Special Interest

Available now:

Paul Hegarty (author of 'Noise/Music')'s 'Annihilating Noise' book (incl Nurse With Wound, The New Blockaders, David Jackman / Organum and others) (Bloomsbury.)

Special edition includes TNB / Haters 'Null Bei Ohr' / 'Wind Licked Dirt' 7" (Ultra Niche), available exclusively via the label.

Full contents:

Introduction: Where Is Noise as Practice and Theory Today?
I. Ungrounding
1. Earth Apathy: A General Ecology of Sound
2. Catch and Capture: 'Field' and 'Recording' in Field Recording
3. The Empty Channel: Noise Music and the Pathos of Information
4. Eon Cores: Noise Prospecting in A Personal Sonic Geology
II. Unsettled
5. Is There Black Noise?
6. After Generation: Pharmakon, Puce Mary and the Spatialized, Gendered Avant-Garde
7. The Silence
III. Unmoored
8. Playing Economies
9. The Spectacle of Listening
10. The Restoration: Vinyl and the Dying Market
11. The Hallucinatory Life of Tape
IV. Undermined
12. Supplementing (in) Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures
13. Less Familiar: The Near-Music of David Jackman and Organum
14. BUNK: Origins and Copies in Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders
15. Vile Heretical Misprision: Dante's Commedia as Metal Theory
16. Noise Hunger Noise Consumption: The Question of How Much is Enough
Index

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/annihilating-noise-9781501335440/

This sounds really interesting, especially the chapters on field recordings and silence.

I have a copy already - I preordered last year using (shhhhhh) Amazon and it arrived about a month ago, haven't cracked into it yet but the last one Noise/Music was really (painfully) academic, not a bad read but I definitely appreciated a book like Japanoise more. I'm getting the feeling this one is a touch looser just from skimming through it quickly.

I would probably read a chapter at a time while working on other books rather than go whole hot into trying to read this in a week.

Yes this looks like an interesting read.  I do however have a stack of books that I need to read first but i'll stick it on my birthday wishlist,...

Hi

I have this book, and I'm working through it whilst in 'House Arrest' AKA Lockdown. I've finished part 1, and have a feeling some might be "disappointed" in its relatedness to 'Noise Music'. So I've attempted a précis – so far – to which i've been unable to resist comment! I hope our moderator doesn't mind me posting this, it might be helpful, and of course all IMO. If there is not too much flak I'll try to continue in this thread, moderator if not willing then not anti. Also I'd be glad if anyone wants to chat about this...

BTW I'm not advocating the text – just giving *my* understanding and comments on it.

Annihilating Noise – by Paul Hegarty.

(Paul Hegarty is a Professor of French @ The University of Nottingham,  writer on Noise/Music,  runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic, member of Maginot with Romain Perrot – Vomir.)

The introduction 'Nothing Is Not The End' centres around 'stopping' and a music post 1960s of transgression. "Noise rejects, it does not build.." It's very brief focus is on HNW in particular that of Vomir," - his Black Box, mainly how HNW tracks end, suddenly or in fades, and summarizes the book as being  "about how noise relates to music and beyond".

Part One. Ungrounding.
Earth Apathy: A General Ecology of Sound.
Discusses mainly sound art, sonic art and its theories covering such terms as dark ecology. Bataille is central to this concluding in the noise of the mouth, particularly the carnivore, (Lions) eating. He discusses various natural sound phenomena including those found in Space, - viz. Radio Waves, (he seems to ignore the difference in the lack of any medium in the electromagnetic spectrum unlike noise, which uses air or water) The main focus is in the 'natural' sounds produced by nature. He cites Douglas Kahn,  Jacob Smith, David Rothenberg, Francisco Lopez's La Selva as examples of sonic artists working with 'natural' (animality) sounds.

Catch and Capture: 'Field' and 'Recording' in Field Recording.
Hegarty begins by posing the idea of the original field sound recordings made early on in the 20th C could be thought of as recordings of 'what is'. He adds that from the 60s field recordings were 'musicalized' by the likes of Cage and Oliveros*, but says no more on this. He makes the point of the idea from there being a pre existing 'field' to be recorded to that of the recorder choosing and so effectively 'creating' the field.  He then documents briefly a number of cases of ethnographic and nature recordings. From 1977 R. Murray Schafer's 'Five Village Landscapes', the recording of the sounds of the World Trade Center (1999) by Stephen Vitiello, &William Basinski's. He references La Selva et al,and various recordings made of animals, Pilot Whales, recordings from Antarctica, and field trips, Hein Schoer's Two Weeks in Albert Bay... * He mentions Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room in passing, but strangely no mention of field recordings used in a more 'constructive' vein.  Steve Reich's use of field recordings or Gavin Bryars... or Robert Morris' 'Box with the Sound of Its Own Making'  - or The Pink Floyd's 'Grantchester Meadows' ...'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast' for that matter!  As for noise I've reviewed a number of 'noise works', obviously not HNW, in which field recordings form a part , recent examples being of urban life in the USA, and  rural Greece. I guess the bottom line here is that far from any 'field' recording being of what is already there, it's a very selective process.

The Empty Channel: Noise Music and the Pathos of Information.
Throughout this chapter, issues of "code, noise and entropy" are underpinned by Claude Shannon ("the father of information theory...") & and Warren Weaver's theories (in which the entropy is an average level of "information" ... or "uncertainty", called "Shannon entropy") together with those of Ludwig Boltzmann ("he provided the current definition of entropy... a measure of statistical disorder of a system.")  I think it's important to note the different meanings in the term 'entropy' above – as does Hegarty*. "Shannon Entropy", Hegarty proposes, accounts for why Noise Music continues, whilst HNW rather than encoding is the production from systems of coding which refuse decryption. (HNW doesn't make specific sounds- codes, but is the sound of the electronic devices, roar of feedback, distortion.) There are reflections on cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang, whose detritus is the process towards the final Boltzmann heat death, as noise. Russolo picks up on this idea of the universal noise of collapse and industrialization both at odds and a product of nature. What unites these ideas is the idea of definition of 'what noise is'.  The idea of an objective answer – or latter an algorithmic account, is rejected by Hegarty. What noise is is subjective, and changes, has multiple understandings. Hegarty offers the idea of 'coding' as an alternative to the search for any "true meaning of noise". What I think he means and does is examine the methods recording and communication of sound in which noise plays an inevitable part. At a deeper level? Noise in effect subjects coding to permanent recoding. (IOW Noise fucks things up, even theories of what it is.) There is a detailed explanation of Shannon / Weaver theory, to the effect that the more you communicate the more you have information the more you have noise. In the case of noise music the information is lost, and so there can be no successful decoding but the listener becomes the 'transmitter'. (IDK? The listener decides if there is any meaning- or not?) "To summarize" for  Shannon & Weaver noise is part of an excess, whereas with Boltzmann it is an absence. Noise music is the over saturation of sounds, codes, which effectively becomes "formless" empty, HNW? Taken from a Weaver quote, "the selected message may consist of ... words, or pictures, music, etc." Hegarty picks up on the 'etc.', and riffs with this. He calls it a "strange surplus" one which is a catch-all perhaps nailing down what noise is? The fragmentary nature of noise, its sub-genres and refusal of definition, he cites the many works of Merzbow as example, and the various other noise genres, can be caught by this etc. The difficulty of pinning this etc. down is found in the difficulty, as example, the engineers at GZ digital had in processing Vomir tracks, or the seeming difficulty in a CD player in accessing noise. From here we see the digital 'glitch' is also incorporated into the etc. Glitch Music. All this and the refusal to communicate of HNW and the intent at being avant garde in other work is the dialectics (opposites) of what noise is. Finally Spotify is seen as the possible algorithmic fix of noise, however in its failure to encode silent tracks noise eludes Spotify, the etc. and the algorithmic. "too much sound, not enough sound".
* Some might be critical of applying science to art for good reasons, wiki 'Sokal Affair', 'Category mistake', 'Apples and oranges'... and  moreover the 'heat death' scenario (found in Brassier's Nihil Unbound, Lyotard's solar catastrophe...) is only one of many, now including the more popular 'multiverse' (Max Tegmark ) and other scenarios such as those of John Barrow, Penrose's 'Cycles of Time' ...  or the  'simulation hypothesis'. IOW it can be 'fashionable nonsense' to apply science and maths to other disciplines, such as Art or Psychology,  e.g. Lacan - 'The erectile organ...is equivalent to the square root of -1.', as literally and so determinately being true. Err – no!

Eon Cores: Noise Prospecting in A Personal Sonic Geology.
For me this is the most 'difficult' chapter so far. It revolves  around an exhibition "A Personal Sonic Geology" @ le plateau Paris 2015 and the accompanying book, in which Hegarty is a contributor. Of "films realised by Mathieu Copeland and Philippe Decrauzat since 2012... offering us a re-reading of a history of modernity seen through visual arts and music. 'Artists ""Boyle Family, a mental map, a waterfall, a desert, FM Einheit, an exhibition, an event, a factory paint, Ellen Fullman, Gilles Furtwängler, a cave, Marcia Hafif, Peter Halley, Fritz Hauser, a printery, Tom Johnson, Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, Lydia Lunch, John M Armleder, Agathe Max, Gustav Metzger, a spinning mill.' Theories of noise are discussed as is the history of Avant Garde Musics and Art in the context of negativity, Dada, and in music the dada of music is 'Industrial Music' –  Throbbing Gristle  of challenging a "consensually fascist society" ... "This moment is at the heart of  Decrauzat and  Copeland's work" ... "works as disruption against expectations of 'correct', polite, 'appropriate' gallery sound." in which Gustav Metzger is "essential to any geological approach to sound and music" - 'geology' the term compared to Nietzsche's genealogy and Foucault's archaeology is "the way Decrauzat and  Copeland can perform an acoustology" ... "A Personal Sonic Geology uses counter-flows, explosions, blend and hybridize... complex and shifting structure ... with the realized geology." My difficulties are many. Those interested in the genre I assume might, as I do, not recognise this exhibition as being significant in 'Noise'.  The only trace left is the book- a French publication I haven't read. I'm not aware of any influence from this exhibition. Further from the little I've seen it is not anything unexpected in contemporary  "gallery sound" - more the usual audio projections seen in prestigious exhibition spaces such as Tate Modern or The ICA (genesis of TG), places which  challenge a "consensually fascist society" - 'cough!'. Nooo... I should add a possible alternative explanation to the use of the term 'geology' – it comes from "The Geology of Morals" - in Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus - the geological process of stratification, sedimentary strata on a plane or plateau where 'lines of flight' seek to free themselves as bodies without organs. It is strange no reference is made, but just how this chapter relates to noise is perhaps my main problem.

