Peter Wild has embarked on an ambitious experimental project exploring the relationship between music and fiction. Wild’s work uses the music of several well-known bands as his starting point, but is generating controversy among music fans looking for writing that more accurately reflects the songs. Noise is the second in a series of six planned anthologies, but the first available outside of the United Kingdom. The publishers felt that The Fall, the source of inspiration for the first volume, was not sufficiently well-known in North America.

“In the U.K., the book is called The Empty Page,” says Wild, “because that’s what you start with — an empty page. I wanted to see how authors become inspired by music…. With The Fall book I let people choose a title and see where it takes them. With this one I changed it and told people to take a title and listen to the song. Let the lyrics and the music start you off.”

Some of the authors already had connections with Sonic Youth. Emily Carter Roiphe lived in New York’s East Village at the same time as the band did in the early 1980s, and her short story explores coming at Sonic Youth’s music from opposite ends of the age spectum. Other authors, such as Mary Gaitskill and Matt Thorne, claim to have been fans for quite some time and their stories manage to convey a sense of Sonic Youth edginess. Some admit to having only a passing familiarity with the band and so one wonders at the reaction Scott Mebus’s tongue-in-cheek story of an aging lesbian buying a sex toy for her younger partner in “Bull in the Heather” might get from the band.

In the introduction, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo sets the stage, by positioning the band’s music as a multi-faceted entity, as if to say there is no single correct interpretation and so all of the stories contained in Noise are viable. Peter Wild’s contribution, “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style,” was inspired by lyrics about Lou Reed, beatific roommates and “the eye in the universe.” The result is a crowd scene that evolved into a short story about undercover FBI agents during the civil rights era. It even features the MC5, spiritual ancestors to Sonic Youth.

The next volume in the series is on The Smiths, in which Wild will be more explicit in his introduction. He will talk about the purpose and process of how the stories were written, hopefully giving the reader greater insight than the introductory paragraph each writer provides in Noise. “People love these bands,” he says, “but can’t always see the journey from the song to the story. But that doesn’t mean the journey the writer goes on is invalid, just because it’s not the same as theirs. When The Fall book came out, some people in the press acted like I’d invaded Poland.”

Wild likens his anthology to a mix tape of authors, with a melting pot of up-and-coming and established writers such as Mary Gaitskill, Emily Carter Roiphe and Shirley Jackson. Wild laughs thinking of Jackson’s lengthier piece “My Friend Goo” in the middle of the book. “It’s kind of like the seven-minute track you put at the end of side one,” he says.

“People are not going to like everything, just as you might expect on a compilation of 20 bands covering Sonic Youth, but most people will hopefully find some new authors they want to follow.”