any thoughts on how one would assemble a harsh noise instrument in renoise?
I make a lot of noise leads. Sometimes I use white noise or pink noise in short loops. Macuilxochitl is an awesome tool for noise waves and fm. Try short loops of percussion sounds. FM/PM, distortion/clipping, etc. The real challenge (for me at least) is clean sounds 
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Activate Line input, Set microphone amplification in soundcard settings to the max. Get the mic to feedback with the speakers - sample that! 
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Melodic, rhythmic, or just…noise?
1.) use a recorded sample from whatever noisy thing you can find, load it into a renoise instrument
2.) run it through one or more distortion devices or harsh filters or EQs
The art of making a harsh noise that is a properly destroying sound, but not an overly destroying sound, is to take care that there are no overly strong peaks in the sound but that all is balanced out. You might want to relax the usual “pink noise” frequency curve for music and give your sounds a bit less falloff in the frequency realm so there are proportionally a bit more highs than usual → this also can make sounds seem more harsh and aggressive.
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it depend if you’ve have hardware to record but just record some sound or noise with a phone and work it with the renoise effect.
otherwise you could use a non input mixing board to make feedback with a mixing board(you put the output into the input).
i don’t use too often renoise this days(i have hardware) but you could do harsh noise for sure
If it must be software, try Softube Modular
You can stack up modulations and do stuff like returning the master output to for instance modulate the filter frequency.
But to get the noise alive → go for hardware and look at modular & semi-modular synths.
These will allow you to wire the instrument in such a way it becomes a noise-instrument able to play with the timbre and rhythmic modulations, without getting stuck in some flat sound.
Hardware allows you to tweak the sound much more intuitive and faster then any software solution. But the software is nice to get an idea of the sound palettes. Or where you want things to happen pre-programmed, rather than in an unpredictable and intuitive manner.
Distortions are an easy way to get a harsh sound, but they have the disadvantage to also flatten dynamics. Creating distortion through a feedback, where you feed output back in, but as a modulation source, also creates a distorted sound, but without the flattened dynamics which is inherent to distortion (pumping the sound over max.level always results in max level.)
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