Saturday, December 4, 2010
Final Part II: Where next?
The more culture fragments into ever-smaller niches and changes at an ever-increasing pace due to increased global connections, and the more global economic and political power structures become larger and more complex, the more difficult it becomes to identify what constitutes noise, subversion, and transgression. Francisco Lopez makes clear how subjective the existence of music (and by proxy, noise) is; while noise music is already an uneasy collection of sub-genres and scenes, one could imagine it splintering even further into highly localized, fleeting spurts of activity that register as noise for only a few. Without an easily identifiable norm, what is there to subvert? Noise may come to be an even more relative concept than it is now: faced with a plethora of niche musics, only the individual subject will be able to analyze any given example as noise or not-noise. While the progression toward total cultural fragmentation is asymptotic, I anticipate that the culturally noisy will become more and more difficult to identify.
What will actually constitutes noise in a cultural sense and what artists who identify as part of the noise genre will choose to produce in the future seem like two different questions. As noise-the-genre reifies, it itself becomes a code, a norm, perhaps even a power structure. The noisiest artworks may, in the future, come from outside noise-the-genre. To offer some specific potential directions: as technology increasingly rules our lives and enters our bodies, I can imagine biomedical artworks that test the boundaries between the biological and technological in ever more invasive ways: performances that involve aestheticized, amplified surgical procedures; the use of biomedical technology to sonify (and perhaps simultaneously manipulate) human brain activity.
Final Part I: Four Quotations
1) From Jacques Attali's "Noise and Politics"(AC p. 7): "Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political...with music is born power and its opposite: subversion." I agree with this statement, but only in a qualified way, thus I'm counting it as a disagree.
Throughout much of history, I think Attali's assertion that social mores and power structures coalesce in music has been accurate. The idea of organizing sound into something recognized and accepted as music is an apt metaphor for organizing people into something recognized and accepted as a functional society (though what this acceptable thing actually looks like is of course immensely mutable depending on context) and we can probably pretty accurately read ways in which sound organizers reflect either the status quo of their society or some form of subversion of that status quo (and if we can't, a lot of musicologists are out of a job.) However, in our increasingly globalized, post-Berlin-wall world, what constitutes power and subversion becomes ever blurrier. The social codes reflected in a music may not accurately represent its place in cultural, political, or economic power structures. Some of these paradoxes are relatively transparent and superficial - wealthy stars rapping about life in the projects; "indie" bands whose labels are in fact subsidiaries of global media conglomerates - but in our increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, the identity crises and ambiguities of cultural position that affect most instances of artistic production are more complex and less easy to identify. So while music remains intensely bound up with power and subversion, those are so far from being discrete, oppositional categories that Attali's statement seems impossibly binary. At this moment in time identifying any given music as representative of either of those categories is intensely difficult; most likely any given music represents both to some degree, and depending on the observer, might represent one or the other for the same reason.
2) From Francisco Lopez: "I strongly believe that any sound can be music, but not that it is music. The essential difference, what converts a sound into music, is a human, subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent, aesthetic, decision...a way of perceiving certain sounds in a certain time by a certain person."
Amen, brother. This goes in my agree column and is one of the most eloquent and forceful statements of cultural relativity I've encountered; it goes second because it reinforces my point above regarding Attali. By highlighting the relativity and subjectivity of music and its reliance on human agency for existence, Lopez by extension highlights the same things about noise. He makes the existence of music and noise seem intensely personal - these categories (much like power and subversion) are endlessly redefined by each individual subject, who in turn may redefine them endlessly as they move through space and time.
3) From NM p. 125: "Noise is on the side of revolt rather than revolution (not that this can be said of all experimental music), as revolution implies a new order, and noise cannot be a message-bearer (other than of itself as message)."
I appreciate the distinction this quotation makes because it helps explain how noise can be allied with subversion. However, this is going in my disagree column because its conclusion - that noise cannot be a message-bearer - while accurate as part of Hegarty's definition of noise, is perhaps the thing that makes me most uncomfortable with noise as a genre. The sounds of the genre don't bother me at all; I enjoy listening to a lot of the music we've encountered in this class. Moreover, I certainly don't think music should be reducible to simple verbal messages, or that it should be asked to serve political or societal functions. However, the suspicion that some of this music may intentionally not have anything to say, and thus may in fact be intentionally disrespecting or devaluing meaning and earnestness, or the search for meaning in art, feels really uncomfortable to me - it hits at the heart of the seriousness and sense of responsibility with which I approach my own work.