Hopefully to be continued????

Hi

next section- and not so good, sorry for the digressions but hip hop and rap = black noise?

Part Two Unsettled
Introduces the 3 chapters whose commonality in major or lesser forms deal with 'privilege' and discrimination, in Gender and Race.

Is There Black Noise?

Professor Jonathan Van-Tam -  Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, has been appearing regularly on British TV over the last year in government briefings on Covid-19. His answers, often peppered with analogies, especially from football, are usually detailed and long. However recently he was asked a detailed question by the press - "should... could... given this & that... to which his answer was "No". So - "Is There Black Noise?" - "No". I'm not saying there isn't, IDK, but this is my précis of this chapter. Hegarty begins by speaking of "Experimental music" but like "Avant Garde" these are dead terms of dead genres. It might be true "Lloyd Whitesell identifies as canonical late modern art's refusal and erasure of race in its wish to approach emptiness" but that finished 50 years ago. Peruse the ICA's catalogue you will see how gender, race, LBGT+ issues predominate. Steve McQueen - director of 12 years a slave, won the Turner Prize 22 years ago, Chris Ofili exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1997 and won the Turner Prize in 1998, in 2003 he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale for the British Pavilion  in collaboration with David Adjaye. (Grayson Perry Turner Prize winner in 2003. In 2008 he was ranked number 32 in The Daily Telegraph's list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture" though neither black nor gay was and is not concerned with 'emptiness') More recently Kara Walker's Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain, referring to the transatlantic slave trade... Walker is acclaimed for her candid explorations of race, sexuality and violence. Zanele Muholi currently (gallery closed) exhibiting @ Tate Modern, Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities... I could go on and sure there is racial discrimination, and "erasure of race" whilst it might be true of late modern art, but modernism, and modern art ended officially at 3 pm, on March 16, 1972. So I think Hegarty has a problem, he briefly mentions the typical mainly white male DIY noise shows, invokes Japanoise as being 'experimental' discusses the 17th - 19th C slave trade, Treatment of people who emigrated to the UK from the West Indies... and the preponderance of African Americans in Jazz. His main thrust to answer his question in the affirmative is to blur definitions, "Flying Lotus ( I had to wiki "Steven Ellison record producer, musician, DJ, filmmaker, and rapper" ) creates a post-genre space between many musics" and so Death Grips, Public Enemy, Ice T and Chuck D are placed in a grey area where he can say "Yes". But there is more, the title of the Beatles White Album is significant! But here is the real low point, "The use of 'white' for a completely full spectrum sound is not neutral"  I need to pause here – maybe this "Arvo Pärt is singled out for making 'symbolically white music'" quoted from Lloyd Whitesell... is lower? Or  Blackness and Whiteness in art touched on in  Rauchenberg's white painting, Reinhardt's black painting and Malevitch's black AND white paintings. But back to "White noise" - white noise =  full, black = empty" and so black noise is "socially excluded". Fine! But white noise is called white because it is the full spectrum of sound, to quote thicky peadia "White noise draws its name from white light".  After arguing or implying that rap, hip hop are noise, Hegarty now introduces Body Count's (I had to look up this as well - 'American heavy metal band') Bloodlust album, because it has a track "No Lives Matter". From which he can discuss BLM, though again not the recent events around George Floyd.  Finally there is some discussion of  Zeal and Ardor - "the band mixes sounds of African-American spirituals with black metal"  So there is for Hegarty Black Noise, which is unlike free jazz which does not see colour (bad) but a noise which is black – which does see colour (good), though is nothing to do with the genre 'Noise' in music but lies in rap, hip-hop and black metal? So -" Is There Black Noise?" - well IDK, but has Hegarty shown there to be a black noise within the noise genre, "No".

After Generation: Pharmakon, Puce Mary and the Spatialized, Gendered Avant Garde.

This chapter begins with some general discussion of what noise is, (which I will reserve for the end of this précis), and some discussion of The Avant Garde. As above this is also mistaken, generally the avant garde was a modernist phenomena and both are now well and truly over, dead, deceased, pushing up the daisies, with the  choir angelic... Hegarty invokes spatiality and from that temporality and maginaity, margins in which I think he sites the 'avant garde' in particular Pauline Oliveros, who he rightly sees as marginalized in a bad way, for being a woman and a lesbian, and not a "Great Man". He avoids then Cage's homosexuality? Worse he avoids any mention of Delia Derbyshire, I couldn't believe this and had to check the index. And Daphne Oram, Else Marie Pade... he writes,  "This chapter is not about female visibility or presence, but about not being in the Margin." I'm uncertain of this point. He mentions a number of women involved in 'performance art', Simone Forti, Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, Dara Birbaum et al.  Notably Marina Abramović. Spending time describing Yoko Ono's cut piece, a remarkable work, but not sonically involved, unlike her work in Grapefruit, the collaboration with Lennon in The Two Virgins, Cambridge 68, Life with the Lions etc. These performance artists are seen a squeal to the work of COUM Transmissions. He mentions in name only Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon, Diamanda Galas, Anne Clark, Karen Finlay, Beate Bartel and Gudrun Gut as emerging from no wave and punk.. but then goes on to briefly focus on 'sexist imaginary'. And I think makes the appalling omission of the misogyny, of the blatant use of sexuality, mutilation found in Industrial, P.E. and Noise. Almost excusable as such objectification of women as bodies of exploitation is often seen as part of the "nobility" of the Marquis De Sade. There is more to read in the Japanoise scene, from Yoshimi P-We, Chie Mukai, Sachiko M, Yasuko Onuki and Wata. Junko Hiroshige is singled out for other than being name checked in a discussion of her collaborations with Sutcliffe Jugend, Mattin et al. Part II moves on to discuss Pharmakon and Puce Mary. Hegarty takes some space to discuss Pharmakon's recorded and live performances, particularly the Bestial Burden an album which "as being about the sense of her body betraying her, and the fragility of illness... the practices of surgical intervention." That Jacques Derrida has a famous text, Plato's Pharmacy, Hegarty sees this in her "division of voice"?  I'm not sure about this, the story in Derrida is of the invention of writing being a boon and a curse, as in the case of a 'drug'  being both a cure and a poison. (J.D. Is asserting writing's priority over speech). I can't see any connection. Puce Mary like Pharmakon uses processed voice and electronics, in this case "Highly composed... Percussive sounds and gasps surround the spoken word part. The narrative would seem to be a violent sexual one... it is easy to hear this piece as a variant of industrial music's fascination for BDSM... Almost all the tracks on her alums have clear beginnings, middles and ends..." It's probably OK for many that in a text on noise, Industrial and Power Electronics could be included, not so sure of books on meditation (silence) films or performance art, certainly in the detail here. Also the problem I think for Hegarty is that he defines Noise as essentially negative, especially HNW in which no narrative can exist. He does however state that these two artists are more categorized by PE and Industrial, and obviously genres and sub genres do merge, but likewise noise, harsh noise and HNW does have a particular lack of meaning to which Hegarty refers, however narratives are at odds with 'Annihilating Noise'. And if he is being inclusive rather than concentrate on 'Annihilation' then there are far too many omissions, Troniks, Hospital Records, and RRR and their releases, the various noise festivals of numerous acts of annihilation, and maybe to explore why such annihilation of narrative is at odds with PE, Industrial and generally with music. For myself at least that is an interesting phenomena of noise, its 'anti everything'. Now some comments on the opening of this chapter.  - Just as it is dangerous for those in the humanities and arts to employ physics and mathematics as evidence, it is also more so when philosophy is employed, for whilst Science and Mathematics has no purchase on the arts, and visa versa (Van Gough's sunflowers are not botany) philosophy does have a purchase. The only problem is getting it right, and unfortunately Hegarty at the beginning of this chapter gets it wrong. "This putatively melancholy effect...(of noise) is subjective, but only in the Kantian sense of requiring a subject on which to work"  For Kant we never have access to 'things in themselves' which includes noise as well as mountains, washing machines, sunsets and other people. Kant might be wrong, but that is not an issue. "Noise is spatial" maybe – but not for Kant as Time and Space are fictions. They don't exist in themselves but are notions we have in built in our heads in order to understand the world. What is out there producing what we hear as noise or music- for Kant is forbidden. "a negativity in the sense devised by Hegel to explain the world as a set of oppositions that mutate over time but never merge"  Hegel is notoriously tricky, The whole of his Logic, certainly the get-go – exists outside time, starts with Being which immediately (timeless) becomes or is Nothing, Being and Nothing being both different and identical... and are 'Becoming' which immediately vanishes into determinate Being which contains both indeterminate Being and indeterminate Nothing – is 'determined' by these... I wont go on! But if you've read this so far you see what I mean?  Or to go on maybe this Hegel is more like HN and HNW in its real or apparent incomprehensibility, or the deliberate incomprehensibility of certain continental philosophy. As if HN and HNW fucks with Music / Sound, these philosophies fuck with thinking. Well my bad!

