Okay. We need to get this out of the way.

I’m a Russ Jackson fan so this will not be objective. I will not gush but I will be biased. I will not aggrandize, embellish or exaggerate, but I will say it straight up — Russ Jackson is a badass.

Some context: I first met Russ Jackson in an industrial warehouse apartment 10 years ago. There was, perhaps, a barbecue. Exactly where this took place I’m not entirely sure. In fact, I recall very little. My memory of it, I’m inclined to believe, has been destroyed, bulldozed, by the very lucid memory of a tremendous, ear-splitting clamor bouncing off of concrete in one of the adjoining rooms. I recall the noise, the squall that seemed to be coming from a modest boom-box on a coffee table, and someone was sitting beside it. Listening.

Now, you’ve got to keep in mind, this is pre-Wolf Eyes. Noise music was still what it definitively is — noise. There were no t-shirts; there was no tour. There was no hip factor — although, arguably there was. Noise — and its sister experimental music — has existed for decades and with that the inevitable possessive hipster who claimed to hear it first. Either way, I hadn’t heard anything like it before (which is really what matters here), and it certainly had for me all the symptoms of epiphany.

I know now, this thing was called Merzbow.

I sat and looked at the record cover, not sure what to make of it, and I tried to imagine who might do something like this. What did this person look like? And what made them do it? If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, you cannot fully appreciate the violence I’m trying to suggest here: the frightening, unforgiving pummel of Merzbow.

“Isn’t it great?” The guy sitting next to me asked.

It’s only then I see that he’s wearing a large bicycle helmet. He’s wearing shades, a delicate white scarf, and extraordinarily small red shorts — either barely concealing a monster member (red threads are stretching), or he has stuffed a large squash down his pants.

He puts out his hand and says, “Russ Jackson. Bike Patrol.”

Flash forward, after countless recordings and various performing incarnations, Russ Jackson is preparing to enter the studio and record on August nineteen of this year, 2006. He can barely contain himself. “I could not be more excited,” he tells me. “I’ve got a baby girl, and I just want to live well, and do as much as I can. This will be a more mobile Riffest. A nimbler Riffest. Ten musicians. All raw power, primordial.”

But before we get to that, tell me everything there is to know about Riffest, I say, and I’ll whittle it down to a readable piece. Over the phone, he went on for hours, until I had finished half a bottle of White Horse, and I heard his newborn, Madeline, cry in the background.

Here it is.

About the time I met Russ he was still in school for industrial design, studying both art and engineering. “I’m a big fan of Dadaism. Guys like Marcel Duchamp taking irreverent philosophy to design. Transcending the norm. This is still all on an academic level back then. But before long, I realized this wasn’t just a visual phenomenon, you could apply the same concepts to sound. Any theory, random, or by design, could be applied to a musical piece or a song. So I became interested in manipulating sounds. Remember, I have no formal training, I tried but it never took. So I wanted to develop a new process and apply it to sound, not bars and keys. This is still 1995, ‘96.”

An avowed metal-head in his youth — Anthrax, Metallica — Russ wanted more.

“Then I found Merzbow, and it was beyond anything I had heard before. Beyond song. Beyond music. It was like a book; you could visualize and invent images, stories. It’s open to interpretation. I became interested in the highest level of aggression and power. I wanted to have Dadaist theory and volume.”

It was then he went to Europe and took field recordings for two months — “bells in Amsterdam , a bike race in Slovenia , fairy boats and leaky toilets in Prague” — and began to think in terms of composition. “I wanted instinctual composition. I began cataloguing random sounds, and planning elaborate ways of composing based on random noises, duration, random affects. I thought I was the most insane and original conceptual artist in the world. Then my friend Dave kindly told me about John Cage.”

So he begins to immerse himself in Cage, Albert Ayler, William Parker, Woody Williams, all of the New York underground jazz and experimental music, and of course Kyuss. Rather quickly, Russ decides to put his ideas on paper and start planning his first foray into live experimental music.

“Experimental music should be just that, an experiment. Not a section in the record store. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t,” he says.

From the beginning, he wanted to incorporate visual concepts as well.

“It can get incredibly boring watching a noise show,” he says. “At first, it was almost tongue in cheek. I just recently found the flyer from our first show. I guess it sounded a little cheesy, but I was twenty-five. I wrote on the flyer, ‘Unity Through Amplification.’ I made outlines, rules and times for the twenty performers. It was improvisation based on the alteration of light. It’s on half-inch tape at Moodswing Records somewhere. Before the performance I gave everyone a lecture on what I was looking for, and split the group into four sets and assigned each a particular color. It was all about controlling sound dynamics with light. At the end of the night all of the lights were at full intensity. It was the most monstrous noise you can imagine. I called it Riffest. I played guitar.”

