Re: [microsound] noise?

[Jeffrey P Shell <jeffr@xxxxxx>]

On Nov 14, 2003, at 8:48 PM, David Michael wrote:

> Hello Microsound,
>
> Perhaps those on this list with an interest in "noise" can explain the 
> form to me.

It is good.  Except when it's not.

> I have studied music is all its forms, from the beginnings of western 
> music to the deterioration of sound art into concept - an yet, i still 
> have no solid appreciation for the modern pandemic of "noise".  I post 
> this here because I am actively looking for a persuasive argument 
> which would sway my extreme aversion to this form of modern music. Let 
> the diatribe begin.
>
> I am aware that much of modern conceptual art regards aestheticism and 
> execution as wholly irrelevant to the work

I'm glad you said "much" but not all.  There are a lot of noise artists 
who just let a stream gurgle on.  But there are also many who do have a 
structure and movement to their work.  Granted, it can be difficult to 
perceive if one is only looking at the outermost surfaces, but it can 
be there.

>  - but I ask you noisemakers, how many different types of noises can 
> we fill our artificial world with before the level of unstructured 
> information becomes totally overwhelming - and by overwhelming i mean 
> just giving me a fucking headache. Is it structured and i merely do 
> not have the codec to make sense of the information stream? How can I 
> as a listener, as an audience, as a musician, tell if the producer of 
> said noise understands what they are doing - or if the discovery of 
> the noises that their electronic and software circuits can produce has 
> merely triggered the most base of adolescent fascinations - i do it 
> because i can - aka - why not?.

I think a big indicator is whether there is movement in the stream.  
How the stereo field is used.  How "clean" (relatively) the sound is.  
As said, a stream can just be made to gurgle on and this may be 
acceptable to some.  But others will have sweeps and swooshes and 
different degradations of sound and loops that appear and disappear.  I 
know that you say below that "intensity of experience" is not an 
acceptable answer, but it can very well be a part of it.  The best 
parts of Merzbow's mid nineties material (that I've heard), for 
example, have a ferocious intensity.  It's not a wall of noise, but 
rather there is a pulsating rhythm driving a lot of the work.  The 
rhythm can and will change during the piece, but it drives it, and can 
be well perceived.

> Need I sit through 30 minutes of a gurgling sound mixed with shrill 
> piercing waveform in order to learn that the artist was utterly 
> obsessed with the process of this sound's inception. Does it 
> ultimately matter to the audience if what s/he produced was the result 
> of a sonified neural network? Must I read a 5 page essay or attend a 
> lecture to understand what I am listening to? Maybe so.

For some good times here, I do recommend picking up some older Hafler 
Trio, especially "Bag of Cats" if you can find it.  It has great 
reading material that accompanies it.  It may or may not be total 
bullshit, but it's a fun read.  Likewise, the sound lectures of their 
"Four Ways of Saying Five" release are equally, if not more, enjoyable.

Otherwise, if it's not a form you're likely to appreciate, you're just 
not likely to appreciate it.  In many cases, I find that good Noise 
tends to just present itself as what it is and little more.  There may 
be underlying home/studio experiments underneath it (ie - making a 
whole release off of a contact mic attached to a canvas being painted, 
and running that input through insane amounts of feedback and 
processing but keeping it all generated at heart from a natural source 
- coming soon from Eucci 2004 ;), but it shouldn't be the driving force 
behind the initial appreciation of the work.

> I am obviously missing the point. I cannot even begin to give you the 
> names of the artisans whose work I am speaking of, so those who know, 
> please let me know who I am talking about.

>
> So here are my questions about the form in a nutshell:
> 1. What is "noise" communicating and to what audience?

You know, I would really like to know the answer to this myself.  I've 
always been turned on by noise and other 
"experimental"/futurist/dadaist influenced composers and acts.  But I 
still don't know why.  This past summer, I returned to heavy noise in 
my own project (Eucci).  I still don't know why.  And for me 
personally, that's the question I'm trying to explore and answer.

> 2. Why?
> "intensity of experience" is an unacceptable answer (which i have 
> already been given).

Many of us live intense lives and have intense patterns and 
antipatterns running through our brains and require intense external 
input.  We may get that from the cities in which we live, and wish to 
turn that into some sort of sonic structure to 
capture/communicate/understand why it excites (why do you think that 
Tokyo has always been such a hotbed of Noise activity?)

About ten years ago, when I started the project that is now Eucci, and 
had started finally finding different 
not-so-noisy-but-still-yeah-kindof acts like Nurse With Wound, I 
decided that I liked the music because it gave me room to think.  I 
could walk around with it in my headphones and find my thoughts 
occupying this larger space that the sound presented, without my 
thoughts and moods being necessarily controlled by sound, unlike most 
"regular music"  My first tape was called "the mind sounds off", and it 
included part of my real first tape, "Sleep," which I had made by 
basically combining two radio signals to make something to fall asleep 
to that gave me neither nightmares nor excitement.  Other early tapes 
and flyers included phrases like "soundtracks of the mind permeate that 
death beyond boredom."  A silly phrase, I think now in hindsight.  But 
the concept "soundtracks of the mind" (or at least my mind) was very 
significant for me during that first year.

In other years, when things drifted back towards noise, it was again a 
processing of the assimilation of input: from the east coast cities, 
from the art world that I was finally able to experience at a higher 
level than I had previously (due to being in a small western city).  At 
the five year mark, the concepts of Futurism and the (dare I say it?) 
intensity of the city were the driving marks, as well as just trying to 
capture certain environments.  I've done two different projects based 
on prisons - one on the violent noise of it all (the alarms, the sound 
of steps and heavy doors reverberating throughout the place, the 
general mood) as captured on the initial "scared straight" film; one on 
the eerie silence of the forgotten or avoided parts (field recordings 
captured by a good friend and occasional benefactor).  To me, they're 
both unsettling and exciting.  And in some cases, it's just processing 
of anger/frustration.

If intensity of experience is an unacceptable answer, I'm not sure what 
else you'll really find.  The question may really be "why the intensity 
of experience?  and why don't I feel it?"  I know that my brain 
generates a lot of extraneous inner noise, for better or worse, and 
I'll go through cycles where I need a music that matches it either to 
take the edge off or to better focus.

> It may well be that noise is the gateway to a higher level of musical 
> structures and possibilities - like the Kurzweilian (is that a word 
> yet?) vision of future music being so sonically and structurally 
> advanced that it is rendered uninterpretable by those without the 
> proper implants.

Maybe noise is a gateway OUT of this world that seeks higher levels of 
musical structures and possibilities.  The Futurists wanted to 
celebrate, among other things, the violence of union mobs.  The sounds 
of factories and trains and the increasingly loud and violent modern 
world of their time.  A lot of music wants to take you away from that.  
Noise amplifies it.  Maybe it's saying "There is no equation of musical 
enjoyment.  Fuck it.  This turns us on, we're going to run with it."

Or maybe it's not.

I'm sorry if there is no overarching theme to this response.  A lot of 
this is thinking out loud (while I'm under pressure to catch the last 
quarter or two of a basketball game).
--
J.Shell for Eucci
http://euc.cx/ (links to releases may be broken while world is in 
transit)

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