A label run out of West Berlin by a man who had come from the anarchist punk scene, which signed most of what mattered in German thrash and a substantial part of what mattered in European metal generally, and which then lost almost all of it.
Karl Ulrich Walterbach
Walterbach came out of the Berlin punk and squat scene and had run a hardcore label before turning to metal, which is an unusual background for somebody who ended up shaping a genre.
That background shows in how the label operated. Noise was run on punk economics: small advances, fast recording, quick releases, and an assumption that the bands would tour relentlessly. It was not generous and it was not sentimental, and several of its bands have said so.
What it signed
Kreator, Celtic Frost, Hellhammer, Tankard, Coroner, Voivod, Sabbat and Running Wild, among a long list. That is a catalogue that includes the founding records of German thrash, Swiss extreme metal, Canadian progressive thrash and British literate thrash, all from one office in Berlin.
And Helloween, whose Walls of Jericho and Keeper of the Seven Keys albums effectively created European power metal. Noise therefore sits at the root of two separate genres that spent the next thirty years having nothing to do with each other.
The Musiclab connection
The other half of the machinery was a studio and an engineer. Musiclab in Berlin, with Harris Johns, recorded a startling proportion of what the label released, and Johns' philosophy suited the roster exactly: get the room, get the take, do not fix it.
That is why so many Noise records share a sound despite being made by bands from four countries. It was not a house style imposed by the label; it was the same room and the same man behind the desk.
| Band | Country | Key record | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hellhammer | Switzerland | Apocalyptic Raids | 1984 |
| Celtic Frost | Switzerland | To Mega Therion | 1985 |
| Helloween | Germany | Walls of Jericho | 1985 |
| Kreator | Germany | Pleasure to Kill | 1986 |
| Tankard | Germany | Zombie Attack | 1986 |
| Voivod | Canada | Killing Technology | 1987 |
| Coroner | Switzerland | R.I.P. | 1987 |
| Sabbat | England | History of a Time to Come | 1988 |
What went wrong
The usual, in the usual order. As the bands grew, the majors arrived with better terms, and a label operating on punk economics cannot compete on advances.
There were also disputes about contracts and ownership that ran for years, several of them public and several of them bitter. Celtic Frost's relationship with the label was famously difficult. Kreator eventually left. By the mid 1990s the roster had thinned and the metal market had collapsed anyway.
The catalogue was sold and has changed hands more than once since, which is why the reissue situation for several of these records has been complicated for decades.
What it proves
The same thing Metal Blade, Megaforce and Cogumelo prove: that the founding records of this genre were made possible by a very small number of people with no money and a willingness to press things nobody else would.
A label that signs Hellhammer, Kreator, Voivod and Helloween within four years is either extraordinarily perceptive or is simply signing what it likes and being right, and on the evidence of the interviews it was mostly the second.
The second rank the label carried alongside the famous names is in the German second tier, and the scene it built is in Teutonic Thrash.
What a label like this actually did
Worth listing, because the function is invisible now that distribution is free.
It paid for the studio time, or advanced enough that the band could. It paid for the pressing. It got the record into shops in Germany and, through licensing deals, into shops elsewhere. It took out the advertisements in the fanzines and the magazines. And it had the relationships with the European promoters that got a band onto a tour.
None of that is glamorous and all of it is the difference between a demo and a career. A band with a better album and no label in 1986 reached nobody.
The other German labels
Noise was the largest and it was not alone. SPV and its Steamhammer imprint in Hanover carried Sodom and Destruction, which means the three founding German thrash bands were split between two companies.
Below them sat a scattering of smaller operations: Aaarrg, Devil's Game, Rockport, several of which released one important record and then folded. And the fanzine and mail order network that connected all of it, which was the actual distribution system for anything the labels could not place in a shop.
Between them they documented a scene that would otherwise have left almost nothing, which is the same story as Cogumelo in Brazil and Metal Blade in Los Angeles.
The reissue mess
A practical note, because anybody trying to buy these records will hit it. The Noise catalogue has changed hands more than once, contractual disputes have run for decades, and the result is that several important albums have been out of print, back in print, and reissued in versions with altered artwork or track listings.
Sanctuary and later BMG have handled parts of it, and a substantial reissue programme has put most of the significant titles back in circulation with the original sleeves. That is recent, and anybody who tried to buy a Coroner or a Voivod album in 2005 will remember it differently.
What Walterbach did afterwards
He sold the label, worked in the industry in other capacities, and has since given a series of interviews about the period that are considerably franker than most label owners manage.
His account of it is unsentimental: the bands were young, the money was small, the contracts were of their time and several of them were bad deals by any modern standard. He does not defend all of it and he does not apologise for most of it, which is a more honest position than the alternative and has not made him universally popular among his former roster.
Sources and notes
Years refer to original pressings. Accounts of contractual disputes follow published statements by the parties involved, which conflict in several particulars.