The Silence

Opens with a discussion of a dystopian silence found in recent films, A Quite Place, Bird Box and The Silence. All three deal with hearing, its loss or the need to keep silent from predation.(Annihilating Noise was written before the Covid-19 pandemic and has no reference to it – the actual silence of a year ago's first lockdown in the UK was a very quiet time... and maybe the pandemic's other affect on fictional apocalypses awaits exploration and comment) Hegarty states he will address silence in the work of George Michelson Foy (American writer and journalist - in Zero Decibels: The Quest For Absolute Silence Paperback – 2014), Thich Naht Hanh (Zen master – writer of the book  Silence The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise) and Erling Kagge (a Norwegian explorer, publisher, author, lawyer, art collector, entrepreneur and politician. Writer of Silence: In the Age of Noise.), implying that they fail and that variants of near silence get much closer (to silence) than these "worthy attempts". (The relevance to Noise and Silence as cultural products of these 3 writers seeking refuge from noise pollution is hopefully addressed) He then devotes 4 pages to Cage's 4' 33", detailing its origins and first and subsequent performances. He cites Seth Kim-Cohen's In the Blink of an Ear- a text on non cochlear sound art, and Craig Dworkin's No Medium in which is a list of silent works. 4' 33" he claims, has "been understood as the beginning of sound art, of experimental music, of listening, of field recording. It could be construed as the beginning of noise, which it is and it isn't" He summarizes the significance of the piece as in Kim-Cohen's terms as undercutting actual listening, which relates not only to Zen, Rauchenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing,  Michael Asher's empty galleries and Robert Barry's closed gallery. (Hegarty ignores Duchamp's Fountain – which like 4' 33" is likewise seminal, in its case of leaving "retinal" art. IMO a major omission) "Conversely", he states,  Tara Rodgers in Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music sees the piece as negating identity, keeping certain individuals out- silencing others (of the underprivileged due to race and gender?)  and finally 4' 33" as opening up of listening, found in the work of Pauline Oliveros et al. Hegarty now returns to the three authors above. Who in over 8 pages Kagge and Hanah see meditative silence as a way of finding oneself in a 'noisy' world, whereas Foy it seems just wants, and fails, to experience 0 decibels. In passing Bells are significant to Hanah, 'The voice of the Buddha' and Kagge whose "ideas on music are odd" focuses on the silence in the EDM 'drop'. There is in this an implied criticism of these who are privileged more than others in their subjectivist search for silence. We then in the context of this spiritual silence abruptly segue to digital silence of the CD and Minidisc. And though these media are capable of silence, unlike the failed silences of cassette and vinyl, they do have mechanical noises and subsequently have the noise of these analogue media used as part of a musical aesthetic, as is the extended silence on such tracks as The Pet Shop Boys, Go West.  The chapter concludes by brief mentions of The New Blockaders Nul Be Ohr, Vulfpecks's Sleepify, Ministry's Dark Side of the Spoon, The New Blockadrers Eparter les Bourgeois, Lopez's Paris Hiss and Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room- the later utilizing the medium's recording of itself. Something which Hegarty himself did with his Pas de vie eternelle, mais seulement un emmerdement permanet. A supposedly noisy Vomir cassette which turned out to be blank, was re-recorded about 8 times to amplify the tape noise and released as Vomir/Safe Pas de vie eternelle...2013. In conclusion Hegarty makes the point (I think) that noise it seems must employ such un-recorded media sounds to stop the occurrence of music and also noise. My criticism – ignoring what might be thought as irrelevances - would be I suppose  that silence isn't noise, or much to do with it, and though Cage's 4' 33" is very significant, like The Fountain is its real significance is in it effectively terminating Music and as the fountain terminated Art, in its traditional and modernist sense. All sounds are Music, all objects Art. The same now goes in conceptual poetry. What this means for noise, is perhaps that it's freely allowable to any and everyone – but not in the sense of what was once Western Art and the Avant Garde. 'That magic feeling of nowhere to go' – Macca.

JLIAT, you should write a book.

Quote from: Soloman Tump on March 25, 2021, 08:55:37 PM
JLIAT, you should write a book.

Hi

I've written several, not on noise particularly, but a number of papers on noise. Here http://www.jliat.com/txts/index.html. The idea of darkness and noise presented @ Falmouth http://www.jliat.com/txts/pop%20goes%20reason.pdf is perhaps an attempt at black noise - i.e. 'Noise is black...'  The http://www.jliat.com/txts/noise-is-stupid.pdf was delivered at an event in Cork hosted by Hegarty.

But it's one thing to write and another to get published. Though my thinking and writing on noise is mainly theoretical which is a problem, the ordinary noiser maybe isn't that bothered- and why should they be. (I don't think they *should* – in brief my theories revolve around noise and art *escaping* theory..!) The world of Academia in the humanities is also difficult as its very much driven by trends and political correctness. I'm aware of many examples @ presentations and conferences. I remember one guy studying at Goldsmiths and writing a paper on some pop genre, new wave or something who was trying to use Badiou's set theory – who admitted to me over a glass of wine he had no clue. Here is the problem, as a good example, I know a little of set theory, but even Rudy Rucker author of Infinity and the Mind admits he is lost in the recent work. If you wiki The Sokal affair you will see what I mean...

But I do think there is missing a good book on noise. By which I mean Industrial, Power Electronic, Noise proper, Harsh Noise and Harsh Noise wall. (and perhaps the other sub genres – black – dark metal???) One which traces the origins, the labels and various individuals. My knowledge is insufficient. The noise books i've come across generally focus on other music, avant garde, prog rock even as subjects.

One last thing re The Humanities, they are in something of a crisis. Lecturers @ HE are judged by papers presented, and books published. A common thread is to combine several papers into a book, as in the case of Hegarty's here.  Maybe someone like Ron Lessard could attempt a noise book which painted a reasonable historical picture?

Part Three Unmoored.

The introduction to the next four chapters has "the context that noise refers to has changed dramatically, and not just as a result of inhabiting a post-pandemic, post shut-down (if it even is post)." Obviously this late addition was not late enough to see it is not 'post'. This 'context' unsurprisingly is I think Late Capitalism. So the first chapter appears to argue, economics, "Now that music is mostly free". The second chapter relates to the shift to spending in music to equipment, notably headphones.  The third deals with the resurgence of Vinyl, the last to Tape, but more as a means of cut ups, no mention of noise and its ubiquitous use of cassettes.

Playing Economies

Begins by discuss improvisation, referencing Dereck Bailey via Ben Watson's book, Free Jazz, along with "'krautrock',post-jazz, fee music, soul jams..." Though improvisation is "explicitly aware  social practice... this has never permeated as far as popular music"?  But have – it seems – "permeated  the avant-garde sound/ music/noise world" - "However, for all its noble qualities, improvising needs to be questioned. To cut this short I think this implies though free improvisation seems democratic, "militantly dialectical" and community establishing, there is at the same time the elitism of the improviser, and still the gap (social) between audience and performers.  Though rock bands and orchestras have a community, improvisation is less hierarchical. The second section switches to "commodity".  "objects made in avant-garde sound are objects of trade" A commodity fetishism exemplified by the Merzbox. Through the proliferation of Merzbow and Vomir releases can defeat the collector – and devalues these works in comparison to collecting classic rock box sets. Not only this but "the breakdown of music economies... " together with the avant-garde's subverting of capitalism means " why would an avant-garde improviser or noise musician want to be paid?" All of this ends in failure, "is a permanent, paradoxical and utopian outlook suggested by content, form, practice of those musics. Failure is not something bad, but the only thing that is not wrong."

The Spectacle of Listening

This chapter falls into two distinct sections (IMO), first the act of listening, second the devices used for listening. It seems "as writers never tire of pretending, the ears cannot be closed". As a tangent I seem to remember some mammals can, sea going? But what for me is maybe missed here is the 'listening', 'seeing' dichotomy. (Ears can be closed its one function of hands) And this relates to Light and Dark. Firstly we are biologically adapted to daytime waking, nocturnal animals are better listeners, watch a cat's ears... which means we are perhaps naturally scared of the dark and things that go bump in the night. Blackness, darkness is not only scary but deeply fascinating. Add to that – hearing is the last sense to go when becoming unconscious. Patients under anaesthetic in operating theatres report remembering the conversation of surgeons, *alarm* clocks, fire and burglar alarms wake us. And evidently on dying, sound is the last sense to go!?  I digress! Hegarty discusses the ubiquitous availability of sources, from digital and internet radio through to TV catch up services. He complains of mobile/cell phone users... a pity he misses bandcamp and soundcloud etc. He picks up on the history of listening by virtue of paintings, Vermeer's Guitar Player and Manet's Concert aux Tuileries, and Cafe Concert, "we can see a very specific (and gender-class-located) listening at play".  (missing an opportunity at political correctness in Munch's Scream and "His Master's Voice", painted by Francis Barraud of a terrier-mix dog named Nipper listening to a wind-up disc gramophone. The HMV logo.) He moves on to note that  audiences being silent was not always the case, and the avant garde attempts in the 20th C to provoke a silent audience. Citing again 4' 33" and Yves Klien's Monotone Symphony. Then in the 50s audiences of rock and Roll became an "ecstatic communion" Things "go private" in the 80s with the walkman, and portable with the boombox and ghettoblaster. The last device is the iPod, there the discussion moves from the cheap ear "buds" through the more expensive and finally headphones (Audio-Technica?) which are as much a fashion statement. In posing the question "Can listening be stolen" - but "in 2020" the only worthwhile things are listening devices. Maybe, this paper was written in 2014, in 2021 from my casual gaze, iPods and headphones have been replaced by iPhones, Samsung Galaxys & Wireless Bluetooth Earphones. And I might add with the smartphone maybe the terminus of any new *types* of hardware-  the smartphone being the only accessory needed for life =  money, travel, communication, gaming, shopping, reading, getting a Pizza or Uber taxi, video & music – both listening, viewing and making, reading this! and proof of ones Covid-19 vaccination?

The Restoration: Vinyl and the Dying Market

Anyone who ventures into a record store (or once did before – u-no-wat) will be aware of the return of Vinyl. "For so long the province of ... [the] 'audiophile', vinyl is breaking free..." From the replaced LP, by "CD and then the (legal) [Hegarty is joking?] download" listeners now "rush to the 'record' store to buy LPs to file alongside box sets."  But now not only are classic old LP releases re-released on Vinyl but music never released on LP and new releases are. "Every major album comes out on vinyl now" "coloured vinyl, heavyweight, now double, now triple, now boxed... Combine all desirable traits in the Queen back catalogue on (admittedly well-chosen) different colour vinyls for c. £285" (now £300 used on ebay) Hegarty goes on to explain the economics of pressing vinyl, with the larger quantities being cheaper per unit. And that companies such as GZ now wont touch runs under 500, in the days of communism it would do 100. I'm not sure of his point, once the master is made production is quick and simple and relatively cheap. I think he misses the point, one made by Chris Ruen that "free access to music would mean less would be made" When he talks of "private capitalist music hoarders" And I think is mistaken in "Music has ended up as an exemplary harbinger of change" not because of global capitalism, the mistake being that this consumerism is nothing to do with 'music'.  If you've watched the film or read the book High Fidelity you will see how niche collectors objects become 'weaponized' by capitalism as 'stuff'. It's nothing to do with music as any more is Damien Hirt's skull (For the Love of God ) is anything to do with what was once art. And nothing to do with noise unless the stuff, merzbox et al is effectively just bitcoin.

