Bring the Noise

The quiet, polite Lea Cummings is strangely enough Kylie Minoise – a volatile and prolific noise artist, behind the infamous Live Aktion sets for which he's garnered a dedicated cult following. His music resonates somewhere between Lightning Bolt and Merzbow, in terms of both its uncompromising, driving noise and his incredible visceral performances, apparently impossible to replicate on record.

“I’m always totally in the moment," he affirms. "One of the reasons why some of my gigs are really short is that, the second I lose focus, I’m aware that I’m in a room full of people, with no shirt on, screaming.”

It’s with a spiritual quality that Cummings explains the unique performance stylistics of Kylie Minoise. “There’s a morphic resonance to what everyone does," he reasons. "The performance creates more powerful energy if I’m 100% into it.”

This cerebral regression into the semiotic allows for his performance to always be at its most raw, cathartic and physical but such an uncompromising methodology – coupled with respect for the audience’s experience of his music –  has its drawbacks.

“For me, personally, it’s about physicality and sound created by my movement,” says Cummings. “Some people think that means it’s confrontational or violent – it isn’t. I do get into the audience and play and jump on tables because I don’t like the idea of playing on stage, the separation of audience and band. Some people attack me in good spirits, I don’t particularly like it but I don’t mind because it’s important to them that they’ve made a spectacle.”

Cummings is refreshingly dedicated to his art, striving towards authenticity and intense personal engagement, wary of rehearsed, mechanical replications of gigs he has played before. His creative process is honed by a similarly theoretical approach: “I throw lots of things at the record and most get scrapped,” he shrugs. “It’s like an aural collage, it will have aspects of live performance but it takes me ages to get something I’m happy with.”

A successful visual artist outside of Kylie Minoise, Cummings’ records would be worthwhile for their cinematic artwork alone, littered with satanic West Highland terriers, murderous women, love hearts and anime. Similarly, his song titles, which have a linguistic terrorist flavour à la Chris Morris (case in point: “NECK BRACE ART APPRECIATION”), work to frame the experimental, noise aesthetic.

All of this, Cummings tells me, is down to a happy accident where he discovered “noise” playing with his band Opaque. “At gigs, the bit I enjoyed best was at the end, the big ending – the noise bit, basically. I didn’t have to worry about playing perfectly, I could just engage with what I was doing and let go.”

“That bit” has fostered international acclaim for Kylie Minoise, allowing Cummings to tour extensively and return to his Glasgow home with stories that could shake up a Rolling Stone – surviving oil drums being hurled towards him aboard a disused oil tanker, angry Slovaks breaking glasses in protest at his short set and unwittingly cracking his head open during a recent set at the Captain’s Rest.

Ironically, these war stories are often the result of successfully engaging with the audience, where Cummings has met his remit. Negative reactions tend to be defined by conservative attitudes. “Some people are narrow-minded with a set idea of what art is,” Cummings elaborates. “There can be this weird perception that I am trying to do something, rather than it is something.”

It’s this experimental DIY aesthetic that works on different levels to skew the monotonous cacophony of “entertainment” and modern life. It’s a joy to see Kylie Minoise smashing through that everyday normality, even if he must bloody his nose to keep a crowd entertained.