New York About the Polywave begins with a clock being attacked by tools designed to move earth. “Digging Through Time (#436)” documents The Haters at TV Eye in Queens on February 22, 2025, with GX Jupitter-Larsen scraping a shovel against a large wooden clock while John Wiese and Crank Sturgeon scratch and sand their own shovels. The resulting sound is immediately harsh, but describing it as harsh noise captures only the acoustic wreckage. The real composition is the collision between objects, actions, history, audience and the absurdly literal idea of digging through time.
A shovel normally enters soil. A clock measures the interval during which the digging occurs. The Haters force both tools into the wrong jobs. The shovel does not excavate earth; it abrades the clock. The clock does not measure the performance from a safe distance; it becomes the material being worn down.
That reversal belongs completely to GX’s world. Since forming The Haters in 1979, he has treated noise less as a musical genre than as the audible residue of actions performed upon objects. Grinding, scraping, punching, sanding, drilling, tearing and breaking are not methods used to create expressive textures afterward. They are the event itself. The sound proves that surfaces met and neither remained unchanged.
The first track runs for more than seventeen minutes, long enough for the scraping to lose its identity as one action. At first the ear follows the scrape of metal against wood. Gradually, those sources widen into abrasive bands of sound, bursts of lower impact and unstable friction. The clock and shovels stop behaving like props and become an electrical weather system created through physical resistance.
John Wiese’s presence adds density and quick internal change. His work often turns noise into an accelerated field of cuts, pressure shifts and sharply articulated detail, but here he submits that instinct to the action’s simple material logic. Crank Sturgeon brings his own long history of amplified objects and homemade performance systems. Three distinct approaches meet around the shovel, one of humanity’s oldest practical tools.
The crowd is not merely listening. After GX throws the oversized clock into the packed room, the audience smashes it. That destruction completes the piece by removing the division between performer and witness. The clock passes from controlled abrasion into collective demolition.
Noise performance often praises participation while keeping the important equipment safely onstage. The Haters hands over the central object and accepts whatever form the action takes next. The audience does not improvise a tasteful response. It destroys the thing placed within reach.
“Digging Through Time Encore (#436)” exists because the audience demanded another round. An encore is usually a repetition of pleasure after the official performance has ended, a familiar song returned as reward. Here the encore extends a destructive process whose primary object has already been damaged.
This produces a peculiar problem. Destruction does not reset between performances. A song can be played again using the same chords. A smashed clock cannot be restored to its earlier condition for a clean second pass. The encore therefore begins with altered material and a changed social atmosphere. The crowd now knows it can intervene.
The eleven-minute recording sounds rougher and less ceremonially contained. The action has crossed the threshold from presentation into aftermath. Scrapes and impacts no longer announce a new object under examination. They continue working upon whatever survived.
The numbered performance titles give these events an archival precision that contrasts beautifully with their physical disorder. “#436” places the Queens show inside a sequence extending across decades. The number does not explain what happened, but confirms that the action belongs to an ongoing practice rather than a spontaneous outbreak.
This is one meaning carried by the album’s title. “Polywave” is part of GX’s private vocabulary of measurements, forms and conceptual units. The exact term resists ordinary scientific definition, but its function is clear enough inside The Haters’ universe: reality can be measured through systems invented specifically to expose the instability of ordinary measurement.
New York is “about” the polywave rather than simply located inside it. The title makes the city sound like evidence offered in support of an impossible theorem. Three venues, three decades and several generations of objects become coordinates in a personal system whose units include decay, repetition and audience behavior.
“Dirwyn (#284)” jumps backward to June 7, 2001. This variation of the Dirwyn performance was staged at Scrape & Pry gallery and used an amplified calculator pressed against a small fan, with GX’s Untitled Title Belt providing additional sound.
The objects are smaller than the clock and shovels, but the conceptual mechanism is similar. A calculator represents exact operation, numerical certainty and the transformation of input into answer. A fan produces repeated mechanical movement without arriving anywhere. Pressing the calculator against the fan places calculation inside a cycle of impact.
The contact microphone enlarges that interaction until small plastic mechanisms become violently present. What might look pathetic from across a room becomes enormous through amplification. Buttons, housing and spinning blades generate a coarse mechanical vibration that sounds more industrial than the objects deserve.
