And he managed to take this joke pretty far. He told his record label there were snippets of classical music in it, nobody could listen to it to verify this so they shuffled it off to their Classical division, who printed a run which was recalled and destroyed when reviewers noted there was no actual music on it. In 1990 Lou had to pay for a copy of his own album.
He was of course totally tweaked out at the time and said in rambling interviews that he'd been reading about army experiments where they make people sick with sound waves, and that's what he was trying to do.
Sort of. There had been experiments in noise and atonality done by different various composers in the past and even German krautrock bands had applied it to rock and roll before this. Lou even sort of preceded himself with Sister Ray. This just took it one step further and popularized it.
PUNK Magazine called this "A Methedrine Love Letter". Some rock and roll magazine (It may have been Crawdaddy, printed a review that went like this: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO... for a full column of print.
My first live-in girlfriend had this album. We used to use it to drive out guests who had stayed too long. It occasionally backfired.