4) From NM p. 111: "So successful transgression can only ever aspire to be "successful" - it is caught in a loop of alternating failures - in its mundane failure in not disposing of the taboo, its alternative failure in getting rid of it and thereby becoming the norm, and above (beneath) all, its failure to even fail properly, as it negotiates between various ways it does not come to be. Transgression is always potential, or always already lost, but this does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle, acting as if it were possible."
This quotation sort of ties everything together. Hegarty is wonderfully honest and specific about the limitations and nature of transgression via noise. Transgression is as relative and contingent as any other category, and the process of trying to achieve it sounds here like a serious quest for a kind of meaning. Elsewhere, Hegarty describes engaging with Throbbing Gristle's output as "always a work undoing itself" as the group would change their sound in order to keep their transgressive power vital. The sustained effort, over time, to maintain a position of imbalance with respect to one's audience is certainly something I can get behind; the idea of inherently eschewing message does not feel nearly as threatening to me when put in this context.
Throughout much of history, I think Attali's assertion that social mores and power structures coalesce in music has been accurate. The idea of organizing sound into something recognized and accepted as music is an apt metaphor for organizing people into something recognized and accepted as a functional society (though what this acceptable thing actually looks like is of course immensely mutable depending on context) and we can probably pretty accurately read ways in which sound organizers reflect either the status quo of their society or some form of subversion of that status quo (and if we can't, a lot of musicologists are out of a job.) However, in our increasingly globalized, post-Berlin-wall world, what constitutes power and subversion becomes ever blurrier. The social codes reflected in a music may not accurately represent its place in cultural, political, or economic power structures. Some of these paradoxes are relatively transparent and superficial - wealthy stars rapping about life in the projects; "indie" bands whose labels are in fact subsidiaries of global media conglomerates - but in our increasingly fragmented cultural landscape, the identity crises and ambiguities of cultural position that affect most instances of artistic production are more complex and less easy to identify. So while music remains intensely bound up with power and subversion, those are so far from being discrete, oppositional categories that Attali's statement seems impossibly binary. At this moment in time identifying any given music as representative of either of those categories is intensely difficult; most likely any given music represents both to some degree, and depending on the observer, might represent one or the other for the same reason.
2) From Francisco Lopez: "I strongly believe that any sound can be music, but not that it is music. The essential difference, what converts a sound into music, is a human, subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent, aesthetic, decision...a way of perceiving certain sounds in a certain time by a certain person."
Amen, brother. This goes in my agree column and is one of the most eloquent and forceful statements of cultural relativity I've encountered; it goes second because it reinforces my point above regarding Attali. By highlighting the relativity and subjectivity of music and its reliance on human agency for existence, Lopez by extension highlights the same things about noise. He makes the existence of music and noise seem intensely personal - these categories (much like power and subversion) are endlessly redefined by each individual subject, who in turn may redefine them endlessly as they move through space and time.
3) From NM p. 125: "Noise is on the side of revolt rather than revolution (not that this can be said of all experimental music), as revolution implies a new order, and noise cannot be a message-bearer (other than of itself as message)."
I appreciate the distinction this quotation makes because it helps explain how noise can be allied with subversion. However, this is going in my disagree column because its conclusion - that noise cannot be a message-bearer - while accurate as part of Hegarty's definition of noise, is perhaps the thing that makes me most uncomfortable with noise as a genre. The sounds of the genre don't bother me at all; I enjoy listening to a lot of the music we've encountered in this class. Moreover, I certainly don't think music should be reducible to simple verbal messages, or that it should be asked to serve political or societal functions. However, the suspicion that some of this music may intentionally not have anything to say, and thus may in fact be intentionally disrespecting or devaluing meaning and earnestness, or the search for meaning in art, feels really uncomfortable to me - it hits at the heart of the seriousness and sense of responsibility with which I approach my own work.
4) From NM p. 111: "So successful transgression can only ever aspire to be "successful" - it is caught in a loop of alternating failures - in its mundane failure in not disposing of the taboo, its alternative failure in getting rid of it and thereby becoming the norm, and above (beneath) all, its failure to even fail properly, as it negotiates between various ways it does not come to be. Transgression is always potential, or always already lost, but this does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle, acting as if it were possible."
