We all know who coined Harsh Noise Wall, but I have no idea when exactly term HARSH NOISE was being popularized?
As examples,
When looking old ads of Mother Savage Noise Productions, it sometimes says POWER ELECTRONICS, or POWER ELECTRONICS - HARSH NOISE. Grey Wolves and their labels could list that "industrial - power electronics - atmospheric - harsh", "harsh industrial noise" and all sorts of variations around it.
Looking at old euro catalogues, Artware and Tesco, noise gets mentioned a lot. Occasionally "harsh" is mentioned too, but it is hard to find any release that would be called bluntly HARSH NOISE. Even Pain Jerk is just harsh electronics or bands like Macronympha may be called power electronics and stuff like Discordance, Dagda Mor, Deathpile all may be called "power noise", that perhaps was just combining noise and power electronics, not referring to what later became known as "power noise".
I recall I made essay on noise in school back in mid 90's, impressing teacher with name dropping John Cage, but back then, with the limited knowledge that I had, I wrote about harsh noise, that besides the SOUND, it was also reference for substance. At the time, getting MSNP stuff, Ramirez, BLJ, Bizarre Uproar, Murder Corporation, Taint, and so on and on, it kind of seemed logical that HARSH was not only sonic category, but also presentation and themes. It wouldn't be like you'd call every highly distorted noise as "HARSH NOISE"... although, this must be purely my own perspective and not about what it really was.
My conclusion of harsh referring also to content and packaging was abandoned over the years.
It is still curious question, when one first time started to see popularity of HARSH NOISE as term in use? When it started to take over meaning as NOISE was something very different from HARSH NOISE?
With kind of re-defining the noise, looking at the history from our perspective, it may be hard to track down anything more than personal experiences, since what we call things now may be different what it was called back then.
Earliest memories of getting exposed to term and what it meant in contrast of power electronics or "noise"? Or for the younger generations, situation may be that it was kind of always there, meaning exactly what it means now?
