[Thor Joachim Haga]

I think you get some automatic “hard skin” for dissonant music when you’ve listened to music for so many years as we have, especially complex music. I have a pretty decent tolerance level myself. But it’s not the type of music that engages me the most, especially not on an emotional level (other than to freak me out, I guess). I feel like I have to sit up straight, sharpen all my senses and turn on every brain cell. I can’t use it for laidback listening.

There’s a difference between that, though, and the type of noise music or sound design I was talking about. This moves beyond mere dissonance and into something else altogether. Even beyond something like ‘musique concrete’. It’s still organized sound, but based more on a collage of natural and unnatural sounds. I don’t really know how to formulate it, but I’m hesitant to call it music.

I can get positively lost in something like Williams’ IMAGES (the atonal parts), deciphering and searching for details, but I can’t do the same with Fiedel’s TERMINATOR. It all comes off as a lot of ‘swish, boom, crash’ – a collage of industrial sounds. Perfect for the film, impossible on album.