I was in my room, having found a place to stand amid the junk and trash scattered on the floor. I turned on a Bluetooth receiver, adjusted some settings on my stereo, and turned the volume up to a rather high level. Then, I pivoted, stepped over some rubbish on the floor, and made my way to my bed. I got on my phone, opened a music player called foobar2000, and loaded an album by Japanese noise musician Merzbow.

The sudden blast of sound through my speakers was jarring despite it being expected. Waves of different textures of noise that washed over each other washed over me, and the mess of unwanted thoughts in my head were blown away like leaves by a leaf-blower. To me, the assault of sound was relaxing: it comforted me to hear something so extreme sounding because it drowned out the mess in my head; it gave me a chance to simply exist in the moment without anything else commanding my attention.

There were droning sounds, distorted sounds, rhythmic sounds, and other types of sound, and it all came together to take me away into itself. There was nothing tangibly related to the physical world in the music except the sound itself, it didn’t evoke anything except maybe abstract images. It was like it was commanding the mind to listen to it, but it wasn’t saying anything except for this absurd wave of sound that I latched on to.

The sound filled the room and as the assault of sound became more normal to me it commanded slightly less attention. I worried that someone might come home and hear me listening to it. I often worried how others would react to the sound if they heard it, if they would question my sanity (which had already been questioned and found to be lacking by multiple professionals). They knew I listened to it, but knowing that someone listens to noise music and hearing someone listen to it at full volume and feeling relaxed by it may be disturbing to some individuals, namely my parents, so I turned down the stereo. It was an old receiver from the 1980s with an analog slider that adjusted the volume. I slid it to the left a bit, and it became a little more quiet. It was still very loud, however.

For several years in my youth I had listened to extreme forms of heavy metal music, but heavy metal had nothing on noise in terms of extremity. Harsh noise music was the limit, the apex of extremity possible with sound. People wonder how one can listen to it, and I ask them how they can listen to the sounds of machines in a factory, or the sound of a lawn mower as they cut the grass? Are they bothered by those? If not, harsh noise isn’t too far off, and the sound actually has some creativity behind it.

I let my mind wander to nowhere as I was taken for a ride through the world of electronically amplified madness. It was fine, I felt no anxiety from it. A sunset made its way through my bedroom window into my eyes as the lengthy tracks strangled the room. But in a way the chaos in the sound was like the chaos in the room, which was a mess to an extreme. I did not take care of mind or my surroundings, and rather than do away with the mess I simply relished it. It was a journey into who I was to hear harsh noise. Even as it blew me away it brought me into myself, and I felt at ease.

As the sunset turned to dark I realized that I had left a dim light on all through the day, and I was happy to be able to exist in the briefest moment of dim illumination. It was a pleasant evening for a madman, and it made things better. As the album came to an end I got up, stepped over a cardboard box between my bed and the door, and walked back into the world. I felt rejuvenated, like some dross had been blown away from my mind. If I could handle noise, I told myself, I can handle the morass of fear and unwanted thoughts in my mind when they returned. I was ready to face the night.