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Here are Friday Night Noise's favorite ten 00s noise albums, in no particular order. Was this an easy list to make? Fuck no.

1. Various Artists, Women Take Back The Noise (UBUIBI) Roughly 10,000 noise compilations were issued in the 00s, but how many came with a noise-making device? How many came packaged in a clear plastic case (pink, blue, purple, or orange) with b&w bio cards? How many were wide-ranging, three-disc sets of woman-generated subterranian internationalized awesomeness?

2. Lightning Bolt, Wonderful Rainbow (Load)

A strident statement of noise-rock purpose as enraged and ear-damaging as it is coherent - and the reason that Lightning Bolt are the only noise band your square friends have heard of aside from maybe Wolf Eyes.

3. The Dead C., Future Artists (Ba Da Bing)

For the 1,500th time, hey're not a fucking noise band, you whine. But FNN would argue that these uncomproming new Zealand experimentalists switched sides for this album, forgoing Michael Morley's slovenly vocals to concentrate on unusually cryptic, extended-play sonics capable of transporting listeners to nightmare countries that can't be found on existing maps.

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Megafauna

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Not counting today, there are roughly 13 or 14 shopping days left until Christmas. In that spirit, this week's Friday Night Noise offers a rundown of the best ten noise recordings issued (or re-issued) in 2009 so that you, dear reader, can hook friends, family and despised co-workers up with the latest, finest brain-rot currently available on the underground market. Got your credit card handy? Yeah? Then let's roll:

1. Jason Crumer, Walk With Me (Misanthropic Agenda)

Meticulously hypnotic, orchestral noise blooms that eliminate the need for laxatives.

2. Acidic Jews, Clean Rigs (self-released)

Uglified shards of fused, blackended glass that are (for the most part) barely recognizable as music. We're as stymied about how Emmy Collins created these arsenic-laced tracks as you are.

3. Aaron Dilloway, Chain Shot (Hanson)

A relentlessly looping-cum-loping - for real, this tour-de-furnace sucker seems to go on for hours, in the best possible sense of that phrase - swirl of clashing/crashing horns, sheet metal, and incidental industrial sounds that may make you wish you toiled in a warehouse or a factory instead of a soulless gray cubicle farm.

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Richard Ramirez, "Removal Off...(Live)"

​Now this is the sort of noise that plasters a big dumb 'ol smile on Friday Night Noise's normally dour mug. How can you hate this sort of stuff, this all-over-the-place, sliding-around-in-oil roar where the crud flies here and there with absolutely no strategy whatsoever, where a piercing bit of feedback could theoretically turn out to be a perverted scream, but maybe it isn't? Where the artist's aim seems to be to super-soak you with as much distorted video-game scree as he or she can muster, psychotically, preferably as loud and looped as possible.

In this case, we're vividly reminded of Carlos Giffoni's Welcome Home. This is dangerous noise, you know? Reality-eclipsing noise. Given that this track - from 2002's Past Buildings That Have Fallen (Spatter) - was recorded live, the mind boggles at what the experience of hearing this in a crowd at deafening volume must have been like.

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Concrete Violin, "Distant Envelopment"

H-Town's Austin Caustic - if that's his real name, Friday Night Noise will eat his black Kangol with pepper sauce - records as Concrete Violin. You'd be forgiven for mistaking "Distant," which appeared on the Dictaphonia Volume One compilation (Hal McGee), for the sound of somebody rummaging through receipts in a gas-station trash can or franticly stabbing through several dozen layers of tinfoil with a screwdriver or, alternately, a starving animal munching on tinfoil.

The track has that itchy/scratchy, static-y quality to it, like John Wiese at his most anemic. That's not a dis, though, because there's something perversely intriguing about this crunchy rabbit-hole nosedive.

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The Homopolice "Sex Drugs Death"

Picture it, if you dare: abject anarchy on H-Town's streets, sexual insanity run amuck, fresh blood pooling in drains, some escaped, foaming-at-the-mouth mental patient narrating with a busted megaphone. That's more or less what "Sex Drugs Death" sounds like in a nutshell, its ten punked-out psych-noise minutes barging by in a effects-pedal abusing, snarling hissy fit. Cymbals shattering. Larynxes lacerating. Ax stings flogged relentlessly.

Halfway though, Homopolice sludges down its breakneck pace into a blues-y, noisome gulch, plumbing the depths of aggression and neurosis with a singleminded aplomb before splitting the crime-scene in a feedback saturated blaze of glory. Anybody know if these guys ever tour with Rusted Shut? Because they totally should if they don't already; Homopolice are kinda the hardcore ying to Rusted Shut's metal yang.

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​Murex "Eventual Railways": Houston's Murex has some sorta connection to the larger In The Land of Archers axis. If we can take "Eventual Railways" as a guide, though, Murex - man, woman, vegetable, some combination, we dunno - prefers a waaaay less ninth-circle-of-Hades approach. Have you ever seen one of those geological cross-sections illustrations that give you a sense of what you would see if you cut a mountain in half?

First, there's dirt or soil, then clay, then varying degrees of stone or what have you. "Railways" is kind of like that, only replace these underground layers with different piercing signal tones. Murex shifts from hissing scree to growling, jammed-phaser blare to Star Trek teleporter quaver, each different sound surplanted by the next before the listener can get a handle on any one. Or, in other words: "This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. This is only a test. If this had been a real emergency," etc.

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