Black Noise (FM album)

Black Noise
Original CBC edition cover
Studio album by FM
Released	1977
Recorded	Sounds Interchange, Toronto, 1977
Genre	Space rock
Length	40:26
Label	CBC, Visa, Passport, Now See Hear
Producer	FM and Keith Whiting
FM chronology
Black Noise (1977) Direct to Disc (1978)Direct to Disc1978
Alternative covers
Cover by Paul Till used on all editions from 1978 onward

Black Noise is the debut studio album by Canadian progressive rock group FM.

All songs with lyrics have science fiction themes. The title "Phasors On Stun" (sometimes announced as "Set Your Phasors On Stun" when performed live) is a reference to the futuristic weapons from Star Trek; the phrase does not appear in the lyrics. "One O'Clock Tomorrow" was inspired by an interview with Timothy Leary as broadcast on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (which came on at one o'clock a.m.), on which Leary talked about his ideas on space travel; or as explained by Hawkins in an introduction to the song during a live performance (from a radio broadcast), "Old Dr. Tim thought, a couple of bags of this, and a couple of bags of that, and he'd just take off into outer space"; but again, neither the title nor Leary are referenced in the lyrics. "Journey" and "Aldebaran" (misspelled "Aldeberan" on vinyl editions) are both about a mass exodus to another planet. "Dialing for Dharma" (an instrumental) is a pun on Dialing for Dollars, a popular live daytime television program which gave away cash prizes via telephone. "Hours" and "Slaughter in Robot Village" are also instrumentals. "Black Noise" is about mutants who live in a secret underground world beneath a city, and rise up through the sewers at night.

The album was originally released by CBC Records in 1977, commissioned after the group appeared on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) TV variety show Who's New. The group expected it would be distributed in stores like a normal release, but the CBC chose to sell it by mail order, and only announced its availability during several radio shows. The album was issued as a limited edition of 500 copies, which was sufficient to meet the response from this limited promotion.

The album was given wider release in the summer of 1978 on Visa Records in the USA, and on Passport Records in Canada later that year. (Passport was a sub-label of Visa, although Passport was the more prolific of the two labels.) The CBC still owned the rights to the album, and licensed it to Visa for reissue. In Canada, the Passport label was distributed by GRT Records, then by Capitol Records in 1979, and finally by A&M Records in 1981, each distributor producing a reissue. Cameron Hawkins claims the group never received royalty payments from any of the Canadian LP editions, as their contract specified all payments were to come through Visa Records in the USA, and none of the three Canadian distributors passed royalties on to Visa.