This quotation sort of ties everything together. Hegarty is wonderfully honest and specific about the limitations and nature of transgression via noise. Transgression is as relative and contingent as any other category, and the process of trying to achieve it sounds here like a serious quest for a kind of meaning. Elsewhere, Hegarty describes engaging with Throbbing Gristle's output as "always a work undoing itself" as the group would change their sound in order to keep their transgressive power vital. The sustained effort, over time, to maintain a position of imbalance with respect to one's audience is certainly something I can get behind; the idea of inherently eschewing message does not feel nearly as threatening to me when put in this context.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Der Lauf der Dinge
The most immediate relation "Der Lauf der Dinge" bears to noise music is that it is art (with a distinct sonic component) made of cast-off materials, or "junk" as we have been discussing in class. The piece makes this apparent from its first image - a dangling, full trash bag. No effort has been made to aestheticize the components of the subsequent Rube-Goldberging. Cans are rusty, bottles stained, wooden components visibly singed, presumably by previous runs of the chain reaction. While the cinematography renders many of the apparatus beautiful - bubbling foam surging across a metal surface, dancing flames on a spinning tetherball - the individual objects are as-is. Many of them are the cast-off products of industry, though this possible link to "industrial" music is tenuous because the sonic result is so different from what we would recognize aurally as examples of the genre "industrial." Luigi Russolo, however, might approve of the use of only sounds generated by industrial materials.
If "noise" as a broad concept contains connotations of perceived threat or danger, those elements are present here as well. Many of the materials used - trash, fire, spilled petrochemicals, fuses, saw blades, etc. (is that bubbling stuff toxic? Did they use dry ice?) - present a real danger to humans in other, less controlled circumstances. "Der Lauf der Dinge" is thus sound(ing) art made with potentially dangerous junk; that sounds like noise to me.
Additionally, the artists do not adopt a clear position toward their use of dangerous junk - are they valorizing the danger? Taming it? Finding a subversively aesthetic use for the waste products of industry? Doing something cool with stuff that is cheap and suggestive? All of the above? The inherent ambivalence of message encoded in the choice of materials and method of deploying them relates this work strongly to other forms of noise.
If "noise" as a broad concept contains connotations of perceived threat or danger, those elements are present here as well. Many of the materials used - trash, fire, spilled petrochemicals, fuses, saw blades, etc. (is that bubbling stuff toxic? Did they use dry ice?) - present a real danger to humans in other, less controlled circumstances. "Der Lauf der Dinge" is thus sound(ing) art made with potentially dangerous junk; that sounds like noise to me.
Additionally, the artists do not adopt a clear position toward their use of dangerous junk - are they valorizing the danger? Taming it? Finding a subversively aesthetic use for the waste products of industry? Doing something cool with stuff that is cheap and suggestive? All of the above? The inherent ambivalence of message encoded in the choice of materials and method of deploying them relates this work strongly to other forms of noise.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Individuation and Aura
Scott Short's painting begins along the same philosophical and processual lines that Glitch music does, but goes a step further than Glitch by re-creating digital residue in a pre-electronic medium, i.e. painting. The musical equivalent would be taking a piece of electronically produced and recorded Glitch music and scoring it meticulously for performance by acoustic instruments (which I'm now tempted to do). But what does/would this extra step mean?
Glitch, raku pottery, etc. - the uncontrollability of materials is certainly a huge factor in both of these categories of art. And one important result of uncontrollable materials is that most often, different instances of "the same" work end up radically different. Running the same Max patch produces different sonic results each time; minute variances in the raku-making process can result in extremely different glaze crackling patterns (or explosion). Even Short's xerox process, I would venture to guess, does not produce the same result from machine to machine or even in two uses of the same machine. Thus uncontrollability of materials circles us right back around to the Benjaminian concept of aura - upon close examination, digital reproduction processes actually produce unique, irreproducible works each time. Glitch musicians recognize this ultimate individuation as a philosophical basis for their work, as made clear in Ben Borthwick's "The Perfect Storm." Carsten Nicolai expresses suspicion of the political tendency to group people into blocs as represented by the phrase "we the people:" "The 'we' doesn't exist. It is individuals...the 'we' never existed. It was just a phrase."
But raku pottery does not use digital production methods, and Glitch uses them exclusively. Scott Short's work, on the other hand, conflates the digital and non-digital, the machine-like nature of his faithful painted reproductions of the "human" imperfections produced by the xerox machine, simultaneously acknowledging and questioning the possibility of Benjaminian aura existing across digital and non-digital media equally.