The Hallucinatory Life of Tape

First a warning, this chapter does not mention Noise (Industrial, PE etc.) and it's historical and ever persistent, if not resurgent, intimate relation to the cassette tape (and xeroxed insert). Hegarty first raises the idea of tape as a part of the history of recording sound. From the wax cylinder through to the digital.  He states " Many critics have come to question perfection as ever having been possible in audio media." The ever improvement making the prior redundant, though now with vinyl not the case. Tape he sees as being both part of this narrative and having one of its own (though here not in Noise).  As a passing irrelevance how could a 'perfect recording' be made. Keep it simple, lets say I'm listening to someone playing a piano, a perfect recording might be possible for me with the technology to record and reproduce the signals travelling from my ears to my brain. But it would not be perfect for any other listener in the room. Even more pedantically this recoding would not be 'perfect' as my mental state, general feelings would not be the same, my reception would then be different. The  'perfect' reproduction would be an identical experience, one in which the listener would be unaware of any previous performance. In other words a perfect reproduction is impossible. To repeat is to repeat differently. Think of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors experiences a new and different repetition of the day, whilst all the others do not, their repetitions are perfect and so non existent (for them). Enough! Hegarty gives a brief history of the development of tape which concludes in the use of it as a creative medium itself. "cutting the tape up and reorganizing, through reconnecting the separated bits. John Cage (in his Fontana Mix [1958] and William Burroughs both saw the immense potential in new work.."   and Musique concrete. "With the cassette, ownership of material, or of creativity, is stretched further" from personal recordings to the 'mix tape'. Hegarty spends some time discussing the mix tape, for it only being replaced by iPods, CDs, Cdrs and setting these to shuffle. Hegarty then points out the difference between the  "the transparency of recording media held by musique concrete" not shared by "Adorno, Lucier, Pierre Schaeffer" - I thought Schaeffer was an originator of  musique concrete? But I think his point is seeing extra qualities in and from the recorded material. Adorno is a strange example as he "looked to the record as asocial object, gathering the family unit around the gramophone player." There is some discussion of this, though irrelevant to 'tape'.  (Well Adorno is a "Name") In passing he mentions "the banality of getting up and putting on the record again" - irrelevant to tape, but back in the day if you taped down the lever which detected the next disc falling down to play on a dansette, it would continually repeat play the LP, driving parents crazy. I've still got a Sony Hi Fi Unit which you can do the same with  cassette, at the end the heads move (you don't need to reverse the cassette) and the tape reverses, playing potentially for ever, and of course 8 track does the same. Hegarty then spends a couple of pages discussing Beckett's play Krapp's last Tape, according to wiki is based on "Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil". We then have more of a discussion on Burroughs, "Tape will always exceed the intention of its operator... the cut-up intervenes directly in the symbiotic evolution of recording and the human (which) ... takes tape into the realm of recombinant DNA."  "At a literal level, this can be seen in the succession of forms of recording media.." VHS, Betamax though unlike Darwinian evolution (he mentions)  the inferior can succeed down to marketing techniques. He then discusses the tape system on the Voyager spacecraft 'When Voyager 1 is unable to communicate directly with the Earth, its digital tape recorder (DTR) can record about 67 megabytes of data for transmission at another time.' And a final mention of the disintegration found in the tape works of Alvin Lucier and William Basinski. Tape works using phased loops by Reich, the time lag accumulator used by Riley and Fripp, tape used in The BBCs radiophonic workshops even the Melotron and much else, the whole mutitrack process which enabled the change in pop- notably George Martin's work with The Beatles... and probably more is omitted. - Teac and Tascam multi track, the legends of the Revox A77 and Nakamichi 1000ZXL ... http://www.hifi-classic.net/review/nakamichi-1000zxl-321.htm "At the usual measuring level (20 dB below the 0-dB indication), Nakamichi specifies a frequency-response deviation of ±0.5 dB from 20 Hz to 20 kHz-the tightest specification we have ever seen on a cassette deck and so close to the limits of our automatic chart-recording equipment that we had to double-check using spot-frequency measurements. Our spot checks, moreover, put the - 0.5-dB points at 17 Hz and 24 kHz, using the ferric EX-II, with - 3-dB points at 13 Hz and 26 kHz. It is hard to conceive of any meaningful improvement on such a response... Our only disappointment is that, having tested it, we must now return it to the manufacturer."


We have had explained the economics of improvisation and noise as its "failure", though I didn't follow this, Listening seemed to boil down to the idea that the listening devices, especially headphones have increased in significance economically at least to the now 'free' availability of music, albeit at times illegal. The only thing worth stealing are the cool headphones. The resurgence of Vinyl is mostly rock music, and now a big business with no room for small runs, and cassette without any mention of its ever increasing importance in noise, (PE and Industrial) small scale and at times hand made editions which I think is unique to the genre, to the extent of being better thought of to many than Cdr. These omissions would be in themselves problematic in a book on Noise. BUT, I'm no collector of noise, my knowledge of the broad range of artists is limited, my interest is more theoretical – obviously. But – apart from these omissions there are others. In Vinyl no mention of Lathe Cuts, of Peter King, of the flexi disc, all found in Noise, moreover and even more radical in noise are the releases on Floppy disk!, on Micro Cassette and USB pen drives VHS and IDK but somewhere Betamax and U-Matic! If Noise is perverse, (and much of it is) it's perverse not only in sound but in media, and then we should add packaging! I don't think any genre can match noise for either of these, OK the badly Xeroxed Cassette is de rigueur, but CDs wrapped in barbed wire, clamped between wood, packed with road kill, or sealed into a BMW!

One more section to go...

Re.:

'(Paul Hegarty is a Professor of French @ The University of Nottingham,  writer on Noise/Music,  runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic, member of Maginot with Romain Perrot – Vomir.)'

Paul's dotdotdot label recently folded. Paul now runs Ultra Niche, the first release (a split TNB / Haters 7" ('Null Bei Ohr' / 'Wind Licked Dirt') relating to 'The Silence' chapter) comes exclusively with the 'Annihilating Noise' special edition.

Re.:

'But I do think there is missing a good book on noise. By which I mean Industrial, Power Electronic, Noise proper, Harsh Noise and Harsh Noise wall.'

There are a few non-academic Noise (incl Industrial, PE, HNW, etc.) books available including 'Industrial Musics,' 'Fight Your Own War,' 'Sounds Of The Underground,' 'Unofficial Release,' 'Noise War' and 'Industrial Music For Industrial People' although the latter two are in Japanese ('Noise War' was written by Masami Akita.)

Re.:

''Noise/Music' was really (painfully) academic.'

The same could be said of 'Annihilating Noise' although the chapters on NWW / TNB and David Jackman / Organum are more reader-friendly.

Quote from: Mr Klang on March 27, 2021, 07:03:24 PM''Noise/Music' was really (painfully) academic.'

The same could be said of 'Annihilating Noise' although the chapters on NWW / TNB and David Jackman / Organum are more reader-friendly.

I can definitely see that from a casual skim, I even found the font size in Noise/Music was painful to read whereas the layout of Annihilating Noise seems a bit more user friendly.

Quote from: JLIAT on March 25, 2021, 01:20:40 PM
Hi
Malevitch's black AND white paintings.

https://hyperallergic.com/253361/art-historian-finds-racist-joke-hidden-under-malevichs-black-square/

#nottheOnion

Quote from: Cementimental on March 28, 2021, 08:28:42 PM

Quote from: JLIAT on March 25, 2021, 01:20:40 PM
Hi
Malevitch's black AND white paintings.

https://hyperallergic.com/253361/art-historian-finds-racist-joke-hidden-under-malevichs-black-square/

#nottheOnion

https://www.wikiart.org/en/alphonse-allais

"His Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Great Deaf Man of 1897 consists of 24 blank measures. It predates similarly silent but intellectually serious works by John Cage and Erwin Schulhoff by many years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_silent_musical_compositions

Quote from: JLIAT on March 23, 2021, 03:31:41 PM

He makes the point of the idea from there being a pre existing 'field' to be recorded to that of the recorder choosing and so effectively 'creating' the field. 

The chapter on field recordings is what seemed most interesting to me while looking through the book's contents, and I am tempted to get it just to read more about this point that you mention.  So is his position that the "field" of a field recording does not come into a full/explicit existence until after the recording has been made?

Quote from: Cementimental on March 28, 2021, 08:28:42 PM

Quote from: JLIAT on March 25, 2021, 01:20:40 PM
Hi
Malevitch's black AND white paintings.

https://hyperallergic.com/253361/art-historian-finds-racist-joke-hidden-under-malevichs-black-square/

#nottheOnion

Funny - I brought up the same reference in this thread, but didn't want to be the first one to mention it again, least of all in the context of "black noise"... http://www.special-interests.net/forum/index.php?topic=10857.msg88540#msg88540

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 28, 2021, 10:31:27 PM

Quote from: JLIAT on March 23, 2021, 03:31:41 PM

He makes the point of the idea from there being a pre existing 'field' to be recorded to that of the recorder choosing and so effectively 'creating' the field.  

The chapter on field recordings is what seemed most interesting to me while looking through the book's contents, and I am tempted to get it just to read more about this point that you mention.  So is his position that the "field" of a field recording does not come into a full/explicit existence until after the recording has been made?

Yes - I think his point is the recording 'creates' the field, which wasn't already there, though we might like to think it was. Then the choice of the recorders bias in selection is not at all neutral. And of course the technology of recording and playback. - mean if you listen to a field recoding without headphones there are two fields present?

An example, I was messing with Google earth with scripts, (it lets you draw shapes etc. onto the views) where you select the long and lat and magnification factor in the script. As an aside i made a script which selected the long and lat at random. What I got, blue screen, blue screen, blue screen...
thinks "doh - yes the earth is mostly water!"  Playing with this eventually some mountains - i got bored before any signs of humanity. So while the field recordings sound interesting- is this a very biased selection...


From the book...

English - in A Beginner's Guide to Field Recording "English is keen to stress that artists and documentarist recorders are communicating their listening"  than capturing "the real of a place" but this just moved the "location of the presumption" ... i.e.the presumption  that something 'real' is still being presented.

