So I'm interested in the aesthetics of noise, but am relatively new to the scene. I was reading As Loud As Possible's issue #1, and there are some references to "great" albums of the 80s and 90s from the genre, but as best as I can tell, most of these records were very lucky if they ever moved 500 or 1000 units. There's a small cadre of mp3-blog enthusiasts these days who specialize in this ultra-obscure stuff too, but that whole crowd seems to have more of a "collector" mentality than a "listener" one—i.e. the fact of the music counts for more than the content of the music.
This leads me to wonder, are there "classic" albums in the noise industrial genres?
I know there are classic artists—Merzbow, Brighter Death Now, In Slaughter Natives, Nurse With Wound, and others (and yes, I know that to purists, I'm mixing sub-subgenres)—but I seldom hear anyone recommend one recording over another when it comes to these bands.
Help me out here, folks. From TG through the 80s tape scene through the 90s European and Japanese noise scenes to the present, what are the classic albums I should listen to? What would no list of great noise be complete without?
