School of Noize: Khulna University alumni reconnect through an original music legacy

Khulna University has produced generations of musicians, but many never shared the same stage or rehearsal room. Over time, bands disappeared, songs remained unreleased, and stories stayed within small circles. School of Noize, presented by KUsician Collaboration, was created to bring part of that scattered history back into one frame.

The project is an original multi-solo instrumental video, not a cover. It grew from an alumni-led idea to reconnect Khulna University musicians across generations through one original piece. Instead of choosing a cover, the collaboration was built around an original backing theme created within the same alumni music circle, later expanded by participants through guitars, bass, drums, keys, indigenous instruments, and other sounds.

The collaboration brought together 34 amateur and semi-professional musicians from Batch ’96 to ’26, representing around 14 disciplines and 19 campus bands, with contributors in Bangladesh and abroad reports a press release. For several senior participants, it became their first proper recording experience; for younger musicians, it opened a space to learn from the writing, recording, tone-shaping, and collaboration process.

The collaboration matters because of its context: Khulna University’s music culture grew without ready-made rehearsal spaces, studios, formal facilities, or easy access to major networks. For many outside Dhaka, it was sustained by borrowed instruments, improvised spaces, limited equipment, academic pressure, institutional resistance, and the sheer will to keep playing.

The title was chosen through voting and echoes Noise Factory, the Khulna University rock and metal forum founded in 2009 and banned in 2023. Remembered as a pioneering university-based band music forum, a long-running campus gig platform, and a regional force in southern Bangladesh’s rock and metal culture, Noise Factory drew its name from a phrase shared by the father of one of its founding members: “music is an expensive noise.”

That “noise” was often misunderstood. One Director of Student Affairs reportedly labelled the name “vulgar,” while another had earlier described Eclipse, one of Khulna University’s earliest bands, as “unsocial music.” Some of those involved allege that Noise Factory’s activities were unjustly stopped by the university authorities in 2023.

With Noise Factory no longer active, School of Noize is both a bittersweet farewell to that era and possibly among the first alumni-based original multi-solo instrumental collaborations of its kind in Bangladesh. Above all, it is a thank-you note to Khulna University — and a reminder to record, create, document, and pass the noise forward.