Fighting Music

Noble Brown: Hardcore since 1987.

photo by Austin Powell

The metal genre is the cockroach of the music industry, vile and primal. Though hated, despised, and misunderstood by most, it will always survive because the demand for dark and disturbing music never diminishes. Every so often, Into the Void will spotlight some of the resilient metalheads responsible for keeping the local scene alive and thriving.

Since the summer of 2004, Noble Brown has hosted Fighting Music, Sundays from 12mid to 2am on KVRX 91.7FM, UT's nonprofit student radio. It’s the two most intense and brutal hours of radio around, packed tight with killer cuts from the UK's Into the Moat, Tampa's Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus, Youth of Today, and Coalesce. There are only two rules to this fight club: It has to be independent and heavy.

“People aren’t born hardcore; they become hardcore,” says Brown, who traces his metal roots back to a mixtape in ’87 that introduced him to speed metal. “If you don't feel like fighting after listening to my show, then I haven't done my job.”

Most heavily rotated:
Commit Suicide
Crowpath
Ion Dissonance
Since the Flood
Cattle Decapitation

Noble Brown’s favorite albums from 2007:
Architect, All Is Not Lost
Psyopus, Our Puzzling Encounters Considered
Beneath the Massacre, Mechanics of Dysfunction
Since the Flood, No Compromise

Top 5 bands with upcoming releases:
Will to Live
Die Young
Job for a Cowboy
Ion Dissonance
Despised Icon

Upcoming shows of interest:
Psyopus and Indisgust, April 9 at Red 7
The Way It Is, a two-day hardcore festival, April 13 and 14 at Red 7