To call what Russ does playing guitar, does it no justice. He has the rare gift of no ego. Not only is he not formally trained, but he fully embraces it. His guitar playing is completely physical, not hampered at all by formal technique, but saturated in his own technique. The only thing comparable I’ve seen are the louder and more aggressive Thurston Moore solo improvisations, in which the guitar is virtually destroyed from playing it.

What followed in the subsequent years, among other Bike Patrol manifestations inspired by, I assume, security guard aspirations, was an increasingly complex aesthetic. Larger in scope, always ambitious.

“The plan was always to refine the vision so that it could be brought to other cities, so we could collaborate with musicians from the hosting city. Above all, that first event showed me how it could be better. I immediately started planning the next event.” The next was far more high-reaching, and equally demanding. Riffest II was an improvisation based on narrative.

“It was a stalking. Four groups again, this time responding to four sets of photos that told a story, taken by myself and Peter Rentz, a designer at Graphic Havoc. We had shots of windows and scoping out of windows, shots of trailing and following. The stalker’s environment. A struggle and, ultimately, the murder. But rather than tell it linearly, we had all four sequences showing simultaneously. It was very dramatic. The images were projected on the walls of the warehouse where we performed.”

It’s a formidable performance documented by Moodswing Records, and available under the title “Ansurbana: Dawn of the New Riff.” There was a painter as well, David Sanchez-Burr, who painted a piece during the performance.

“Dave was there. And I had spent so much time preparing the visuals, I was happy to have Dave offering to work with me, and take care of the visuals from then on. He had his own art projects going under the moniker ‘Ansurbana,’ so we decided to start planning the next event. I would only do sound.”

The next official event was equally visual, but perhaps more cohesive and focused: “We wanted something rhythmic, but visual rhythm translatable to sound.”

This time there was a theme: Rains, Train, Steel, Time. “We had four conductors. Images of each theme projected onto screens handmade by my wife. We premiered at the Eyedrum in Atlanta . And then took Riffest on the road to San Francisco. I think I was more impressed than anybody in San Francisco. Twenty-five broke-ass musicians, some can’t pay their rent, flew out to the coast, while two more drove the equipment cross-country. And to think we arrived safe and performed at the San Francisco Art Institute. This is big, legitimate stuff. I think they were equally impressed that we rolled up like that, totally organized and just shook their walls.”

Next was New York, at OfficeOps in Brooklyn.

“I think we intimidated the people if anything. Though Ty Braxton [of New York ’s improv unit Battles] was there and I think he really dug it. We did a live radio performance for WFMU on the way back. But it broke me. At this point I had spent over $10,000 on Riffest. We had another performance before I started concentrating on recording again. A show at the Eyedrum. All the musicians played in a circle. It was freezing, and I think it was the best yet, but unfortunately, no recording of it. About this time Dave and I went our separate ways to pursue other projects. I wanted to record more.”

And my god, has he recorded. I asked Russ to send me some, and he overnights me what seems like two weeks of music. I’ve been listening since. There are the live event recordings that range from slow rhythmic crawls to unrestrained cacophony.

“There’s a lot to trudge through,” he tells me. But its fascinating trudging, sometimes among musicians meandering and trying to find the voice of the piece, at times getting lost. And there are playful, gentle, even fragile tapes that reek of late night beer, and the early crack of sun on the farm where they were recorded.

“It was the most amazing recording environment. A haunted farm in Athens, Ga. We recorded 24 hours a day,” he says.

I hear the baby cry behind him.

“I gotta go,” he says.

I haven’t heard a thing about what’s to come.

“Let’s make it quick,” he says. “Riffest has been incredible. I couldn’t have done it without so many people. Too many to list, but I got lost in it all. I’m scaling it back. Rick Moore, a guitarist, has been along for the ride since the beginning. He has great taste, and he’s dedicated. We’ve been planning a more mobile Riffest. A nimbler Riffest. It will be exhilarating and visceral. I want a pure outpouring of physicality and emotion. I don’t know what form it will be, only never the same. The direction is there is no direction. We will go back to New York. I want to go to Japan. All I know is I’m back in love with the idea of standing in front of an amp and worshipping the sound that comes out of it.”

A few days go by and he sends me two new studio recordings, Russ on guitar and the inestimable Dwayne Halstead on drums. The first is called “Hey.” It’s little more than random snare shots, the occasional kick, with no pattern whatsoever — and Russ speaking into the microphone, perhaps 50 times, each with a different voice and intonation, saying “Hey.” It’s ridiculous, and funny as hell. The second, “Pam Cam Up,” comes with an advisory: “This is a primer for Riffest. Do not listen to it on tiny little speakers, listen to it on headphones or real loud somewhere.”

I did.

It’s almost frightening, it’s beautiful, and it’s organic: two guys in a room playing their hearts out as truly and powerfully as they are able. It took me back, and I realized that yet again Russ Jackson has managed to blow my mind. And I like it.

Scott Cheshire is a writer who lives and works in New York.