Some musician friends of mine once jokingly proposed starting a noise band. Or rather, they wanted to start a “racket” band. It would feature sound sources such as leafblowers, jackhammers, obnoxious cellphone ringtones, car alarms, upstairs neighbors moving furniture at 2am, small yipping dogs, and a crying baby. The joke stems from the rather obvious pitfalls of ascribing the malignant qualifier of “noise” to define a realm of music. Noise does not generally hold any positive connotations. It is the opposite of music. It’s what you’re left with when melody and rhythm are stripped away.

Yet for folks like Demian Johnston, there can still be an emotional resonance in music rendered without concern for harboring a beat or a recognizable tune. “It's a totally different way to enjoy sound. You are experiencing sound as textures and emotions and colors and often the pain of the volume and frequencies.” Johnston can speak on the subject with a fair degree of authority, he’s been hanging around the noise scene since the mid-‘90s, tracing back to his early experiences witnessing bands like Merzbow and Crash Worship. “I can remember both shows very clearly and they made a huge impression on me. Hearing Merzbow live was like jumping into the ocean for the first time. Although I was submersed in wave upon wave of the loudest harshest noise I had ever heard, I felt comfortable, like I was a reed, blowing in the wind.” While Johnston was a musician himself, his projects typically maintained a more structured and meticulous nature, lending his abrasive manner of guitar playing to bands like Nineironspitfire and Kiss It Goodbye. It wasn’t until he began working as one half of the duo Hemingway and started self-releasing his offerings under the label name Dead Accents that his interest in musical abstract expressionism truly blossomed.

Dead Accents focuses on artists operating on the perrifery of conventional music models and specializes in small runs of cassette tapes and CDRs in hand-constructed packaging. This includes the psych-squall of This Blinding Light, the avant-garde piano and sound collages of Mammifer, the brutally dissonant hardcore of Trap Them, and the art-rock deconstructionism of Triumph of Lethargy. The label also serves as an outlet for Johnston’s own projects, including various solo drone explorations, the doom-driven Shining Ones, and his aforementioned collaborations with occasional Stranger-contributor Shane Mehling, Hemingway. “Shane and I had talked a lot about the mistakes that (our former band) Playing Enemy made over the years and one big one was waiting around for someone else to take an interest on putting out our music. We felt that we would have been a lot more productive had we been aware that we could be constantly recording and releasing music on our own instead of crafting and recrafting songs over and over while waiting for the phone to ring.” Dead Accents, like so many DIY labels, was born by necessity.

Of course, the nature of the releases is a curiosity in and of itself. Opting for formats like the struggling CD and the nearly extinct cassette tape is an odd choice. The decision was both pragmatic—tapes and CDRs are cheap and can be reproduced at home—and idealistic. “Posting music online is fine… but it's kinda like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, a very crowded ocean. I think creating the vessel that the music is delivered in into some sort of fetish item helps me show people how I feel about this music.” The packaging for the releases is typically exquisite, often aided by the design and screen-printing expertise of Andrew Crawshaw of Broken Press. And with the small numbers of each release—his products can be limited to editions of anywhere from 12 to 300 copies—Johnston is able to put great attention into detail and take chances on unconventional music without risking bankruptcy.

Another crucial factor in the small pressings and low overhead approach to Demian’s work pertains directly to the nature of the music itself. While one of the most prolific and high-profile modern experimental outfits, Wolf Eyes, mentioned that their Burned Mind album was meant to be the noise equivalent of Slayer’s Reign in Blood, most artists working within the realm of discord and caucaphony would likely argue that this type of music doesn’t aim to qualify for the same kind of classic status. These works are less about timelessness and more about capturing a specific moment in time. “The improvisational nature of most noise artists makes each performance and record unique,” Johnston notes. “Noise music gives you an instant unfiltered look at the artist and their artwork.” These releases wind up like little artifacts, documents of transcendental experiences.

Obviously, these forays into the more obtuse methods of artistic expression will always have a limited appeal. There will always be those that see the dynamic fluctuations of sound created by folks like Demian Johnston, and even the more broadly known artists like Merzbow and Tom Smith, as little more than musical masturbation, as an indulgence in cranking knobs on effects pedals and a stubborn refusal for playing instruments the way they were intended. To those folks, they are all “racket” bands, both in the uncomfortable and abrasive sound they generate, and also in their ability to con others into attaching any sort of artistic value to these exercises. To that accusation, Johnston has a simple reply. “Most people who have an adverse reaction to it often say that ‘it's not music’. And my response is usually, ‘good’.”

Demian Johnston plays w/ Tiny Vipers, Dave Knudson, Dull Knife, and Crystal Hell Pool at The Josephine, Saturday February 20th at 9pm