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi seems integral to much of the art in question this week - whether overtly, as in haku pottery, or implicitly. Finding beauty in the imperfection and transience of things, often small, simple, everyday things - xerox machines, digital residue, vegetables - is a common theme. Any artistic medium or working process will inevitably have limitations and conditions that lead to the individuation of individual works, performances, and even (as Glitch and Scott Short make clear) purportedly identical reproductions. Art that embraces and foregrounds these limitations and conditions seems to me to fulfill a basic human need to acknowledge (and perhaps find meaning in) both the transience and conditionality of all human life and the tragically transient uniqueness of each individual person.
Glitch, raku pottery, etc. - the uncontrollability of materials is certainly a huge factor in both of these categories of art. And one important result of uncontrollable materials is that most often, different instances of "the same" work end up radically different. Running the same Max patch produces different sonic results each time; minute variances in the raku-making process can result in extremely different glaze crackling patterns (or explosion). Even Short's xerox process, I would venture to guess, does not produce the same result from machine to machine or even in two uses of the same machine. Thus uncontrollability of materials circles us right back around to the Benjaminian concept of aura - upon close examination, digital reproduction processes actually produce unique, irreproducible works each time. Glitch musicians recognize this ultimate individuation as a philosophical basis for their work, as made clear in Ben Borthwick's "The Perfect Storm." Carsten Nicolai expresses suspicion of the political tendency to group people into blocs as represented by the phrase "we the people:" "The 'we' doesn't exist. It is individuals...the 'we' never existed. It was just a phrase."
But raku pottery does not use digital production methods, and Glitch uses them exclusively. Scott Short's work, on the other hand, conflates the digital and non-digital, the machine-like nature of his faithful painted reproductions of the "human" imperfections produced by the xerox machine, simultaneously acknowledging and questioning the possibility of Benjaminian aura existing across digital and non-digital media equally.
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi seems integral to much of the art in question this week - whether overtly, as in haku pottery, or implicitly. Finding beauty in the imperfection and transience of things, often small, simple, everyday things - xerox machines, digital residue, vegetables - is a common theme. Any artistic medium or working process will inevitably have limitations and conditions that lead to the individuation of individual works, performances, and even (as Glitch and Scott Short make clear) purportedly identical reproductions. Art that embraces and foregrounds these limitations and conditions seems to me to fulfill a basic human need to acknowledge (and perhaps find meaning in) both the transience and conditionality of all human life and the tragically transient uniqueness of each individual person.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Merzbow et al.
Out of all the Japanese noise music we have listened to for this class I find Merzbow's the least pleasant to hear. However, I want to argue for Merzbow's superiority, at least among this small sample of Japanoise, on the basis of his music's extremeness. One finds extremeness in multiple elements of his work: the volume, the broadband saturation, the track lengths, the number of releases, etc. Although these elements all work together to form a total impression, some seem more crucial than others; to me, the simple fact of track length makes a big difference. A Merzbow track is on average much longer than the non-Merzbow Japanoise tracks we've encountered. For me, the longer the piece, the more successfully it can employ the sort of "formless" form Hegarty identifies as a marker of Japanoise (N/M p. 139). When a track is between, say, one and six minutes, I find myself more likely to perceive form in the traditional sense even in the absence of traditional formal markers. The beginning and end are close enough together in time that one can sense the proximity of any given moment to these points of framing, thus understanding that moment's place within the time-container of the work and hearing the work as some sort of arc across or way of dividing the time between the beginning and end points. The fact that most mainstream genres routinely produce songs in the one-to-six minute range doesn't help - we're conditioned to understand music that lasts for relatively short durations in pretty conventional formal ways. It's much easier to "get lost" temporally and thus formally in a Merzbow piece; one loses sight of the beginning and can't anticipate the end. Constant broadband saturation, overwhelming volume, and relative lack of differentiation of material over the long time span compounds this. In the non-Merzbow Japanoise, one can more easily identify individual sounds or even gestures that recur, evolve, etc. which can lead to more traditional formal perception.