Quote from: theotherjohn on March 28, 2021, 11:15:13 PM


Funny - I brought up the same reference in this thread, but didn't want to be the first one to mention it again, least of all in the context of "black noise"... http://www.special-interests.net/forum/index.php?topic=10857.msg88540#msg88540

Well other pieces make fun of illness...  Hegarty (wrongly IMO) argues 'White' in 'White noise' is racist, but fails to mention race in discussing 'Black Metal'?


And Pink Noise?

The naming of Quarks - I would think the anti Quark to 'Up' would be 'Down' but its not it seems  ;-)

I believe the correct term is "noises of colour"...

Quote from: theotherjohn on March 29, 2021, 11:50:13 AM
I believe the correct term is "noises of colour"...

:-)

Haven't and wont read the Hegarty book but the question of 'field' recordings is an interesting one and something I've been noticing more and more. I hope I don't sound too anti-intellectual in positing that I think the term at this point is mostly just a super colloquial misuse of a highly specific thing (what's new?). It seems like for most artists now a 'field recording' is just something that happens when you use a portable recorder or record outside. Even if you use it to record the same old shit you normally do. Perhaps the argument that the act of recording creates the field is valid and could explain this, but I doubt most practitioners would make that case themselves and would probably admit to just using a term they've heard used elsewhere. It's fine for people to use incorrect terms of course, who really cares, but I still think that embracing something more like 'situational' or 'environmental' might lead to a bit more thought and hopefully creativity in that whole act. Not just 'let's throw a recording of a busy or serene outdoor area into this synthesizer improvisation.

Quote from: JLIAT on March 29, 2021, 01:16:07 PM

Quote from: theotherjohn on March 29, 2021, 11:50:13 AM
I believe the correct term is "noises of colour"...

:-)

Well yes.  In one issue of my snare rush zine I briefly discussed the rainbow of available noise colours.

Pink, Brown, Green, White.... all well documented.

I love the definition of Grey noise - which makes it a subjective noise depending on who is listening to it.

Quote from: Duncan on March 29, 2021, 01:34:22 PM
the question of 'field' recordings

Hmmmm...

Of course being an "ARTIST" its possible to PLAY in music, make stuff up...

jliat.com/bravo.mp3 (http://jliat.com/bravo.mp3)


bravo 18:45:00.0 28 February 1954 (GMT) Bikini Atoll. Surface burst. Yield 15 Mt. A 15 Mt two stage thermonuclear surface burst. The Bravo test created the worst radiological disaster in US history.

jliat.com/fire1.mp3 (http://jliat.com/fire1.mp3)

Fire fight west of Kabul....

Quote from: Duncan on March 29, 2021, 01:34:22 PM
I hope I don't sound too anti-intellectual in positing that I think the term at this point is mostly just a super colloquial misuse of a highly specific thing... It seems like for most artists now a 'field recording' is just something that happens when you use a portable recorder or record outside.

A worthy example. I rather love this release:

Anthony Janas "Field Recordings of Mythical Beasts." (2019)
https://anthonyjanas.bandcamp.com/album/field-recordings-of-mythical-beasts (https://anthonyjanas.bandcamp.com/album/field-recordings-of-mythical-beasts)

"Exploring the intersection of sound libraries and ethnographic recordings, 'Field Recordings of Mythical Beasts' is a series of fake field recordings of mythical creatures. The recordings were created using traditional foley techniques originally developed for films. Field Recordings of Mythical Beasts represent explorations of a long forgotten expedition group on its journey to remote regions of the world. The Phoenix, Hydra, Griffin, and Holga have all been documented in their 'natural' environment. - Leicht Records"

Part Four Undermind

The final section deals with 5 topics. Joy Division and music production. Organum, noise and the uncanny, Nurse with wound,  TNB and the cover version. Dante's Inferno and black metal theory and finally harsh noise and harsh noise wall, all 5 were originally papers presented at various symposia.

Supplementing (in) Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures.

First presented at Atrocity Exhibition: A Symposium on Joy Division, 2015. This opens with a discussion of music production which I couldn't follow, Hegarty asserts "The culture industry has always liked to 'do it clean'". This I don't understand. Then the introduction of producers giving a particular – I assume clean sound? such as Phil Spector? And states "The more interventionist the producer (or non-artist involved in the recording process), the greater the danger of noise entering the circuit" Which is at odds with the idea of a cleanly produced sound? Moreover is the producer an artist? Spector I'd say was, as many producers who used the studio as an instrument. What of Brian Eno's work with Bowie. Well Eno IS an Artist. Who then are these non artists who engender noise entering the circuit? The sound engineers? Who I assume are responsible for the very opposite. Slightly on topic, Spector's 'back to mono' – e.g. on the original release of All Things Must Pass was identified as a 'Wall of Sound'. We move on to dub "the forefront of musical experimentation through production." I guess that is because it was pioneered by recording engineers and producers?  And from this to Martin Hannet the producer of Unknown Pleasures, the first Joy Division album.  Hegarty uses the writings of Peter Hook, Bernard Summers and Stephen Morris on Joy Division, and concentrates on the tracks on Unknown Pleasures of 1979. "Authenticity was a false value to pin on punk. What is peculiar about Hannet's production ... is how a overt level of 'falsity' of something extraneous is able to bring the music toward a more authentic expression." Is this the honesty of open hypocrisy of Post-modernism? Irony? Hegarty goes on to locate this work in the turbulent decade from the mid 70s to mid 80s. I have to disagree with his history though understand an academic in the humanities in 2021 has to accept certain 'givens'. I will say that "I was there", if you look at the image on the left of my Synthi AKS, that was my bedroom studio in my mom's council flat in 1975 in Chelmsley Wood Birmingham. For certain it was a miserable decade. I will say that Hegarty I think is right about the industrial collapse, down to the trade unions and governments, but also by then multinational finance in The City. I found myself working there in the 80s – pure greed.  But this is nothing to do with noise, and this history is complex, the oil crisis of 74 because of the Yom Kippur War, whose origins far from beginning with the Suez crisis of 56, is literally biblical in its origins. Enough of this, Lennon was killed in 1980 and so 'The dream was over.'

Less Familiar: The Near-Music of David Jackman and Organum

Originally published in Revue & Corrige December 2017. I'm less familiar with David Jackman's work, though it's now available on YouTube. Hegarty explains "Organum, has been producing a steady stream of strange records, that sit uneasily between noise, industrial, ambient and contemporary classical" These Hegarty writes is  "the uncanny and 'the double', as identified by Sigmund Freud" Jackman's work surfaces in the 1980s, "Organum's music is part of a specific movement in the breakdown of generic divides that comes in a key moment in Western 'popular' music." His works are typically short, many on 7 inch Vinyl. (Has collaborated with  Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, Christoph Heemann, Robert Hampson, Jim O'Rourke, Michael Prime of Morphogenesis, Eddie Prévost of AMM, Andrew Chalk and noise artists The New Blockaders, and was originally part of Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra between 1969 and 1972.) Hegarty discusses several of his releases, The Tower of Silence (1985), Pulp (1984), Raze pt. 1 Hori (1986), Crusade (1994) "pretty much as close to 'noise music' as Jackman gets" and others "in the early 2000s ... a more resonant minimalism". Hegarty explains that "Noise music, in many forms, attempts to dismantle or destroy the edifice of music" and gives Merzbow and John Cage as examples. Though finishes this chapter saying "Ultimately; this is Jackman returning us to the origins of music, where it was never self-contained , nor simply itself" I have listened to a few of Oranum's works, and they do strike me as ambient drones, In Extremis was the most 'noisy' I could find. I think Hegarty has a problem with the term 'noise' and its application, such that at times it (for him) can more or less apply to anything, but then sees it as being negative, and as above Crusade gets close to noise music, so I would assume therefore isn't, in Hegarty's terms? The other problem I have is his assertion that "Organum's music is part of a specific movement in the breakdown of generic divides that comes in a key moment in Western 'popular' music."  Firstly just what is popular music. People in SI  will no doubt know of The Rita, Nurse With Wound, and Merzbow got some Red Bull sponsorship- but popular? In terms though of popular, and this kind of music, I think The Orb and The Future Sound of London etc are better examples of both being popular and breaking down generic divides. But what of Brian Eno - Ambient Music - 1978 earlier work with Fripp and his Obscure Records label of 1975 – examples being his Discreet Music, David Toop / Max Eastley New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments, Michael Nyman Decay Music ‎ et al. all of 1978, and popular, my mates had copies. OK back in 1972 when I tried in a local record store to get Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air, they'd never heard of him and wanted to sell me the  Curved Air LP (English prog rock band). Though latter there was the collaboration with John Cale. As for drone, La Monte Young - 1962 The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–present) - based on the air pump for his terrapin? Obviously not popular, but avant garde? OK picking out Black Metal, Jackman, NWN & TNB etc. maybe OK, and to cover the Avant-garde would need volumes, but my problem is that though genre's blur, with Noise, as in HN and HNW there is something different, something missing, even the idea of 'performance' which singles it out from others.

