Vinyl records pressed with bodily fluids and CDs packaged with human hair — what makes a Toronto doctor collect these things?

Dr. Michael Tau works in the Unity Health Toronto hospital network, serving patients at St. Mike’s downtown and Providence in Scarborough. Recently, he wrote a book in which he explores a certain obsessive behaviour that might seem odd if not downright disturbing to the average person. But the book in question probably won’t make a lot of waves in his specialist field of geriatric psychiatry – because it’s about his music collection. And it’s not filled with the typical vinyl LPs that you’ll find at Rotate This or Sonic Boom, but music preserved on cassettes encased in blobs of spray-painted cotton, albums issued on floppy disks, and cigar-tin box sets that came packaged with clumps of human hair.

In addition to being a doctor (and a new dad), the 35-year-old Tau is one of this country’s most dedicated archivists of underground experimental music. His long-time fascination with artists on the fringiest end of the fringe inspired him to write “Extreme Music: From Silence to Noise and Everything in Between” (Feral House), a 368-page deep dive into the myriad subcultures that form the vast mosaic of DIY avant-garde music around the world. And Tau’s definition of “extreme” goes beyond the sound of the music to explore its varying methods of presentation. From one-second “songs” by Napalm Death to 233-disc box sets of pure distortion that would take two years to listen to, from pornographic picture discs to records encased in concrete, his book is a celebration of any audio oddity that messes with traditional concepts of what music should sound or look like.

“It’s not like I’m specifically obsessed with unusual packaging,” Tau admits, “but the idea of elaborate packaging is a theme that runs through the history of small experimental music labels.” When Tau first started learning about this musical netherworld and researching these small record labels on the internet, he noticed that a lot of the releases came in strange packages. “I realized these people aren’t just thinking about the music, but also the packaging in such a unique way. They’re committing all this time and energy to it, and that got me thinking more about why this was happening.”

For Tau, this musical education preceded his medical one – as a high-schooler, he discovered the much-loved CBC Radio program “Brave New Waves,” a four-hour overnight showcase of experimental indie rock and electronic sounds that ran from 1984 to 2007. By the time he was attending university at McGill, Tau was a music reviewer fully immersed in the fertile underground ecosystem of niche artists, micro labels, and ultra-limited-edition handcrafted releases that fall under the genre umbrella of “noise.” This isn’t the sort of music that merely prompts parents to pound on their teenager’s bedroom door to get them to turn the stereo down; it’s the sort of fearsome, unrelenting squall that might make those parents call in professionals to examine their kid’s well-being.

The history of popular music is essentially one of radical ideas gradually being absorbed into the mainstream. Yesterday’s scandalous hip-shaking becomes fodder for today’s Oscar-nominated Elvis biopics. Once the unrulier likes of punk, heavy metal and alternative rock experienced their own pop crossovers in the ’80s and ’90s, noise emerged as the new final frontier for loud-music lovers who crave all the punishing volume and anti-social aggression but without the conventional song forms that might lure the normies onside. In this lawless world, verse/chorus/verse structures and any semblance of a melody are wholly obliterated in favour of improvised 20-minute-plus onslaughts comprising some combination of strangulated guitar distortion, digitally processed screams, ear-piercing electronic frequencies, and the occasional power tool.

For decades now, noise has proven itself admirably resistant to commercial co-option. Sure, some notable artists have flirted with free-form chaos: in 1975, Lou Reed unleashed his infamous white-noise symphony “Metal Machine Music” and, in 1991, Neil Young released the no-song/all-feedback “Arc,” though these albums are seen as extreme outliers – if not elaborate pranks – in their discographies. But even after iconic alt-rock bands like Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails helped make screeching distortion more palatable to wider audiences, noise marks a permanent line in the sand that only the bravest listeners dare to cross.

Tau hardly expects an uninitiated reader to become an instant enthusiast of goregrind, harsh noise wall, flashcore, and other foreboding genres dissected in his book. However, he does see a higher purpose to these movements than mere antagonism. “I think of noise as being sort of like folk music or folk art,” he says. “Certainly, there’s a punk-esque element of positioning oneself away from the mainstream. But I also think what motivates these people is not just rebellion, but also sort of a sense of communion, of sharing in a folk ritual by creating unusual music and trading it.”

Accordingly, Tau’s writing is as accessible as his subjects’ creations are inscrutable, as he presents warm, welcoming portraits of artists who deal in cold, confrontational sounds. In trying to diffuse the mystique surrounding some of the wilfully obscure musicians lurking in his collection, Tau discovered many of his subjects were a lot like him: working professionals with kids, who just happen to enjoy deafening drones.

“It was so interesting to see these very disparate people distributed across the world, many of whom do completely unrelated things in their day-to-day life but share an interest in experimental music and noise,” Tau says. And in this light, the connection between his job as a psychiatrist and his peculiar record-collecting passions couldn’t be clearer – ultimately, “Extreme Music” is as much a behaviourial study as it is a counter-cultural history lesson.

“The big question I posed to everyone was: ‘What is it about yourself that draws you to create this quite unusual body of work?’” Tau says. “So, if there is a parallel between my day-to-day work and this book, it’s that idea of: What motivates people to do the things that they do?”

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