Merzbow's extremes seem to hew closer to a Bataillean vision of excess than any of the other Japanoise practitioners we have encountered. While I often find his music uncomfortable to listen to, I appreciate his ability to extend the excesses of his work so far that subsequent artists in the same field do not seem to have attempted to push through the boundaries of volume/length/information overload/etc. he delineates, but rather have looked for new ways to make noise within them, or in some oblique side-stepping relationship to them. Merzbow's music thus seems to define the primary artistic questions of a large group of subsequent musicians, forcing them to be defined in terms of how their work relates to his. Very few artists achieve this genre-defining, inevitable-comparison-evoking status - Schoenberg and Lachenmann come to mind, or the Beatles, or Enrico Caruso. Whether it is a good thing or not, I'm not sure, but it is certainly noteworthy; for me, Merzbow's excesses put him in this category with regard to Japanoise.
Merzbow's extremes seem to hew closer to a Bataillean vision of excess than any of the other Japanoise practitioners we have encountered. While I often find his music uncomfortable to listen to, I appreciate his ability to extend the excesses of his work so far that subsequent artists in the same field do not seem to have attempted to push through the boundaries of volume/length/information overload/etc. he delineates, but rather have looked for new ways to make noise within them, or in some oblique side-stepping relationship to them. Merzbow's music thus seems to define the primary artistic questions of a large group of subsequent musicians, forcing them to be defined in terms of how their work relates to his. Very few artists achieve this genre-defining, inevitable-comparison-evoking status - Schoenberg and Lachenmann come to mind, or the Beatles, or Enrico Caruso. Whether it is a good thing or not, I'm not sure, but it is certainly noteworthy; for me, Merzbow's excesses put him in this category with regard to Japanoise.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Post-Industrial
What would a post-industrial music be? If industrial music uses sounds that reflect the manufacturing economy, post-industrial music would use sounds that reflect an information economy. What that actually means is certainly not obvious. Manufacturing by definition produces a certain category of sounds - to enter a plant or factory is to encounter machinery, sounding materials (metal, stone, etc), and repetitive production processes; an information-based economy is more difficult to associate with specific categories of sound. From the point of view of a laid-off factory worker with no employment prospects, the information economy might be defined by lack. One might record or simulate the sounds of an abandoned factory - frame a sonic absence, or in the most derelict cases, a return of the building and its machinery to nature. But a post-industrial economy could also be defined by what it does have, though one would be hard pressed to find a unified sound world in those things: consulting firms, creative professions, computer science...
Or perhaps the post-industrial economy and culture are defined by their cerebral nature. A commonly iterated narrative of the industrial age posits that industry removed humans from nature, putting us to work alongside machines, mechanizing and disconnecting us from the natural origins of our food, clothing, and shelter. The post-industrial age (to continue with this narrative) removes humans from our last connection to nature: our own bodies. Working with one's hands and body fades further into nostalgia and anachronism; the prototypical career paths sought by college grads are in cerebral, non-physical fields: finance, consulting, business management, information technology, law. We lose touch with our bodies to the point that obese people think they look normal and are healthy (this misperception is so common that a new term has been coined for it).
If there is a good way to tap into the sounds of the human brain and use them musically, or to harness the brain-controlled computer technology currently being developed for musical purposes, that might produce an appropriately cerebral post-industrial music. I can imagine an isolated, physically passive simultaneous music-making and listening bio-feedback loop: the sounds of your brain are transmitted to computer and you listen to them over headphones; through your own thinking you can control real-time DSP of these sounds in an improvisatory manner (with the option of streaming the whole session live on the internet.) While I have no idea what the actual music resulting from this process would sound like, it would effectively encapsulate some of the overarching themes of the post-industrial ethos: real-time speed of information transfer; computer-facilitated, remote interaction and work; multi-disciplinary application of the same technologies; cerebrality; the web-ification of arts and culture...
If there is a good way to tap into the sounds of the human brain and use them musically, or to harness the brain-controlled computer technology currently being developed for musical purposes, that might produce an appropriately cerebral post-industrial music. I can imagine an isolated, physically passive simultaneous music-making and listening bio-feedback loop: the sounds of your brain are transmitted to computer and you listen to them over headphones; through your own thinking you can control real-time DSP of these sounds in an improvisatory manner (with the option of streaming the whole session live on the internet.) While I have no idea what the actual music resulting from this process would sound like, it would effectively encapsulate some of the overarching themes of the post-industrial ethos: real-time speed of information transfer; computer-facilitated, remote interaction and work; multi-disciplinary application of the same technologies; cerebrality; the web-ification of arts and culture...
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