BUNK: Origins and Copies in Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders

From an article which appeared in  Organised Sound – 'Just what Is It That Makes Today's Noise Music So different', a riff on Richard Hamilton's famous pop collage, 'BUNK' a term used by Eduardo Paolozzi, another Artist associated with Pop Art. Hegarty begins by making several assertions which I'm not in particular agreement, but as a précis, I'll do just that, and number my replies which anyone can then skip. First we can't fix what noise is & "Noise raises the question of an avant-garde as such.... Noise is a negativity: defined in opposition ... to something else, for example, meaning, music, structure, skill, beauty, etc. [1]... the noise is in how noise and music relate, the noise is the differential" [2] ... "The recognition of originality, of avant-gardness, is not the end of the story but the place around which noise circulates" Hegarty goes on to discuss the problem of defining noise with examples... "many types or instances of music can become noise, through the process of assessment, rejection or acceptance, disruption or assimilation. This is not a subjective way of seeing noise as a thing that is personally found to be good because noise, or bad because noise. It is instead based on statistical or normative listening that deems something to be outside." Hegarty then rasises the question of influence –  "literally, and obliquely" which "might be one way of identifying something as noise music." He then begins a review of Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders. NWW centred around Steven Stapleton, who claims "Nurse music is surrealist music".  NWW first album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella "live improvisations, free of rehearsal, plan or pretty much any other sort of musical convention... blank materiality of the music (free of meaning, explicit purpose etc.) is counterposed with the accompanying materials..." A list of influences numbering hundreds. "The sounds within are to be imagined as a crystallisation of those influences... We have to remember that in 1979 there was no established discourse of a history of experimental music". [3]  The work is "a new subversive canon"  Hegarty describes the sounds and those of the 2001 reissue, and work following Chance Meeting... "atmospheric collages.." comparing these to Schaeffer's musique concrete. "if an experimental artist does a cover, it raises curious questions: how does the artist who wishes to break with musical convention engage with respect? Is an homage by Nurse With Wound any different to a pop 'diva' doing the same? Possibly not..."  Whatever, NWW avoids, Hegarty states, the use of irony and kitsch (despite Sylvie and Babs announcing itself as kitsch). In summary  "Nurse With Wound have managed to summon influence without either letting it go, becoming slavish to it or even adapting it."[4] "The New Blockaders combine use of non-musical instruments, art inspiration and a critique of musicality that is designed to renew." The first album Changez Les Blockeurs!, 1982 also on CD1 of Gesamtnichstwerk - "made up of objects and bits of rooms being scaped, dragged, thumped, scratched etc." They are dissimilar to Einstürzende Neubauten in that "the German group are using destruction, where The New Blockaders are destructive of instrumentation." [5] "The New Blockaders set themselves apart from Nurse With Wound: the former are genuinely rehearsing and re-presenting the purpose of Dada – a continual questioning and destruction being in its own right creative..."[6] They have 109 releases according to Discogs, many are collaborations and before discussing these Hegarty spends some time discussing Gesamtnichtswerk a 4 CD 'Antiology (1982-2002)' with particular reference to Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence  in which the poet struggles to free themselves from anxiety, and which, Hegarty maintains, NWW and TNB manage to do.  TNB's work being both influenced by Dada and the writing of manifestos in high modernism. Hegarty finally discusses the 2018 NWW "remixing, undoing, thickening" of Changez Les Blockeurs!, which "managed to make a harsher yet smoother Changez Les Blockeurs, a cover , an homage that turns in on itself, on the Nurse With Wound list and The New Blockaders manifesto alike ... and on musical performance"

[1] But many in and making noise uses just these terms 'meaning, music, structure, skill, beauty' to describe noise and or their work.

[2] Hegarty says he can't fix what noise is, but it's negative, and yet elsewhere it is other things. And
the term Avant Garde – 'new and experimental' is not circular, or was noise in the sense it is used here new by the 1980s.

[3] Michael Nyman - 'Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond' first published 1974
Ballantine, Christopher. 1977. "Towards an Aesthetic of Experimental Music".
Benitez, Joaquim M. 1978. "Avant-Garde or Experimental? Classifying Contemporary Music".
Beyond  first published 1974
Cage's definition, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" 1961.
In the 1950s, the term "experimental" was often applied by conservative music critics—along with a number of other words, such as "engineers art", "musical splitting of the atom", "alchemist's kitchen", "atonal", and "serial"—as a deprecating jargon term, which must be regarded as "abortive concepts", since they did not "grasp a subject" (Metzger 1959, 21).Metzger, Heinz-Klaus. 1959. "Abortive Concepts in the Theory and Criticism of Music"

[4] "without either letting it go, becoming slavish to it or even adapting it." ?

[5] Destruction – Metzger was a tutor of Pete Townsend.

[6] The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London, from 9–11 September 1966. Metzger. I don't see how TNB could be considered avant garde. I think, as TG sort, it was more an Avant Garde for the non elite? Like NWW, Surrealism was by the 1980s long gone. What replaced it was Abstract Expressionism – which IMO relates to HN, and Minimalism, HNW? The current problem in Noise is Что дѣлать? Наболѣвшіе вопросы нашего движенія (What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. Vladimir Lenin -1901).

To have the category 'Noise' (or 'Tree') and look for examples, which I think Hegarty is in danger of doing, is to put the cart before the horse, or resort to Platonism. In the latter there is a perfect ideal horse, to which horses are botched shadows. The Platonic forms exists first, things then are identified by being their shadows. Art IMO doesn't work like that. There wasn't the idea of impressionist painting, which Monet and Manet came along and manifested, any more that the idea of 'Tree' was prior to actual trees. Noise, like trees are more 'family resemblances', in Harry Potter you never see a Weasley, you might think you do, but you only see specific examples. Here the danger is in the word 'example' – example of what, not of anything that exists (other than a family resemblance). Without Ron and his family no thing called  Weasley would exist, and no Weasley can exist as a pure non specific thing. Same with Impressionism, same with 'Noise' or HN / HNW.  Now 'Noise Music' IMO is like noise (in nature) as it doesn't represent anything other, has so been called "noise". If Power Electronics represents – like surrealism, it's not IMO 'noise'.

Noise as the binary opposite of music doesn't work. If music is organised sound, much of noise music is organised sound, if music has meaning then many have said that noise has a meaning, if only a negative one. And from that they can argue that such things as a red sky at night can have a meaning, 'a shepherd's cottage on fire' in the joke. Buds on trees mean spring is coming... This is however a mistake, music can be a 'language' – just as any art. In language one thing stands for another. So 'Dog' stands for the actual animal, the word wont bite, or will the drawing of the dog. The word Dog represents something, the buds on the trees don't re-present the Spring they are part of it. Part of its presentation. So before any music, before even mankind existed – there were sounds, noises on the early earth. There was noise from the creation of the universe, though not a sonic 'Bang'. The difference in Power Electronics and Industrial Music, and Black Metal et al is that these do represent, are intentionally  representative of. Vomir, some HN, and HNW are non representational.  Now maybe the term Noise – in music is a coverall for PE, Industrial, HN and HNW for some, just as 'Modern Art' has within it representational work, Cubism, Surrealism, and non representational Art – Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism. So maybe I'm talking at cross meanings when I see noise as being non representational. Again the sound of a Lark ascending doesn't represent a Lark ascending, it *IS*, The Vaughan Williams 'Lark Ascending' is not the sound of a Lark ascending but music representation of it and connotations of this. Noise as noise qua noise IS non representational.
https://d1oqwsnd25kjn6.cloudfront.net/production/curio_primary_images/11685/original/Aug30_2017_AdReinhardt.jpg

Vile heretical Misprision: Dante's Commedia as Metal Theory

First delivered as part of the Dante lectures at University College Cork in 2016. Hegarty sets out to use a Catholic Christian text, one of 'one of the greatest works of world literature' based on The Summa Theologiae,  a compendium of the main theological teachings of the Catholic Church, as a basis for a theory of Black Metal which is generalized by its anti Christian, misanthropic ethos. (some  may be puzzled at this seeming incongruity, worse may see the conflation as merely an mercenary act, however IMO too soon to judgement) I know a little of Catholic theology, and very little of Black Metal, well I wikied it, and have had conversations with those I think support some of its 'theories' and watched numerous videos and those of Varg Vikernes. Hegarty begins,  "Three beasts  circle the intrepid poet [on] his journey through hell and on to Paradise... the leopard [false pleasure], the lion [pride], and the she-wolf [avarice]."  Hegarty needs more than the she wolf for his riffing, [a technical term in lit crit] "she is theory, she is metal music, and she is the spirit of these in strange collusion... black metal theory." The chapter, he explains, will not analyse metal music in depth "instead place it in ... an entrapped yet radicalised way out through 'outness' which may, of course, look a lot like being further in." I'll stab at this,I think he is saying  'in providing some supportive theory of Black Metal, this may back-fire and make Black Metal look more non theoretical. I could say- more stupid' – which would be unkind save for many in Black Metal are I think very opposed to intellectual thinking and human beings in general. I must quote "Dante's book is recursively heard as itself metal, an unwitting attack on all that is holy" Tricky?  " recursively heard" - read lots of times over (like black metal riffs) and so becomes meaningless (unwitting) and so contradicts (attacks)  its own idea of a journey into holiness – clear light of day - understanding?  (Black metal is opposed to the light of reason.) "Inferno is full of gleeful descriptions... (The Black Metal bit?) Purgatory ... a relentless bureaucracy (boring everyday work, like Neo's day job in the Matrix) and Paradise is  a song filled beatific realm – (religious and political utopias)"  Hegarty argues you need the other two to make the Inferno. (Black Metal is a rage against nice liberal healthy living) He adds to the effect to get out of the Inferno and into the paradise of light you need a theory of black metal, hence the above, getting out of black metal, theorizes it, to its cost. But of course this act on Hegarty's part against Black Metal's anti theory, by theorizing it, does it harm, but if you are into black metal that's precisely what you crave- harm. True evil looks at understanding and smiles. He then begins a chronology of Satanism in Pop Music, and its link with Hellraising, which of course goes way back before pop. He says, in the way a reasonable and nice understanding guy would, that this was nothing demonic but just about a good time, sex drugs and rock and roll. But I guess he doesn't believe in the devil, but if there was a devil then having this kind of good time is precisely how such a devil works, from that perspective like the pied piper he leads the children to hell. But that in the light of reason is nonsense. If we replace this devil for a more modern version, 'the id' – or Will - then unbridled pleasure is demonic – in modern agnostic psychological terms - in medieval terms is the work of Satan. Metal in its decent into unreason by ever extremism is 'demonic' in one of these scenarios. And the personification of that is the devil. Eventually we arrive at Black Metal, in Scandinavia, Varg Vikernes et al. Though it wasn't IMO a "heretical take on critical theory" - more simple, it rejected or simply ignored or was not aware of Critical Theory as it was not theory, but pure animal action. Hegarty concludes "Black Metal eats away at sound... the only process that can resist is death" Below I make the argument that this 'death' is a very part of the process of a line of flight which is Black Metal. He continues with his heat death scenario "In the real universe, entropy will one day become total ... everything , has become unified into an absent or zombie existence". I've already pointed out more recent alternatives to this 'Victorian' scenario. And 'to sleep with the fishes'  in the afterlife would seem to some not that bad a fate – especially for the hedonist, serial rapist, murderer etc.  But in this already overlong exegesis I will give a more 'gruesome' account of the future... "our entire Universe [in the far future] will have some minutely small probability of  undergoing a quantum-transition into another type of universe. ... When there is an infinite time to wait then anything that can happen, eventually will  happen. Worse (or better) than that, it will happen infinitely often" Prof. J D Barrow FRS. - very like Nietzsche's most gruesome (and nihilistic) of ideas. Some may think to eternally repeat a hedonist life wouldn't be a bad thing... but I think with a little more thought the utter pointlessness in eternal repeating is The Greatest Weight. However I think once unpacked this chapter offers useful insights into not only anti-Christian, misanthropic and  ultimately anti intellectual Black Metal, a rejection of liberalism and social justice as the aims of society, whether true or not of western democracies. That Black Metal, it seems flourished in Scandinavia maybe because those countries at least by standards of others, the USA, UK, appear more liberal and have advanced social services and less deprivation than areas in Europe, and the USA. It would also explain the general interest of Industrial and PE in occultism, Fascism violent crime, serial killers, paedophilia mutilation and disease etc. If one other feature is suicide and self harm again an explanation can be given, but I need to use the Deleuze and Guattari model of a plateau. Imagine a plane, or simpler a straight line. Pick an arbitrary point around the centre, that's where (probably) you are. To the left is the place that represents a sedimented society. I.e fixed and unchanging where citizens are robots, examples, the fixed class structure of mediaevalism, and "communist" states such as North Korea. To the right "Anarchy Crowned", total freedom, a Body without Organs. There is a relentless pull towards the left and sedimentation -a sea millions of years ago was alive with creatures and moving sediments, we now find blocks of stone in which they are now dead fossils. Even the extent of getting a good job, *settling down*, raising a family is the process of sedimentation...   'Authentic' life is then the struggle against that, this struggle is a flight from settling, a line of flight. Obviously a "good" thing if one sees oneself as an individual. But it has dangers, move too fast and the power can overcome, "It's better to burn out than to fade away" (Kurt Cobain's suicide note) Hedonism is dangerous. The Fascism  of the Futurists... And in collectives, if "communism" is dead sediment, for D&G Fascism, surprisingly, is not. It's a collective suicide of the Will to Power, out of control. You see it historically in the Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany. If the one extreme today is North Korea, I'd say ISIS is perhaps the other. It's a thought. And one which surprisingly arose from reading this chapter.


