I first became acquainted with Jared Xu’s work when I was in Taipei in 2023. At the time, I was learning about the early history of Taiwanese noise music that began to garner a small but loyal following in the years after the country’s thirty-eight year martial law was lifted in 1987. The first wave of Taiwanese noise came to fruition through Fujui Wang’s pioneering zine, which was appropriately titled NOISE (est. 1993). The second wave was led by the prolific work of Dino (AKA Liao Ming-he, 1976–2022), a Taipei-based no-input-noise underground icon active from the mid-1990s.
When conversing with a hospitable group of fellow gig-goers on a night out at Revolver Bar in Taipei’s Zhongzheng district, someone began recalling the show they’d seen the night before: one of Jared Xu Outer Pulsation (OP) events. ‘Jared’s shows are great! I remember Dino’s inaugural set at OP#1’, another exclaimed. Established in 2019, OP is a Taipei-based guerilla noise event held in tunnels, under bridges and in subway underpasses/overpasses. It is organised by Jared Xu (AKA Chia-Chun Xu, FKA Berserk). After expressing interest, someone added me to the social media group used to circulate upcoming gig details. A few days later, I was presumably vetted as not a cop and accepted into the group, only to be disappointed in discovering that the next event was scheduled after my fly out date.
***
Within the short space of what can still be considered an ‘early career’, Xu (b. 1997) has earned a reputation within noise music and experimental sound art scenes in Taiwan and abroad in East and South/East Asia. In 2016, when Xu was still a teenager, he released a split LP with Japanese noise heavyweight Merzbow titled A History of Self before going on to launch Karma Detonation Tapes, an ‘experimental noise & Taiwanese occult sound’ independent record label. Since then, he has performed countless shows primarily using the no-input-mixing-board (NIMB) technique and organised in excess of forty OP events across Taipei.
NIMB is a regular feature at OP events. It involves wiring one or more mixer output channels back into its input channels, generating corrupted oscillations and amplifying the internal resonance that bounces between the mixer’s channels. Pedals, DIY effect units, and other audio processors might be placed in between input and output signals (which, for NIMB, are collapsed into one and the same). However, in lieu of any traditional input instrument, NIMB practitioners must tweak tone and volume controls in an effort to locate esoteric pockets of noisy textures whilst narrowly dancing around excessively crushing feedback. Invariably, as with a lot of contemporary noise practices, this highly abstract treatment of signal processing denies any neat theoretical articulation. However, it is precisely the chaotic characteristics of NIMB that give way to a destructive albeit rich set of ideas for navigating socio-sonic dynamics between the internal and external; the technique creates a sort of anxious resonance.
Here we can turn to theorist Sianne Ngai’s 2005 publication Ugly Feelings, which provides a starting point for articulating anxiety as a negative affect that is ostensibly understood to inhibit a subject taking action in the present. Ngai describes anxiety as a feeling occupying a ‘special temporality’ of ‘future-orientedness’, and therefore aligning with Ernst Bloch’s category of ‘expectant emotions’ (rather than more immediate emotions available from the already attainable and empirically experienced world). For Xu’s work, anxiety is a useful affective register on two accounts: (1) It folds into decades-long discourse on improvisation in avant garde musics, performance arts and psychoacoustics that mobilises motifs of tension and release, harmony and dissonance etc. within temporal frameworks of the score/song/piece’s horizon of time; and (2) anxiety inflicts an immobilising effect on subjects who find themselves caught up in an OP event.
For Xu and OP, the discomfort of anxiety is not a question of how but when. Its possibility is imminent for all parties involved: for the consenting audiences who must first locate the show before funneling into tight spaces designed to amplify the harshest of frequencies; for the nonconsenting audience mostly comprising of exhausted commuters who are forced to walk through the performance on their way home from work; for Xu and his guerilla activities that are often and at any time subject to police sanctioning; and finally for the performing NIMB practitioners who, amongst all of this social noise, must focus their full attention on wrestling their output signal using a setup that is ironically designed to do the exact opposite. On all accounts, future-oriented anxiety exists as a contingent germ within OP’s communication channels that coalesces by design in the (often literal) underground environments where Xu’s guerilla events occur.
However, whilst Ngai’s notion of anxiety is fitting, theory only takes you so far with NIMB. It’s a challenging practice to articulate and any attempt to do so ought to be paired with an empirical experience. Given this, we can look towards affect from the perspective of the punter — not unlike that which was emphatically described to me at Revolver Bar. In lieu of an OP event, myself and the aforementioned punters embraced the next best thing; an indoor subjection to Xu’s NIMB work as the opening act for a Ryosuke Kiyasu-headlined gig at the intimate Da'an district venue, Senko Issha. What I took from the show and what can presumably be drawn from an OP event is the following: if noise and anxiety are to be understood in their conventionally negative character, then Xu’s work operates to furrow into a teleological vacuum within the market-driven world it finds itself in. When paired together, NIMB and OP produce a sonic excess that often supersedes its demand (think of the fatigued public transport commuter) in order to, albeit momentarily, level dominant socio-political hegemonies and tired rhetorical promises of the neoliberal milieu. These include upwards socioeconomic mobility, the merits of free-market libertarianism and earnest egalitarian democracy. It begins with the absence of a traditional input signal to propose an abstract alternative of collective socio-sonic listening, an indication that social determination is culturally constructed, not naturally given and can therefore be changed — something that Taiwan knows all too well. Why is this a teleological vacuum? Because it interferes with predetermined neoliberal conception of purpose by opting instead to dissolve liberal selfhood of the performer and audience, dealing a heavy blow to the ego.
Through NIMB and OP, Xu works anxiety through entire crowds. It’s an affect that doesn’t discriminate but contracts all within earshot into an experience of the immobilised self, prompting considerations of potential escape routes to move beyond (infra)structural chokepoints. In other words, it presents a future-orientedness where change is anticipated, liberation from capitalism’s structural determination is envisioned, DIY collectivity is embraced and (most importantly) the neoliberal individualism of the self is set aside during a close brush with sonic humility. No-input, no-bullshit. The late Dino said it best: ‘I am a man of self-abandonment.’ If you listen closely loudly, you can hear such a sentiment echoed in A History of Self — a recording of this very process of collective construction via individual destruction that lies at the core of Xu’s work.
¹ Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 209.
² Sheryl Cheung, ‘Gentle Sweeps in a Deep Abyss: Interview with Dino’, ArtAsiaPacific, 26 March 2019, https://artasiapacific.com/ideas/gentle-sweeps-in-a-deep-abyss-interview-with-dino (Accessed 23 February 2025).