The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that:
Disaster Area noise levels: comparative analysis. Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagralacka Mind Zones are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all.
Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty seven miles from the stage. Whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit round the planet, or more frequently round a completely different planet. Their songs are, on the whole, very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy being meets girl being beneath a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.
…
In both size and shape the sound rig closely resembled Manhattan.
Risen out of the silos, the neutron speaker stacks towered monstrously against the sky, obscuring the banks of plutonium reactors and seismic amps behind them.
Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath the city of speakers lay the instruments that the musicians would control from their ship, the massive photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex.
It was going to be a noisy show.
— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