Last chapter to come.

Quote from: JLIAT on March 29, 2021, 10:42:08 AM

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 28, 2021, 10:31:27 PM

Quote from: JLIAT on March 23, 2021, 03:31:41 PM

He makes the point of the idea from there being a pre existing 'field' to be recorded to that of the recorder choosing and so effectively 'creating' the field.  

The chapter on field recordings is what seemed most interesting to me while looking through the book's contents, and I am tempted to get it just to read more about this point that you mention.  So is his position that the "field" of a field recording does not come into a full/explicit existence until after the recording has been made?

Yes - I think his point is the recording 'creates' the field, which wasn't already there, though we might like to think it was. Then the choice of the recorders bias in selection is not at all neutral. And of course the technology of recording and playback. - mean if you listen to a field recoding without headphones there are two fields present?

An example, I was messing with Google earth with scripts, (it lets you draw shapes etc. onto the views) where you select the long and lat and magnification factor in the script. As an aside i made a script which selected the long and lat at random. What I got, blue screen, blue screen, blue screen...
thinks "doh - yes the earth is mostly water!"  Playing with this eventually some mountains - i got bored before any signs of humanity. So while the field recordings sound interesting- is this a very biased selection...


From the book...

English - in A Beginner's Guide to Field Recording "English is keen to stress that artists and documentarist recorders are communicating their listening"  than capturing "the real of a place" but this just moved the "location of the presumption" ... i.e.the presumption  that something 'real' is still being presented.

This is very interesting.  I must admit that I do want to think that the field does preexist the recording - at least in some way.  It seems that something must be "there" to be recorded in order for someone to even begin to consider recording it.  Maybe something like the field recording makes a listener explicitly aware of the existence of the field (previously ambient or unnoticed) might be more accurate?

Also, that is a very interesting observation about listening to field recordings without headphones!

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 29, 2021, 09:32:25 PM

This is very interesting.  I must admit that I do want to think that the field does preexist the recording - at least in some way.  It seems that something must be "there" to be recorded in order for someone to even begin to consider recording it.  Maybe something like the field recording makes a listener explicitly aware of the existence of the field (previously ambient or unnoticed) might be more accurate?

Also, that is a very interesting observation about listening to field recordings without headphones!

I agree that the sounds exist prior to recording. I'm afraid some academics have made the mistake, maybe deliberately, in saying that before the sound is perceived it doesn't exist. It comes from saying before we perceive a sound we have no perception of it - obviously, and that perception is ours. They move from that to assert that the thing itself, the object, field thing didn't exist, which is crazy. Its part of the theories of "Reality" being a social construct which is all the rage in humanities departments  :-(

It's a simple mistake - i.e. Cage's 4' 33" shows there is no such thing as silence. ..... untrue.... 4' 33" shows we cannot perceive silence. i.e. we cannot hear no hearing. You cannot feel no feeling.... etc.

I mean the argument that the recording makes the field would mean the Perseverance rover - was a waste of money sending it to Mars. It is recording both images and sounds of something other than it- some field recording!

Quote from: JLIAT on March 30, 2021, 01:14:53 PM

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 29, 2021, 09:32:25 PM

This is very interesting.  I must admit that I do want to think that the field does preexist the recording - at least in some way.  It seems that something must be "there" to be recorded in order for someone to even begin to consider recording it.  Maybe something like the field recording makes a listener explicitly aware of the existence of the field (previously ambient or unnoticed) might be more accurate?

Also, that is a very interesting observation about listening to field recordings without headphones!

I agree that the sounds exist prior to recording. I'm afraid some academics have made the mistake, maybe deliberately, in saying that before the sound is perceived it doesn't exist. It comes from saying before we perceive a sound we have no perception of it - obviously, and that perception is ours. They move from that to assert that the thing itself, the object, field thing didn't exist, which is crazy. Its part of the theories of "Reality" being a social construct which is all the rage in humanities departments  :-(

It's a simple mistake - i.e. Cage's 4' 33" shows there is no such thing as silence. ..... untrue.... 4' 33" shows we cannot perceive silence. i.e. we cannot hear no hearing. You cannot feel no feeling.... etc.

I mean the argument that the recording makes the field would mean the Perseverance rover - was a waste of money sending it to Mars. It is recording both images and sounds of something other than it- some field recording!

That view of the world that you describe sounds anthropocentric and more than a little disappointing (I wonder what the later Heidegger might have said in response).

I think the Cage example is apt and correct.  I think that people have a constant tendency to engage themselves with the sounds around them, and that the types of sounds they engage with just change depending on the circumstances they find themselves in.  The quieter it is, the smaller the sounds you find yourself noticing.

It also makes me wonder, is any "recording" of 4' 33" best classified as a field recording?  It certainly seems to have a different intent than any field recording, but would otherwise be very similar in regards to the sounds it would capture.

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 30, 2021, 11:12:42 PM
That view of the world that you describe sounds anthropocentric and more than a little disappointing (I wonder what the later Heidegger might have said in response).

I find Heidegger's latter work more difficult than the earlier, the famous 'Turn', but I don't see it as less anthropocentric, if anything even more dismissive of science and technologies impersonality.
If you mean the idea of 'Reality'  as a social construct found in the Humanities it results in absurd nonsense, LaTour claiming that TB didn't exist before Robert Koch discovered the  bacillus causing tuberculosis in 1882, more recently Timothy Morton claimed that Heidegger said that gravity  didn't exist before Newton (he didn't say that of course) and he claimed the Higgs particle would not be found as according to the theories of his (and Harman's) ontology it couldn't, he made this 6 months before it was found. Interesting that Hegarty picks up on Morton's Dark Ecology in his book.

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 30, 2021, 11:12:42 PM

I think the Cage example is apt and correct.  I think that people have a constant tendency to engage themselves with the sounds around them, and that the types of sounds they engage with just change depending on the circumstances they find themselves in.  The quieter it is, the smaller the sounds you find yourself noticing.

It also makes me wonder, is any "recording" of 4' 33" best classified as a field recording?  It certainly seems to have a different intent than any field recording, but would otherwise be very similar in regards to the sounds it would capture.

I'd say any recording of 4' 33" is no different to any recording of other works of Cage or any musical performance. I suppose you could call them field recordings, of any un-edited live or studio music. But I wouldn't, for me a field recording is an attempt to record something – sound- which  occurs that is not a 'performance'.  But there are obvious problems there, what of recordings of the cries in a street market? What about Messiaen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong)   I think 'intent' might be useful.

But then one can appreciate Birdsong, the noise of waves, is this different to appreciating music? This throws the Art status onto the listener, but then Art becomes a social construct. I have to disagree to that. Cage created 4' 33" not society...?   

Last Chapter.



Noise Hunger Noise Consumption: The Question of How Much Is Enough

First given as a talk at Noisexistance, Bremen, 2016. This is a difficult chapter to précis. It begins with a statement "Noise is not what it used to be." Then questions, "Have we had enough? Too much?" then many more questions about the nature of noise and numerous sources and commentaries on noise including Hegarty self-referencing his own previous work. From noise being negative, primal, communicative order based on abuse, right-wing extremism... apathy, gentrified. "Noise music did not ruin either the idea of noise, or the practice of avant-garde shock.... we can observe is the sense of relief that noise is in some way over..."  "writers should acknowledge we have been slow to recentre the idea of thought, where music that was or would be caught up in tangled sets of judgements about what would or should not count as music, or as music of a particular genre, or of appropriateness." I think in simple terms this is an explanation of something that occurred in Fine Art some 50 years ago, and is occurring in poetry now. It may not be so obvious in music, modernist music, but in Fine Art around the 1970s modernist ideas imploded. For various reasons, but all centring on validation and definition. "What is Art?" The answers are only two, in modernism. Nothing and or anything and everything. Either way its game over for a modernist art that shocked the bourgeoisie and was ever new, ever avant garde. To paraphrase Don Judd, 'if someone calls it Music it's Music'. Obviously this does present a problem for writers discussing the status of noise, or any sound for that matter. He makes the point that  "Like all anti-art, success is failure." Hegarty identifies HN and especially HNW with an idea of excess or fullness, and associates this with 'pleroma' - 'the totality or fullness of the Godhead', in which this can be regarded as the succession of progress in the avant-garde, and I think he wants to challenge this idea "Harsh noise wall is a sign of completion, of being sated with noise, and is one of the last sounds..." but like all previous avant-gardes its is not necessarily so. So he adds "Harsh noise wall is not the culmination of noise, but it is a type of ending..." He uses Vomir and Puce Mary's Piss Flowers as examples, in the latter "noise about noise". Having identified the seeming finality of HNW he argues it needn't stop, that Vomir's repetition without difference could be like Yves Klien's blue paintings, or what followed Cage's 4' 33", however he also sees this as "A never-ending decline" of his heat death scenario. But the kind of Art which Kline was involved is no longer the case or possible, or is the 'music' of Cage, where it does it regains an aesthetic, as in Wandelweiser. If fine art is anything to go by this aesthetic will become shocking and then overtly political. If not an eternal return of the same, maybe a return of ever more queer differences.

