Boyd Rice is too wise to the ways of the world to start plea-bargaining now about the impact, for good or evil, of NON's early noise purges. Then, he doesn't need to, the timely reissue of Pagan Muzak speaks volumes. First released in 1978, Pagan Muzak is a 7" vinyl long playing record housed in a 12" sleeve. It consists of 17 locked/looped grooves, each of them containing a different noise. A second axis hole drilled off-centre doubles the number of tracks; and as it can be played back at up to four speeds - 16, 33, 45 or 78rpm - working out just how many tracks Pagan Muzak effectively offers the listener involves complicated calculations of all the different playback combinations of axis choice, turntable speeds and the grooves themselves. The mind boggles, yet when it was sold as a long playing record, some buyers thought they'd been short-changed by at least five inches. Boyd recalls, "Because it came out as a 7" record in an album sleeve, people used to go,[in a whining voice] 'It says LP on here. . .' 'Well,' I said, 'LP means long player, and this is the longest player you are ever going to find'."

Between the record's peculiar format and the noises contained in its locked grooves, Pagan Muzak clearly anticipated the sound and shape of many music practices to come. Rice's radicalisation of vinyl reversed the listener's usual passive relationship with the record as a sound carrier. To listen to it meant first of all making 'musical' choices regarding pitch and tempo, dependent on playback axis and turntable speed. In this sense, putting on Pagan Muzak was a kind of rehearsal of a near future, when DJs and turntablists would play
records as a musical instrument. 1978 - when Pagan Muzak was originally released - was coincidentally the year breakbeats first broke out in the Bronx, with DJs scratching the stylus across the grooves to intensify a climax in the same way rock groups would play guitar solos. However, the first HipHop and rap records featuring breaks, such as The Fatback Band's "King Tim III" and Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", only started coming out a year later. Over on the other coast, in his hometown San Diego, Rice had been exploring similar ideas, albeit from a completely different angle.

"I did stuff with turntables in the 70s," he says. "I took apart a bunch of different ones and tried to get weird sounds by having the needles removed from the arms and ran them into the grooves, but it just sounded so hokey, it sounded so obvious, I thought. I was looking at the time for noises, where people would say where did he get that sound from? But with this kind of technique, it obviously sounds like a record going 'Eecchuurgh, eecchuurgh'. . . So I stopped, then five or ten years later I started hearing all these people going eecchuurgh."

At the beginning of the 80s a New York based artist Christian Marclay treated the vinyl record as a late 20th century art object. He constructed records out of broken up vinyl and played the results; he scattered records across a gallery floor, let people walk over them for the duration of the exhibition and sold the results, the idea being that scratches, flaws etc were of equal value to the music. The one flaw in Marclay's own design was the sound itself, which often came over as secondary to the concept that explained it. This is where Boyd Rice's noise - in performance or on record - differs from Marclay's and other gallery orientated sound artists. His sound generating devices and customised records were evolved to meet NON's very particular sonic requirements. "I've done a bunch of stuff with scratched records," Boyd remembers, "I have done everything to vinyl that you can do. I have put records in the oven, I have used sandpaper on them, I have cut them up and put them back together again in different ways. . ."

In the mid-70s he used to play a guitar with rotorblades. He recalls how he painstakingly devised tape loops, naively believing that he was the first to hit upon the idea, only to discover it was a familiar avant garde method. His debut 7" single was also his first two-centre varispeed release. The idea for Pagan Muzak arose as a response to something said by the late John Cage - whose Cartridge Music was the first composition to feature records and players as musical components. Boyd explains, "I guess I got the inspiration for Pagan Muzak when I read some interview with John Cage. He said he didn't want to make records because the format was too fixed. Well I immediately thought that's ridiculous, nothing is too fixed. You can set something on the table and look at it from four different angles and it will look like four different things. And it is the same with records, you can play them at any different speed, you can put a second hole in them, play them off centre. That's where I got the idea for doing Pagan Muzak. "I made my first record playable at all four speeds. And on Pagan Muzak, I did the looped grooves, the locked grooves, and to my knowledge at that time, I didn't think that anybody had ever done a whole record of just locked grooves, though I have since been told that Linguaphone or somebody did them, 'Parlez vous francais, monsieur? Parlez vous. . .' You know, you repeat it until you got it. And somebody told me that the BBC had some looped groove records, which they used for sound effects in radio plays. But I didn't know about that. Since I was doing minimalist music that I just want people to be able to listen to it all day, it seemed logical to make a record with looped grooves."

Getting the idea was the relatively easy part. Getting the record manufactured presented a formidable logistical challenge. Boyd continues, "Well, because they always lock off a groove at the end of a record, it seemed reasonable to me that they would be able to do it at any mastering plant. But everyone I spoke to said, 'No, you can't do this, it's impossible, the technology doesn't exist'. Then these people in Virginia said, 'Oh yeah, we should be able to do that, I don't see why not'. But a couple of months later the tapes came back with a letter saying it is not possible. Finally I went to this mastering plant in LA, and talked to its president, and he said, 'Well, yeah, I think we could do that'. He kind of took it on as a personal challenge and did it himself. . . Always go to the top!"

