The next time someone says live music in Shanghai is tame, point them towards the city’s emerging experimental noise scene. Local acts such as Torturing Nurse, Zhi Wang and Nine Inch Screw put on performances that are part art installation and part torture chamber, bombarding their audiences with atonal feedback and cacophonies of static. The results sound like a cross between a 1960s sci-fi soundtrack and the music they’d use to break detainees at Abu Ghraib.

On August 28, Hiroshi Hasegawa, the founding member Japanese experimental noise group C.C.C.C., plays Shanghai. Joining him are noise acts from the UK, Germany and across China, promising a night of sonic abuse. Their names alone should draw the curious: Hong Kong outfit Orgasm Denial will play alongside Scotsman Lea Cummings, who plays under the irresistible name Kylie Minoise.

“Noise is anti-music,” says Chaos Junky of Torturing Nurse, who arranged the show. “We don’t use conventional instruments. I use a contact microphone, a turntable, bits of junk, distortion pedals, or just use my voice. Noise is anti-rhythm and anti-melody.”

Hasegawa sits on the more laid-back, ambient side of noise. But there’s no getting around it–most noise performances are distinctly unpleasant for the audience. But Junky says harsh noise can unlock something repressed in us, and that there is a Dionysian pleasure about atonality. This idea was pioneered by dada artists and picked up by the surrealist and fluxus movements, all of which fed into the development of noise.

“I think what we do is closer to art or anti-art than music,” says Junky, who traces the first noise experiments back to Luigi Russolo, a futurist painter. “But I just express my own feelings during a performance. I don’t do it in order to create a certain audience reaction.”

Junky admits there will never be a wide audience for the genre, but says the scene is growing in China. “There aren’t many people making noise here. It’s hard to find a place where we can play gigs. But it is growing, very slowly. There are new people at every gig and the development of anti-music has only just begun.”

Whether or not all of this is just noise to you, let no one say there is no life in the Shanghai underground.