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.