He experienced the same problems when he investigated the chances of getting Pagan Muzak reissued on CD, but as yet every plant has turned it down, claiming it's impossible to programme a disc of 17 locked grooves. Perhaps that is for the better, for the noises on Pagan Muzak were designed to incorporate sound properties unique to vinyl. The locked groove is a simple, mechanical means of reproducing repetitive minimal music. Playing one groove over and over for any length of time wears it down much faster. The corresponding deterioration of sound quality means the noise changes over time from one play to the next. These aspects would be lost on a CD, unless there was some way of digitally programming the groove to deteriorate. "I wanted to put in as many different sounds as possible, high pitched ones, low pitched ones, harsh ones, soothing ones, so you could pick whatever mood you wanted to be in and find one to match," comments Boyd, about his looped noise grooves. "If you play them for a day, you can tell they're getting degraded. Because it's only one groove being played repeatedly, it's getting more play than you'd subject a normal record to in years and years. For me that sound decay is good, because they get noisier the more degraded they get, and I like noisy stuff. That they change and evolve like that is fine by me. . ."

It is fitting, then, that Mute's reissue of Pagan Muzak coincides with the revival of the vinyl record as a specialist format for vinyl lovers and DJs. As specialist records go, they don't come more special than Pagan Muzak. Possibly out of a reaction to the digital perfection of the compact disc, a strain of contemporary music from electronica through to post-rock has been working vinyl's scratches, glitches and deteriorating sound quality into a kind of minimal music, treating vinyl's surface crackle as a texture or processing sticking needle sounds into rhythm patterns. The medium's common defects, which Rice factored in to Pagan Muzak as special listening features, have become the very stuff of the music promoted by such glitch-worshipping minimalist labels as Ontario's Minus, Cologne's Kompakt and Vienna's Mego, among countless others around the world.

Meanwhile, a 'spray-on distortion/crackle' software tool has been designed to cater to a digital age nostalgia for the lost vinyl listening
experience, allowing artists to bestow on their music the warm glow and authority of antiquity (for starters, check releases by Tarwater and Warn Defever). As its title implies, Pagan Muzak was also about using the vinyl record as an aid to engendering different moods and atmospheres. The name is both a description of the record's contents and a homage to Hawaii-based exotica pioneer Martin Denny, composer of environmental mood music that embraced such seemingly irreconcilable components as easy listening, unusual instruments, natural sounds and dissonance. Along with Les Baxter and Arthur Lyman, Denny became a hero to the so called Lounge/Space Age Batchelor Pad movement of the early 90s. "I was influenced by Martin Denny," Boyd confirms. "He was doing this stuff that was like muzak but it had these heathen overtones. I liked the idea of paganism and I thought it was like pagan muzak, because it was music to change your environment, fill it up with noise, fill your brain with noise, and I thought that was really a pagan concept. It's weird, I was just asked to be in this New Zealand book about Tiki culture, and I wanted to write this whole thing about making a pilgrimage to see Martin Denny in 1980. I grew up among this. When I was a kid you could buy a Hawaiian shirt, which came with this tiki, which had gems for eyes and stuff, and my make-out spot in San Diego used to be this club called Bali Hai, which had a beach behind it, and the house band was Arthur Lyman, and I would be making out with girls, while Arthur Lyman was playing behind me. I grew up with this stuff, so it is a little weird to see all these people getting into this stuff years after they'd torn all these places down. But I am glad they are, because I always thought everybody in the world should know about Martin Denny and Les Baxter, and I am glad that they lived long enough to see this resurgence of interest in their music."

Did Boyd have any particular functions in mind when he was laying down the locked grooves of Pagan Muzak? "I've heard from people working in record stores who say, 'We love your record. At the end of the day, we just have to put it on and it clears the store'. People have said it is good for housework, and other people have said it is good for sex. It is a very functional record. . . "If someone is getting too noisy upstairs, I put the record on. After you have had the noise going for an hour or so, it creates an artificial silence. You don't even realise it is there. It is like creating solitude, blocking out all the noises which really are distracting, which infringe on your consciousness. A girl I knew was pissed off with her neighbours, so we put this record on, locked the door and went up into the mountains, so the neighbours would have to listen to this for, like, 48 hours."

The late William S Burroughs had a theory that noise kills pain and could be used as a drug-free anaesthetic, albeit running the risk of the pain kicking back in every time there was a lull in the music. "Well, noise affects that reptilian part of your brain that releases endorphins," expands Boyd. "I have never noticed it kills pain, but it makes sense. I mean, I always feel that my music touches that part of the brain that releases endorphins and makes you feel better. It makes me feel better. . . It is also like when your brain is in the alpha state - the beta state is the active, interactive, thinking part - and when you are in the alpha state you are tuned out of all this stuff."

Naturally, it would be downright reckless to make grandiose claims about how breakbeats, worshipping the glitch and the exotica boom all grew from Boyd's bad seed of a noise record. Detecting any sonic similarities between Pagan Muzak and future developments in other musical fields doesn't necessarily draw him close to them. Boyd once said, "I never understood alienation. Alienation from what? You have to want to be part of something in order to feel alienated from it."

What is undeniable, however, is the remarkable consistency of the motivation running through all his different activities, be they his paramusical noisemaking, his championing of Incredibly Strange Films and Incredibly Strange Music, his pranks or his provocations. And that is to short-circuit received cultural filters, which purportedly privilege authentic expressions of feeling and emotion, when the aesthetic skills required to properly 'appreciate' them distance artists and audience alike from the emotions expressed.

Exhilaratingly direct and irreducible to anything other than what it is, Pagan Muzak's noise jams all aesthetic-as-anaesthetic signals. It requires no special knowledge to get what it's about: Either it thrills you or it kills you.