That word, ‘challenging’, took me a while to settle on, and I ended up choosing it deliberately because of its vagueness, and so I don’t write this promising I will give any kind of definitive or even satisfying answer at the end, if such a thing even exists. But let me try to pin down what I mean by ‘challenging’. I know at least that I don’t mean it in the sense of ‘difficult’, like solving a quadratic equation – the musical equivalent of which would be something like getting handed a prog-metal song and being asked to identify its time signature by ear. No, I mean ‘challenging’ as uncomfortable to listen to, unsettling, disturbing, frightening, even; what makes you most want to stop listening without it just being poorly-made.
We can make a start by inverting the question. What music most makes us want to continue listening? Usually songs with catchy hooks, melodies or choruses. It follows naturally that what we’re searching for would eschew these things, and so immediately most genres stemming from the blues can be immediately written off. The main exception would be metal music, specifically its harder subgenres like black metal and grindcore. Bands in these styles often even have a reputation for trying to produce the most hardcore, extreme music out there. They are often loud, abrasive and decidedly negative in tone: a good start.
However, these three qualities are all surpassed when we consider noise music – specifically harsh noise, as made famous by Merzbow. There is essentially no common ground between his Venerology, for instance, and a radio pop song. Every feature commonly associated with music has been carefully stripped away to produce uncompromisingly alien sounds, and the result is something that very few people can tolerate for extended periods, and even fewer can honestly claim to enjoy*. But is it the nec plus ultra? Personally, I can put on a Merzbow track and not have it affect me greatly. His work, and that of other noise artists, becomes so abstract in its quest for absolute alienation from common forms of music that it fails to find any foothold in my soul. The first screeching wall of static and hissing noises is disconcerting, the tenth is boring. This is no indictment of noise musicians: I don’t doubt some of them would see this as a great success. Nevertheless, our search must continue.
In writing this I pondered if the lack of lyrics, or more generally, the lack of vocals was responsible. After all, would could be a better cure for alienation, and hence more afflicting, than a human voice? We do, after all, say that ‘words can kill’. An emphasis on vocals is indeed the common thread behind the three pieces of music I decided on for this
article as my personal ‘most challenging’ pieces: the works of Stalaggh/Gulaggh, who used what were reportedly the screams of real mental patients throughout their noisescapes; Diamanda Galás’ album Schrei X, which consists primarily of her own twisted chanting, murmuring and shrieking; and the hidden track at the end of Today is the Day’s song ‘Sadness Will Prevail’, which is, from what I remember, a manipulated sample of a harrowing 911 call. Naturally, many people will listen to these things and find nothing of interest in them, and their own personal choices would likewise have no effect on me. Furthermore, I imagine that there would always be something more horrifying than the last, if only due to my shifting tastes and preferences.
It should be fairly obvious by now that there is no single, logical, mathematical answer to this question. Maybe in the future scientists will discover the combination of tones that are perfectly antithetical to human existence and induce suicide in everyone who hears them, but thankfully we are not yet at that point. However, I think the more interesting puzzle raised by this search is why, exactly, we have a morbid desire to find the most extreme thing out there. It can probably be linked to why we watch horror movies: we like to indulge in fear since it gets our blood racing, but only in a controlled environment that we can stop with a press of the pause button. It may also just be a form of bragging: oh, you think you’re so hardcore for listening to Burzum? Well, look at what I listen to for fun!… in any case, this is likely a very dense psychological question, so I’d welcome any ideas or suggestions from anyone in the comments.
*One must of course ask if this material can still be considered music, given its deliberate flaunting of such a title. My brief response is that Merzbow and other noise artists still separate their sounds into tracks, give them names, print them onto CDs, sell them and perform live concerts, and ‘music’ is a fair enough word to group together all such human-directed sound that is quantified in this way.
Telemachi 