ABSTRACT
Boredoms quickly came to represent the sound of the Japanese underground in the 1990s, as "alternative music" became the catchphrase of a rapidly consolidating global music industry. The concept of Japanoise might never have taken hold without the North American media flow that Boredoms achieved in the 1990s, via the retail boom in "alternative music" that made independent CDs available in national distribution networks. The invention of the term "Japanoise" also helped support the belief that the distant "Japanese Noise scene" was bigger, more popular, and more definitive of this extreme style. Japanoise appeared to be a unique local style of music from a particular place and time, with representative musicians, sounds, and a body of recordings that could be collected under the name. In important ways, then, the cultural object of Japanoise did not just "come from" Japan, but was created and perpetuated in the feedback of transnational circulation.
