When I first heard the title of this cassette, "Cosmic Noise Compilation", I had a strange little image pop into my head of half naked hippies dancing around a fire under the moonlight, howling like maniacs and banging noise out of their rugged acoustic instruments. Lucky for you this was a little off target. What this tape does contain is a little less civilized.
          "Dear fellow noise lovers / music haters", reads the intro to the press sheet accompanying this release. This is where I first guessed that I was in for a pretty noisy listen, since the title of the tape itself proved a little misleading for me. One of the definitions of music is "pleasant natural sound". Noise, on the other hand, is defined as "sound, especially loud and unpleasant". There you have it, polar opposites. I never thought I'd be able to base a review on quotes from the Oxford dictionary... it's about as shameful as painting by numbers.
          The artists on this comp apparently denounce the pleasantries of music in preference of loud unpleasant noise. That's not to say it's bad or that you won't enjoy it, though. S & M pioneer Bob Flanagan helped to alter perceptions of pain, and noise of this variety is attempting to rewrite it's own definition. It's a kind of audio sadomasochism, which replaces leather whips and metal chains with cassettes and tape decks. The recommended listening conditions, according to the liner notes, are either with headphones or at a maximum speaker volume. If the notion of bleeding eardrums makes you giddy than this might just be a tape for you.

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