The New Blockaders may sound like a hip Indie Rock band, and they may want you to believe such a thing to lure unsuspecting listeners. As merchants of 'anti-music,' they embrace Luigi Russolo's 1913 Art of Noise manifesto and although Russolo is widely credited as being the first major noise theorist, contemporary Noise artists like TNB were the first to progress from the use of noise as assault on tonality to the development of a rich, complex language capable of subtleties of shade and nuance without sacrificing any of its feral power or ability to unlock repressed personae in the listener.
Their manifesto (1982) proclaims, 'Blockade is resistance. It is our duty to blockade and induce others to blockade: Anti-music, anti-art, anti-books, anti-films, anti-communications. We will make anti-statements about anything and everything. We will make a point of being pointless…’ Everything about TNB entails refusal. The title of their collection Gesamtnichtswerk is important here. It reminds us of Wagner’s dream of the ‘total art work’ – the Gesamtkunstwerk, but the art is replaced by nothing... (more)
