I'd meant to post something more coherent (or at least, more properly convoluted!) on some of what Mr CYESS AFXZS had to say, before getting side-tracked by the subsequent subcoherent ramblings of a certain sorry sod (technically recorded over a month ago).
For me, the one moment that starts the conversation is this idea that noise needs to be destroyed before it can move forward (or be reborn shall we say), through perhaps something like un-noise. This immediately reminded me of a comment Hiroshige made in an old Bananafish interview, cautioning that this is a paraphrase of a translation by David Hopkins from an interview taking place over 25 years ago: that an almighty mass of disorganized sound is prerequisite to going beyond music
and noise [italics theirs- translators? publishers?]. That comment has been bugging the hell out of me ever since. How does producing an almighty mass of disorganized sound go "beyond" noise? And relates back to an old joke I used to trot out on the subject, in reviews and discussion; that no matter what you may try to do with noise, the results are always the same: more noise. Which might perhaps take a would-be destroyer in death spirals around jliat territory, where noise in its purest conception
is the limit [empahasis mine].
I was then reminded of Hiroshige's solo work, which is certainly much more structured, presented in a complete package with lyric book containing what I'd call almost classic verse (not myself being anywhere near versed enough in Japanese poetry to offer any but the vaguest suggestions along these lines, but shall we say approaching something like spiritual-cum-existential Morita Doji esque lines, I digress). And clearly there was an impact there, at least among the Japanese contingent, when you'd have Monde Bruits
covering one of the better cuts on the first of these albums. (There were only about three albums before he began to edge more into, albeit noise-y, rock 'n roll territory. My fave track still gets plenty play here, though
this youtube clip grossly curtails all the nuance.)
I trot out Hiroshige and Hijokaidan here as symbols of the some of the earliest attempts at bringing noise to its most clinically devastating (do check out the above indicated tracks at appropriate levels, and call your audiologist in the morning). Could the Japanese contingent have been having the same conversation we are now, back in the late 70s?
Now this idea of necessary destruction in the service of moving things forward is I think nicely supported in the contention that a would be destroyer needs to know the history. That is, needs to know the contours of what it is they are actively seeking to destroy. One might otherwise be missing the mark by quite the margin without even realizing it. We all watch movies. We know what happens when they think they got the bad guy but the actual dying breath is not shown. Cue the piercing violins.
One thing that I think needs to be emphasized, and here I will refer back to an old Ligotti quote from an interview bearing the same title:
it's all about personal pathology. It may be harder than we think to "bring the whole thing forward" through individual re-framings, creations, destructions, but possibly that is all we will ever have. Reframings creations destructions on a strictly personal level. (Let this not be interpreted necessarily as resistance to the idea of at least trying. All for that, here! But.) I was in conversation very recently with a person who I feel is absolutely pushing things "forward", and who is absolutely challenging ideas of what might constitute listenable (never mind good) sound and music. And through this came a resistance to the idea of potentially assigning a sense of perceptual "movement" to one element (or cluster of elements) in a very atomised world of individual persons working through their personal pathologies and passions. Some may wish to ride the wall, others may choose to be NO PART OF IT. What can perhaps be seen as a serious and debilitating issue can as easily be perceived of as a strength (leaving out the tinnitus!), where any sense of a frame or frame within which to work is always fraying and cracking as it comes into contact, for however long, with other supposed frames, such as how Soddy briefly etched in his WCN episode, on the semi-wave-like convergence/dis-convergence of more classically minded harshnoise purveyors with the more gleefully
anti elements in playful pursuit of private personal pathologies and passions.
Perhaps the only thing to be wary of is falling into a syntactic trap, wherein perceptions of music-sound-art are waylaid by overtly didactic attempts to frame it in words (which is all we'll ever have. sorry!). Trying (and failing) to locate a similar discussion on this forum from some years back, I did find vaguely tangential comments stuck in the middle of a subreadable
borbeto commentaryQuotethat truly great noise is beyond words, and would only be diminished by words of any coherent form in the same way the infinite is diminished by any attempt to re-present in terms comprehensible to the syntax of subject-verb agreement
So going back to Hijokaidan and Hiroshige, perhaps the only way to go beyond music and noise is to stop talking about it. To stop pretending that we are making any sense whatsoever. And that, I'm afraid, is an IT OF which I'd like to be NO PART.
Glad I could convolute that up.
