Final Part III: Summatim

si nihil est, nihil subvertitur

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Who's Afraid of Improvisation?

The idea that improvisation is inherently wrong or inferior to composed music is so foreign to me that I have trouble taking it seriously.  I've always felt that improvisation and composition are different animals: the skills involved in composing and improvising are different; the time frames of their production are different; their social position and the criteria used to judge them should be different - ultimately, neither threatens or cheapens the other; although in the right cultural circumstances, they can be allies.

I find support for this long-held view in this week's readings.  Paul Hegarty's account of the development of punk begins by describing "the Bataillean sense of a dialectical history where disruption is always present, noise always coming in, then dissipating." (Noise/Music p.89).  Indeed, the musical movements we've read about this week - from free jazz to free improv, prog, punk, avant, and no wave - support a dialectical view of the formation of noise-inclusive genres.  With seemingly increasing speed, what was once transgressive becomes accepted, becomes canonical, becomes commodified; society requires new forms of transgression to make it aware of itself, its excesses and taboos, and the loss of individuation at the hands of the culture industry that Adorno so presciently lamented.  We see certain musicians trying to keep up with this demand by changing themselves and their musical output - Derek Bailey describes a gradual process of free improvisers moving further and further away from "the inherited improvising langauge" (Audio Culture p. 259); the Sex Pistols challenge their own audience in Public Image Limited, which Hegarty characterizes as "a punk rejection of punk." (Noise/Music p. 97)

Despite these efforts on the part of performers to remain on the edge of cultural transgression, it stands to reason that one group or method alone - either composed or improvised - cannot answer the accelerating demand for musical transgression and its attendant questioning of the status quo.  At this particular moment in music history, it seems to me that many improvisers and composers I know have at least one major goal in common: though they may not say it explicitly and their means may differ, it seems that they seek, among other things, maximal individuation of sounds, forms, and musical events - a celebration of the infinitely varied and of the Benjaminian concept of aura; a protest of the uniform and commercialized.  Seeking this individuation through improvisation - an art that unfolds in the immediate temporality of live performance as the performer interacts directly with the capabilities and constraints of his or her instrument - seems quite logical (e.g. http://www.myspace.com/peterevanstrumpet - especially "Xangu" and "end of the world button").  But many scored pieces use types of notation or ask for nigh-impossible combinations of elements that force performers to make technical choices and sacrifices in real time, ensuring a unique realization each time the work is attempted (e.g. Brian Ferneyhough's "Time and Motion Study II," Aaron Cassidy's string quartet, etc.).  Still other composed works rely on spatialization or acoustic phenomena that make the exact sound of any instance of the work location-contingent.

Musicans who wish to make art in full awareness of the homogenizing power of the culture industry can't afford to reject either composition or improvisation (sorry, Adorno).  Each has a role to play in answering the constant need for new theses in ever-evolving dialectic of sonic opposition to mainstream culture.

Deep Listening

A recent "deep listening" experience, and one that changed my perception of environmental sound:

I was home alone one night this summer when the power went out.  I was using my unplugged laptop and did not have any lights turned on, so what initially alerted me to the outage was not the lights going off or my screen going dark, but the sudden absence of sound.  I realized that normally, the perennially plugged-in refrigerator, TV, modem, stereo, clock radio, and microwave (maybe even the lamps?) make much more noise than I would have expected.  Being within the walls of an electricity-less third-floor apartment in the middle of an electricity-less swath of city was quieter than being in the woods at night, where a larger set of flora and fauna infuse the environment with many things to hear.  The streetlights were out, too, and it seemed nobody was daring enough to drive their car in the darkness.  From my porch, in the absence of traffic noise and air-conditioner hum from other buildings, I could hear, word-for-word, the conversation of neighbors congregating at the other end of the block and an array of sounds that clearly emanated from a greater distance than I was used to perceiving - faint but distinct dog barks; traffic hum from Uptown, a mile south, where the lights were still clearly on.  Wondering how much noise streetlights normally make, I lit two candles to read by but was distracted by the infinitely complex sounds of their tiny flames.  

When the power came back on an hour or so later, the returning hum of the appliances seemed incredibly loud - a huge, beautiful, static chord.  I wandered through the apartment, crouching by each appliance, trying to vocally match the pitches it was producing and understand the internal time structure of its sound emissions.  These sounds' brief absence had made them much easier for me to hear - or perhaps it was just the first time I had found value in trying to hear them.  

Which left the aesthetic dilemma: which sound environment did I prefer, or should I prefer?  The absence of machine noise produced by the power outage uncovered a world of sound that connected me more to the sounds of my community, to a much larger area of space and non-machine sonic detail.  But the machine sounds of my apartment were gorgeous.  Ultimately, I think I prefer the lack of machine noise on both aesthetic and moral grounds, but the experience made clear to me the complex spectrum of positions one might hold on the subject of environmental sound, both "natural" and man-made, elective and non-elective.  

Bataille

"As the class that possesses the wealth - having received with wealth the obligation of functional expenditure - the modern bourgeoisie is characterized by the refusal in principle of this obligation.  It has distinguished itself from the aristocracy through the fact that it has consented only to spend for itself, and within itself - in other words, by hiding its expenditures as much as possible from the eyes of the other classes."

