NON is essentially the one-man project of noise monger and provocateur Boyd Rice, whose solo work is virtually interchangeable with that released under his NON alias. Rice's first work, originally titled The Black Album, consisted of looped bits of girl group and bubblegum pop songs worked into a numbing drone; it was released in 1981 by Mute under the title Boyd Rice. Subsequent NON releases like the antagonistic Physical Evidence (1982) and the textured noise of Blood and Flame (1987) pushed the limits of aural accessibility. A compilation of NON's '80s material, some of it non-LP, was released in 1991 under the title Easy Listening for Iron Youth. In the mid-'90s, Rice revived NON often; 1992's In the Shadow of the Sword focused on social Darwinism, while 1995's Might! was an opus of musically backed poetry inspired by author "Ragnar Redbeard"'s (likely Jack London) Might Is Right. NON released the album God and Beast in 1997, which sported the clearest production to date on any of the project's works. Receive the Flame followed in early 2000 and Children of the Black Sun in 2002, the latter accompanied by a DVD 5.1 mix of the album. While Rice was active in collaborations and with work under his own name, it would be almost a decade until NON returned with its next proper full-length, 2012's Back to Mono. The album stepped away from the minimalism and ambience that had come to define NON, embracing again the harsh noise and hateful tones of the project's beginnings. ~ Steve Huey, Rovi