The Haters

The Haters
The Haters in Japan 1999
Background information
Genres	Noise Experimental Performance art
Years active	1979–present
Website	[1]
Members	GX Jupitter-Larsen, Jessica King, Pamela duran and Elden M

The Haters are a noise music and conceptual art troupe from the United States. Founded in 1979, they are one of the earliest and best-known acts in the modern noise scene. The group is primarily the work of the Hollywood, California-based musician, artist, writer, and filmmaker GX Jupitter-Larsen, accompanied by a constantly changing lineup of other "members," usually local experimental musicians and artists in whatever town in which a Haters performance happens to take place.

The group began as a punk rock band, but assumed its current form when Jupitter-Larsen realized he was more interested in making noise and destroying venues than in structured music. Soon the Haters established contacts with like-minded artists in what would become known as the noise music scene, including Merzbow, Maurizio Bianchi, and The New Blockaders. In the late 1970s GX Jupitter-Larsen was done with the Punk scene. At first, in 1979 in New York, the kind of noise he was looking for would not be audible through the ears, but through a kind of sociological transmission. A social distortion instead of sonic feedback was his personal post-punk mandate.

The Haters first performances did not involve any deliberate use of sound. Even if there were any sounds, the audio was secondary. Haters performances at the time were simple actions. Events such as hitting video cassettes with a video camera, watching dust form on a floor, or counting garbage cans along a street.

The Haters only started using sound in live performances because of two necessities. One, the need of a stage curtain, and two, the need to keep track of time.

Traditionally, the opening of the stage curtain signals the beginning of a performance, while the closing signals the conclusion. As nearly no place they performed had such drapery, The Haters needed to come up with something else that would duplicate this function. The Haters started using pre-recorded sounds on tape. The sudden start of the noise let everyone in the audience know that the performance had just begun. Likewise, the abrupt end of the soundtrack unmistakably marked the finale.

Haters performances typically consist of Jupitter-Larsen and one other performer, both wearing masks, creating extremely loud noise using various types of machinery, with the sound distorted and amplified until it is virtually unrecognizable. The Haters' many CD and record releases are usually recordings of these performances. Underlying all the Haters' output is Jupitter-Larsen's peculiar mix of aesthetic and conceptual obsessions, particularly entropy and decay, professional wrestling, and a self-created lexicon consisting mainly of personalized units of measurement such as "polywave," the "totimorphous," and the "xylowave."