That mismatch between source and result is one of The Haters’ great pleasures. The work does not require expensive machinery, military hardware or an abandoned factory. A calculator and fan contain sufficient violence once their intended functions are interrupted and their friction is amplified.
The title belt adds theatrical authority. Professional wrestling has long occupied GX’s conceptual universe because it treats performance, conflict, costume, physical impact and invented measurement as one system. A title belt certifies victory inside a contest whose rules are both real and theatrical.
Calling it the Untitled Title Belt creates another useful contradiction. It grants status while withholding the name of the achievement. The belt has authority without a stable category, much like the polywave itself.
The recording’s fifteen minutes accumulate through repetition rather than narrative progression. The calculator keeps contacting the fan. The action becomes rhythm without agreeing to become music. Mechanical cycles appear, distort and wear their sources.
The physical deterioration is important. Repetition in electronic music can be theoretically endless because a loop remains identical. The Haters’ repetitions change because objects wear down. Plastic cracks, paper tears, metal dulls and motors strain. Entropy edits the composition from inside.
“Clici-clic (#155)” returns to December 8, 1991, when three members of The Haters performed the first clici-clic action at Generator Gallery in Chelsea. Each used a handheld hole punch fitted with a contact microphone to pierce hundreds of holes through paper and cardboard.
The hole punch is nearly perfect Haters technology. Its purpose is to remove small circles from a surface. Every use creates emptiness while producing a tiny piece of material as evidence. The object does not draw or build. It subtracts.
Amplification turns each subtraction into a blunt, snapping impact. Three performers repeating the action generate a dense pulse that resembles primitive machinery while remaining visibly connected to office supplies and manual labor.
The title copies the action’s sound like a word invented by the tool itself. “Clici-clic” is childish, mechanical and exact enough to enter GX’s private lexicon. It names neither an instrument nor a genre. It names a repeated event.
Over sixteen minutes, the piece creates rhythm more openly than the others. The punches fall at irregular but accumulating intervals, producing a collective choreography of pressure, release and perforation. Paper gradually becomes less capable of remaining a sheet.
Every hole increases the surface’s vulnerability. Eventually the object carrying the action begins losing the structural continuity required for more holes. Destruction creates its own limit.
This early recording also shows how consistent The Haters’ practice has been. The objects and venues change, but the essential grammar remains intact: choose a simple action, amplify its physical consequences, repeat it until deterioration becomes visible and allow sound to function as evidence rather than decoration.
New York About the Polywave is therefore not merely a live compilation. It is a thirty-four-year comparison of the same conceptual organism adapting to different rooms. Chelsea in 1991, a gallery in 2001 and a packed Queens venue in 2025 become three stages of one extended erosion.
The album also preserves the changing relationship between The Haters and their audience. “Clici-clic” presents performers carrying out a disciplined action. “Dirwyn” centers a compact object system. “Digging Through Time” throws the main object directly into the crowd and allows collective destruction to become the ending.
The performances grow more socially porous while retaining their severe simplicity. No elaborate explanation is needed once the clock enters the audience. The crowd understands what to do because the object has already been framed through scraping and noise as something available for transformation.
The CD turns those physical events into fixed recordings, creating a contradiction The Haters has always carried. Entropy is temporary and irreversible, but documentation can be replayed. The clock is gone, the paper remains punctured and the calculator may have stopped functioning, yet the sounds begin again whenever the disc is played.
That repetition does not restore the objects. It produces another layer of distance between action and residue. The recording becomes a second surface upon which the event continues wearing itself down.
The New York setting matters because the city has repeatedly offered The Haters spaces where art, noise, spectacle and participation overlap without requiring comfortable boundaries. Galleries and clubs become laboratories for actions too blunt for conventional concert language and too loud to remain private conceptual gestures.
Yet the album does not romanticize New York underground history. The earliest recording is not presented as a sacred relic, and the newest is not treated as proof of triumphant survival. All three are materials placed beside one another to show that time itself can be scraped, punched and handed to a crowd.
The Haters has lasted because the work was never dependent upon technical novelty. A better synthesizer cannot make a hole punch obsolete. Digital production cannot replace the specific fact of a wooden clock being destroyed by people in a room.
New York About the Polywave makes that fact audible. Numbers become titles, tools lose their assigned functions and simple actions grow enormous through repetition. The clock measures nothing after it enters the crowd. The calculator produces no answer. The hole punch keeps making emptiness.
Across thirty-four years, the surfaces change. The polywave continues.
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