My Life as a Noise Band

Paul’s language is noise: monstrously blaring tracks in which he screams out his despair in a distorted voice. Away from the stage though, everything seems empty, nobody understands him or his lyrics, and he largely spends his life alone. Apart from Mark, who is part of the band but seems to be receding into his own, private world. But everything changes when Paul meets Annika after a concert. She shares his fascination with noise bands like Hanatarash and Atrax Morgue, and Paul immediately falls in love with her. After they have a child, the urge to express everything in murderously loud music wanes. But what is left of his art? And why has Mark finally resurfaced?

Lone wolves, outsiders, people suffering in silence – in My Life as a Noise Band, Clemens J. Setz gathers stories about figures situated on the margins of society. With observations of everyday life that are as precise as they are poetic, these stories lead us through distorted realities, in which the familiar, the grotesque, and the obsessive revolve around one another. Violence and loneliness exist alongside moments of unconventional tenderness and a longing for intimacy and connection.

»Full of violence, perversions, embarrassments, and at the same time, the most sensitive material you can read about life on the internet and contemporary gender issues … sensational« Marie Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Clemens J. Setz on his home turf: social deviancy, disabilities, the abysses of care and of being entrusted with the lives of others. Stylistically, in his new collection of stories, Clemens J. Setz is entirely in his element.« Klaus Kastberger, Die Presse

»Time and again, Setz expresses this caring stance toward people, nature, and objects, a fundamental empathy for all that exists, which forms the nucleus of poetry and resists horror..« Caspar Battegay, WOZ Die Wochenzeitung

»Clemens Setz is currently Austria’s most innovative and fascinating authors, thematically and formally with his finger on the pulse, he creates psychologically complex, often eccentric characters, which challenge, surprise, and captivate readers.« Meike Stein, SR

»In his collection of stories, Clemens J. Setz writes against beauty. The more desperately he does it, the more tragic it gets, funnier, more beautiful.« Berliner Zeitung

»Setz ... uses language not for describing the everyday or for recounting experience, rather he uses it as a lever to force open the joints and faultlines of our lives at the spots where they develop explosive power, prising open the crack between the surface and what lies beneath until he can shine a light inside.« Wolfgang Huber-Lang, Salzburger Nachrichten

»In My Life as a Noise Band, Clemens J. Setz tells of figures on the margins and pushes the borders of the utterable.« Barbara Beer, Kurier

»This book sounds like the echo of supposed societal margin figures, which do not represent some mere cabinet of curiosities, but are as widespread as they are invisible.« Raffael Leitner, Der Standard

»His empathy with the more or less harmless psychos and overly sensitive nerds lead linguistically to a magical poeticization of the world.« Nicole Strecker, WDR

»Setz radiates as one of the most important literary voices of the present moment..« News »Setz’s always surprising stories are of the highest linguistic virtuosity.« News