Quote from: JLIAT on March 31, 2021, 12:11:38 PM

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 30, 2021, 11:12:42 PM
That view of the world that you describe sounds anthropocentric and more than a little disappointing (I wonder what the later Heidegger might have said in response).

I find Heidegger's latter work more difficult than the earlier, the famous 'Turn', but I don't see it as less anthropocentric, if anything even more dismissive of science and technologies impersonality.
If you mean the idea of 'Reality'  as a social construct found in the Humanities it results in absurd nonsense, LaTour claiming that TB didn't exist before Robert Koch discovered the  bacillus causing tuberculosis in 1882, more recently Timothy Morton claimed that Heidegger said that gravity  didn't exist before Newton (he didn't say that of course) and he claimed the Higgs particle would not be found as according to the theories of his (and Harman's) ontology it couldn't, he made this 6 months before it was found. Interesting that Hegarty picks up on Morton's Dark Ecology in his book.

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on March 30, 2021, 11:12:42 PM

I think the Cage example is apt and correct.  I think that people have a constant tendency to engage themselves with the sounds around them, and that the types of sounds they engage with just change depending on the circumstances they find themselves in.  The quieter it is, the smaller the sounds you find yourself noticing.

It also makes me wonder, is any "recording" of 4' 33" best classified as a field recording?  It certainly seems to have a different intent than any field recording, but would otherwise be very similar in regards to the sounds it would capture.

I'd say any recording of 4' 33" is no different to any recording of other works of Cage or any musical performance. I suppose you could call them field recordings, of any un-edited live or studio music. But I wouldn't, for me a field recording is an attempt to record something – sound- which  occurs that is not a 'performance'.  But there are obvious problems there, what of recordings of the cries in a street market? What about Messiaen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong)   I think 'intent' might be useful.

But then one can appreciate Birdsong, the noise of waves, is this different to appreciating music? This throws the Art status onto the listener, but then Art becomes a social construct. I have to disagree to that. Cage created 4' 33" not society...?   

In bringing up Heidegger, I was referring to the shift in emphasis from Dasein to Being that the later work seems to have, in which the human being is somehow dependent upon Being - rather than the other way around.  It is likely true that he remained anthropocentric, though.

Intent has to be a key concern, as without it many clearly different things would end up collapsing into one vague unity.  I wonder whether throwing the status of art onto the listener necessitates art becoming a social construct, though.  It might just be a broadening of potential venues for aesthetic experience to go beyond what is recognized as "art" in society?

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on April 01, 2021, 08:48:15 PM
Intent has to be a key concern, as without it many clearly different things would end up collapsing into one vague unity.  I wonder whether throwing the status of art onto the listener necessitates art becoming a social construct, though.  It might just be a broadening of potential venues for aesthetic experience to go beyond what is recognized as "art" in society?

I'm changing my mind over this, what if "things" had intrinsic qualities regardless of intent. Music is a good example - 'harmony' is intrinsic, harmonics existed way before humans. And so would then diss-harmony.... noise?

Is it 'intent' then that makes something 'Art'? I'm not sure.

Quote from: JLIAT on April 02, 2021, 12:18:25 PM

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on April 01, 2021, 08:48:15 PM
Intent has to be a key concern, as without it many clearly different things would end up collapsing into one vague unity.  I wonder whether throwing the status of art onto the listener necessitates art becoming a social construct, though.  It might just be a broadening of potential venues for aesthetic experience to go beyond what is recognized as "art" in society?

I'm changing my mind over this, what if "things" had intrinsic qualities regardless of intent. Music is a good example - 'harmony' is intrinsic, harmonics existed way before humans. And so would then diss-harmony.... noise?

Is it 'intent' then that makes something 'Art'? I'm not sure.

I can't say that I am sure either.  It makes sense to say that things have some intrinsic qualities.  Take, for instance, an anatomical drawing from a medical textbook and compare it with an artist's realistic sketch of the same body part.  I guess, in a way, the "thing itself" would be identical in each case.  But we tend to value the latter as a work of art because it was made with the intent of it being art (or at least in the service of art).

To bring it back to noise, I can think of a few cases where the sound of a car is sampled (and not altered) in a noise/power electronics track.  If you want to ask a mechanic friend about whether your car sounds like it is running fine, you might make an identical recording to share with them.  But only the first of these recordings would seem to be art even though the "noise" would be the same in both cases.

This brings to mind, for me, the question of what changes in a given recording that is pulled from the news or some other documentary project, and then put into a track.  IS it no longer documentation?  It has to remain documentation in some sense, otherwise it would add nothing in most cases.

At the same time, though, emphasizing the role of intent might produce some "art" pieces that could be reasonably said to go beyond what might rightly be called art (though this leaves the definition of art ambiguous).

What would be your the final or conclusive opinion of the book JLIAT? Did you like it now you've read it? Or are the different chapter to different to each other to give a overall verdict on the book?

Quote from: W.K. on April 04, 2021, 10:56:06 PM
What would be your the final or conclusive opinion of the book JLIAT? Did you like it now you've read it? Or are the different chapter to different to each other to give a overall verdict on the book?

Overall -lacked addressing the title.

To be a brief as possible, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone interested in noise music, either from little knowledge or having a keen interest. Though the genre for some covers industrial, power electronics and harsh noise and harsh noise wall, the latter two are IMO sufficiently different, and Hegarty does make that point, i.e. the lack of meaning and even expression. The chapter on tape missing the resurgence of the cassette, there were other omissions, RRR records, Troniks, Hospital Records, No Fun fest ... etc. Many of the chapters were recycled papers so in cases lacked relevance, though the one on Dante and Black Metal was interesting, those on Joy Division and Organum for me lacked relevance. Being an academic working in the humanities is difficult these days. So chapters covering race, gender and ecology are to be expected, as is the pressure to be published as universities get funding on that basis. The final chapter could have been the first, it tackling the seeming real or actual terminus of Noise in Harsh Noise Wall. And perhaps unfortunate as being written prior to the pandemic and its effects on culture as well as the recent political events.

Perhaps the title offered the idea of noise as something essentially nihilistic, which maybe isn't the sort of thing people want, and so was not central in the book.

I'd say a book with something like these topics? Any thoughts?

1. Brief history – From The Art of Noise to Vomir.
2. Methods, equipment, recording,  packaging, distribution, performances, merch, zines, blogs and forums.
3. World, flavours – Japanese, European, American, Asia and Australasia...
4. Links with other Arts, politics, life styles.
5. Problems with Definitions & Theory.
6. The Future?

Appreciate your readings, summaries and thoughts on this book JLIAT, even if ultimately it's not a book I would find myself wanting to read! Kudos to you for slogging your way through it.

This forthcoming philosophy book from Urbanomic looks like an even more impenetrable read, which I suppose is apt for a book about noise... https://www.urbanomic.com/book/irreversible-noise/

Quote from: theotherjohn on April 05, 2021, 03:30:14 PM
Appreciate your readings, summaries and thoughts on this book JLIAT, even if ultimately it's not a book I would find myself wanting to read! Kudos to you for slogging your way through it.

This forthcoming philosophy book from Urbanomic looks like an even more impenetrable read, which I suppose is apt for a book about noise... https://www.urbanomic.com/book/irreversible-noise/

Hi

I was aware of this upcoming from Inigo Wilkins, i met him at a noise 'thing' @ University of Kent organised by Amanda Beech - another of Urbanomic
authors - and Ray Brassier in Glasgow.

I'll try to resist it but doubt I will. These kind of books are a bit like a drug... I blame the French!  


"The central aim of this pioneering critical work is to demystify noise"    Cough!



"to counter the neoliberal politics of self-organising systems and the tendency to fetishize indeterminacy in contemporary art—by showing how constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organisation of complex hierarchically nested systems, including higher cognition, and how the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and consequently of freedom."


IOW - shit happens - and sometimes its useful.   ;-)

Quote from: theotherjohn on April 05, 2021, 03:30:14 PM
Appreciate your readings, summaries and thoughts on this book JLIAT, even if ultimately it's not a book I would find myself wanting to read! Kudos to you for slogging your way through it.

This forthcoming philosophy book from Urbanomic looks like an even more impenetrable read, which I suppose is apt for a book about noise... https://www.urbanomic.com/book/irreversible-noise/

This one sounds really interesting (though I can't say that I completely understood even the summary).

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on April 05, 2021, 06:35:00 PM


This one sounds really interesting (though I can't say that I completely understood even the summary).

You might then be interested in his Phd paper which explores randomness.... free download

Irreversible Noise: The Rationalisation of Randomness and the Fetishisation of Indeterminacy

Cultural Studies PhD Candidate: Inigo Wilkins
Submission Date: 07/12/15
Goldsmiths, University of London,
Centre for Cultural Studies.
Supervisor: Dr. Luciana Paris


Overview

http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19354/


Paper

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19354/1/CUL_thesis_WilkinsI_2016.pdf

Quote from: JLIAT on April 06, 2021, 10:50:56 AM

Quote from: Balor/SS1535 on April 05, 2021, 06:35:00 PM


This one sounds really interesting (though I can't say that I completely understood even the summary).

You might then be interested in his Phd paper which explores randomness.... free download

Irreversible Noise: The Rationalisation of Randomness and the Fetishisation of Indeterminacy

Cultural Studies PhD Candidate: Inigo Wilkins
Submission Date: 07/12/15
Goldsmiths, University of London,
Centre for Cultural Studies.
Supervisor: Dr. Luciana Paris


Overview

http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19354/


Paper

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/19354/1/CUL_thesis_WilkinsI_2016.pdf

Thank you for this, it sounds very similar to his book.  It looks like I have some reading to do!