Wolf Eyes

Wolf Eyes Released 'No Hate' In Honor of Charlottesville Victim Heather Heyer

On Sunday, August 13th, Detroit-based noise act Wolf Eyes released a new album called No Hate on Bandcamp for free. Included in the album’s description on Bandcamp is a link to the now-completed GoFundMe campaign for the family of Heather Heyer, who was murdered in a domestic terrorist attack while she was protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

No Hate is not an easy album to listen to, nor is it designed to be. The record is a discordant and deeply unsettling experience. Glimpses of saxophones, woodwinds, and semblances of a human voice cut through on occasion, but the vast majority of the album’s six tracks are a harsh swirl that defies standard instrumentation.

I don’t choose that verb arbitrarily. No Hate exists in defiance of hatred, yes, but also of the larger prevailing systems that allow that hatred to exist. Experimental and noise music don’t exist just to challenge your taste or to sound unpleasant the sake of it. It’s incidental that No Hate is a close approximation to the sound my brain makes when I scroll through Twitter each morning. The real value of music that throws away the rulebook of conventional taste is that it forces us to question other forms of conventional wisdom. It dares us to imagine a world different from our own, one where the impossible is possible. Perhaps one without hate.

While you can no longer donate to the Heather Heyer GoFundMe, there are still plenty of other places that you can donate your money toward a similar cause. The Southern Poverty Law Center is a good place to start. You can listen to No Hate below, and you can find Wolf Eyes on Facebook here.