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.
Spot-on comments; it's the reason why (love-him-or-hate-him) he has to be considered one of the canonical figures. My contingent designation has been to set up Merzbow and Lopez as the "Mozart&Haydn" "Debussy&Ravel" "Schoenberg&Stravinsky" that we can use as reference points. Maybe that assessment will change over time, but for the moment it works..
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comments completely. The question of length in Merzbow's music makes me reflect on contemporary classical composition in general. It seems to me that there is a tendency now adays to avoid lengthy compositions in favor of shorter ones. 7 to 9 minutes seem to be the norm, which is not the same standard as, say, 20 years ago. Logistics aside (programming practicality, difficulty of composing lengthy pieces, etc), I assume there must be other reasons for the trend. Perhaps it's because we're more and more removed from the dialectical process of composition, and the only way to sustain length in non-narrative music (be it classical, glitch, etc) is through excess. The intended (or not) goal of the latter, as you described, is to promote a sense of "formlessness" and an untraditional listening experience. The music of Stockhausen and Xenakis comes to mind. Each ruled with his own compositional principles, they seem to defy the modern composition academia obsession with form (I just got strangely self-conscious with that sentence), as Merzbow and other Japanoise makers resist "ethnomusicologizing". For me, the listening experience of their music is not completely dissimilar to Merzbow. Though unlike Merzbow who represents the coalescence of Japanoise, the excess of Xenakis and Stockhausen makes them anomalous phenomenons in the modern compositional world.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in your theory that removal from "the dialectical process of composition" results in shorter pieces. By dialectical process, do you mean that form and development is driven by the interaction of opposing musical elements, such as harmonic areas (I vs. V) or themes (first vs. second?) The oppositions could of course be more complex, but the general idea would still hold that in dialectical composition one thing happens and a different thing enters, causing the first thing to change and pushing the piece forward in a developmental, perhaps even narrative way. If that's approximately what you're thinking of as dialectical composition, then I agree that it presents a convenient way to extend the length of a work, and that noise (including Stockhausen and Xenakis) seems to eschew that kind of thinking. Now I'm wondering what the time limits are of dialectical pieces - can this method go on forever or does it have a natural time limit, dictated by the limits of human perceptual ability or our ability to stay awake and aurally conscious of a dialectical process for long periods of time? Does the material one uses for a dialectical piece expand or contract this limit?
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