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.
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.
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I think there will always be noise music for the musically conservative. Though as commercialism goes, I guess there's little point in producing music for a population who will not consume it. As for the avant-garde noise artists of the future, I agree with you that it will be hard to identify their position in a social context, since the norm is lost. If I may venture to assume, what you seem to be describing are post-noise (or neo-noise?) artists. As Noise Music the genre reifies and becomes a thing of the past, true noise musicians will have to abandon it in hope of finding something else that will transgress against it. Otherwise, the whole genre will have to be re- defined or assessed (where subversion, "otherness" are no longer a key focus) for one to safely call himself/herself a Noise Artist, since trangression within it is no longer possible. I think this has something to do with a shift that takes place gradually within noise music: It's becoming less about what we hear as noisy but the noisiness of the philosophy in its creation. I am thinking of Industrial and Glitch music, where the content is actually noisier than how it sounds. Perhaps as these sub-genres and aesthetics splinter further and become numerous in the future, any artist or musician can claim connection (or not) to noise. Thus the aura of Noise Music as we have known it is diminished, and its transgressive authenticity lost.
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