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.