Bataille's assertion that perhaps human acquisition is rooted not in the need to amass wealth but in "the need to destroy and to lose" is very interesting; his subsequent reading of how the modern bourgeoisie has denied this need as expressed in the quotation above is quite different from any other (even quasi-Marxist) hypotheses I've ever encountered about what's wrong with modern humanity, but it does seem to have a bit of truth in it.  One could see his complaint stemming, especially at the time he was writing this, from the vaguely Puritanical, publicly demure main-line American wealthy (those who might use "summer" as a verb to be performed on private islands off the coast of New England.)  While this form of bourgeois culture is waning, the ethic of maintaining privacy surrounding one's wealth remains, in gated communities in distant suburbs and the general sense that to publicly dissipate one's wealth is highly improper.  But our fascination with the very public downfalls of larger-than-life wealthy celebrities - Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan - suggests that we do have a need for the democratizing effect of public and utter "unproductive expenditure" on the part of those who have acquired obscene amounts of money, fame, cultural capital, etc.      It's a sort of media-age potlatch, less focused on the shaming loss of material goods, but on the shaming loss of positive press and public goodwill.  Taking this reading to its logical extent, by giving a celebrity these things in the first place, the media and the public "obligate" that celebrity to somehow return the favor.  There are two ways they can do this that seem to suffice in our eyes: they can humanize themselves by providing something genuinely useful for the public - i.e. Brad Pitt regularly working with his own hands and money to rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina - or they can engage in "unproductive expenditure," fall apart on national television, and return our gifts by allowing us to feel morally superior.

I won't pretend to completely understand what Bataille is getting at in "The Pineal Eye," and it's pretty difficult to pick just one passage of this that seems ridiculous to me.  What I want to critique most is his assignation of gender to the characters in the piece's multiple illustrative scenarios: they're mostly female.  We have the "satanic...nude bottom a young sorceress raises to the black sky," a highly fetishized "Englishwoman" leading the disgusting sacrifice of the "giant female gibbon," and finally, "the little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos" contemplating ape butts.  Yes, there's a lot of phallic imagery as well, but it's more figurative and metaphoric; the actual people (and the poor gibbon) he uses to make his points are female.  He seems incredibly concerned with the inherent unnaturalness of humans (we exist along the wrong axis!  We over-privilege the mouth end of our bodies!) but his positioning of female characters as somehow best able to access the natural (through erotic ritual and child-like thinking) really doesn't seem like a positive to me.  Women are bestial, closer to apes than men - diagnoses of hysteria and sexual exploitation do not lie far from this implication.  Bataille may see this feminine erotic connection to nature as a positive, but to me it seems like he's using a received semiotics of misogyny to get people's attention through titillation.

Both quotations I've chosen to respond to this week are not statements with which I profoundly agree or disagree, but which I think need qualification.

As Paul Hegarty closes in on a definition of noise in the opening paragraphs of Noise/Music, he states "First...noise needs a listener - probably some sort of animal or a non-organic machine with hearing capacities...The sound then has to be perceived as dangerous to the functioning of the hearing machine. Without these two moments, we might have a sound, but we would not have noise." While I agree with Hegarty's overall point that "noise is cultural," and understand that in the context of a book subtitled "a history" it is necessary to establish immediately that cultural perception of what constitutes noise changes over time, this quotation emblematizes his tendency to define noise only as sounds perceived to be a cultural threat.  He doesn't even mention that there is a more technical definition of the word noise, i.e. sound whose component frequencies are aperiodic.  I think that the technical definition of noise should have some place in the story of music that involves noise, at the very least to delineate the actual sonorous qualities of a large number of the previously taboo sounds that have gained entry into music over the course of the last 100 years or so.  While I understand that Hegarty wants to keep his definition of noise open enough to include even Fluxus's action-based art and text scores as part of the noise-music impulse, I think he's forcing that a little bit - they may be part of the same larger artistic impulse or cultural need as noise art you can hear, but to me he takes the acoustic teeth out of noise in order to give it bigger, sharper cultural teeth.  In a crude sweep over the course of the development of western music from plainchant to now, one sees that sounds with increasingly complex acoustic properties have gradually been accepted into the not-noise category, from the perfect fifth to the diminished seventh chord to Ives' polytonality to all manner of synthesized broadband sounds; the addition of an acoustic angle to Hegarty's overall "noise is cultural" argument would strengthen it and ground his theory in the physical realities of sound.

Luigi Russolo's second concluding bullet point largely sums up the gist of his call to action: "Futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms." If I had only heard orchestra music written before 1913, I would probably say the same thing.  But orchestral music has completely changed since then, with much wider ranges of timbre opening up in the use of extended techniques, microtonality, unusual instrumentations, expanded percussion possibilities, etc.  It seems like Russolo was (rightly, I think) concerned about the inability of late Romantic orchestral writing to adequately address the artistic needs of an increasingly technological society, but that he was just not a visionary in the realm of orchestration/instrumentation.  He's right that various electronic means can be (and currently are) a large part of the way of the future, but his assertion that the orchestra has exhausted its timbral possibilities looks ridiculous in an era where we've already had decades to digest the work of Lachenmann, Grisey, and Sciarrino (to give only three out of many possible examples).  The question of whether the orchestra is artistically relevant today is still valid, but I think that's more due to the conditions of the orchestra as a cultural institution than to its sonic or stylistic limitations.  Since Russolo, composers have learned how consciously interact with the mechanical/acoustic conditions of sound production on traditional western instruments to achieve some of the same goals he had for new electronic instruments.