When I interview Aryan Kaganof, I try my best to avoid mentioning that the first time I saw him perform he was naked, suspended from a rope, hanging upside down from the ceiling.
Known for pushing the boundaries as a filmmaker, director, poet, novelist, musician and blogger, Kaganof is thankfully not intimidating at all in person. Although he does suggest that we both stay quiet and rather telepathise the interview in a mind battle.
Kaganof is the architect behind a collaboration that brings together a collection of mind-bending artists in the upcoming Badilisha Poetry X-Change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. In Kiswahili, “Badilisha” is an expression denoting change, exchange and transformation.
The festival is curated by poet Malika Ndlovu and arts manager Lorelle Viegi.
“Noise,” he explains, ” is a sign of our culture. It’s everything that people in charge want you not to hear and not to see.” Together the collective hopes to create a space of “healing alchemy”. He says that in putting this piece together, he feels “the second most excited since having a baby”.
Ngqawana, despite being highly revered in the music community, is scarcely seen performing in Cape Town.
“This country has a terrible history of neglecting its great jazz artists while they’re still alive,” says Kaganof. “And I think it’s insane that Zim isn’t playing constantly.”
Describing the musician as a “compositional genius and an improviser” he adds: “It’s a dream come true to put people like Zim and Warrick together because they’ve never worked together before.”
He tells me this story: “I first saw Warrick in Cape Town in 1978 at a club called Scratch (named after Lee “Scratch” Perry) that was one of the few non-racial clubs in the country. I was 15 at the time and he was playing in this band called The Happy Ships.”
Kaganof claims to have seen Sony playing the “scissors” and continues: “My whole aim was bringing him back to those kinds of acoustic instruments.”
Kaganof talks about non-racial clubs during the ’80s as a group of political partygoers all “dancing their way to freedom”.
“I’m still trying to dance my way to freedom,” he confesses.
About the project at the festival, he says: “We don’t want to set limits, everyone is coming in with absolute openness.” This is Kaganof’s way of bringing these hugely diverse artists together, in producing something that could possibly never be seen again.
The African Noise Foundation was originally started in 1999. “It is an umbrella and in that umbrella the personnel can always shift and change, but it’s a way of putting people together in ways that don’t fit within a genre. Putting these artists together was too important not to do.”
The build-up to Badilisha will include a series of workshops from November 24-26 at various venues in the city. Kaganof will present Lost For Words: Working in Collectives, which will aim to deconstruct poetic conventions and discuss language exhausted of meaning. The festival includes international performers Dorothea Smartt (UK), Warsan Shire (Somalia) and Ngoma Hill (US).
# Check out the Badilisha Poetry X-change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. Time: 7.30pm. Tel: 021 422 0468. Info: www.badilishapoetry.com
“It’s not a question of Africa or America”
Interview with the saxophonist Zim Ngqawana
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Forty-two-year-old Zim Ngqawana studied jazz at the University of Natal before going to the United States to train with the likes of Max Roach and Wynton Marsalis. On his return to South Africa, he toured with Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela whilst also developing his own style. His record collection comprises innumerable works by John Coltrane, along with Mozart and the Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. Open to everything and in search of spirituality, Zim Ngquawana considers himself as a free man. This practicing Muslim refuses ready-made formulae and labels. On his latest record, Zimphonic Suites, he performs the traditional songs of his ethnic group, the Xhosas. His approach refuses to limit his music to being specifically South African. He rejects local colour whilst at the same time challenging globalisation. He doesn’t play jazz; he plays music. He isn’t African; he’s universal.
What do you think of the older generation of South African jazz musicians, the Chris McGregors or the Winston Mankukus, who died unheard of and at times penniless?
The system always sought to suppress jazz as an art form because jazz addresses important social questions, because it helps you to think and be free. Those musicians constitute my heritage.
How do you answer your critics who accuse you of being too influenced by America, of not being African enough?
It’s not a question of Africa or America. The American masters belong to my people. Duke Ellington is my father. John Coltrane is my father. I have to connect with all the people in the Diaspora who do the same thing as me, who practice the same form of expression, based on the same social conditions. I don’t want to discriminate, or limit myself to South Africa. The world is not South Africa.
Has the country’s opening since 1994 significantly changed South African jazz?
No, because most of the great innovators were around before, and were often in exile. Music and thought has deteriorated since 1994 for economic and political reasons.
What reasons do you mean?
The way life is taken hostage so that people do not realise the meaning of their lives. The modern slavery that exists all over the world, people programmed to sleep, work, and consume. People whom the artists entertain. I’m not here for entertainment’s sake.
Are you angry?
I empathise. I’m not angry anymore, otherwise I wouldn’t play the music I play. Anger is dangerous; it can consume you completely. You have to channel it, to understand it and use it as a stimulant in order to affront life. You can get the best of yourself from it.
Do you ever consider leaving the country?
I have already left, spiritually speaking. Johannesburg remains my base for logistical reasons, a place where I can plan and accomplish other things, such as family life, which I need to stay balanced. When I say family, I mean all people who think and who want to attain positive goals.
Are other jazz musicians a part of your family?
There is no jazz community here. It’s frustrating. That’s why I had such a good time in Paris at the last La Villette jazz festival. I met American musicians, critics, people who were sensitive and aware of what is going on in the world, activists. I also went to visit the dead; I went to see Frederic Chopin and Edith Piaf’s graves.
What do you think of jazz adaptations of traditional maskanda?
There’s no such thing as maskanda or anything else! Music is as free as the air… We live in a technical world where tradition is considered underdeveloped. That’s all nonsense. We need to develop technicality, technology to be compatible everywhere…
Do you think you are better appreciated abroad than at home?
Africa, South Africa, is the only place I have problems in playing my music.
Why?
Because people carry on talking when you play… Africans need to understand their reality and adapt. It’s all very well preaching the African renaissance and not putting it into practice. If you want to be primitive, why carry on living in chic neighbourhoods? We ought to dress in our skins and beads, our traditional clothing, and go to the office in them… Tradition needs to be transformed, reworked to be made compatible with our urban lifestyle, our world, and our reality. We don’t have any other choice: I can’t go to Paris on horseback! We need to rethink things in general, not just music, if we want to play a role in the global village.
Published by DATANOM
Edited by Pelle Krøgholt
ISBN 87-988955-0-8
Copyright 2002 by Sangild & DATANOM
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Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.
Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay. To give an exhaustive explanation of it, though, is not only beyond the limits of an essay, but seems to be fundamentally impossible due to the evasiveness of the matter.1 There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it. It is my hope that the following reflections are nevertheless able to sketch out an approach to understanding the important part noise plays in the music of today.
After defining noise and giving a brief history of noise in music, I will take a closer look at Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Merzbow and Curd Duca as four very different aesthetic approaches to noise. Ranging from aggressive ecstasy to soft intimacy, from melodic sweetness to abstract hard-core noise, from the guitar to the computer, these examples serve to indicate the variety of noise in both rock music and electronica. Reflecting these in a broader perspective I will then turn to philosophical concepts such as the sublime, the Dionysian, multiplicity, and the abject.
What is noise?
Etymologically, the term “noise” in different Western languages (støj, bruit, Geräusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that the word “noise” comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but also to seasickness, and that the German Geräusch is derived from rauschen (the sough of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music.
A single definition of noise is not possible; instead I will provide three basic definitions: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition.
A. Acoustic noise
In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that ‘white noise’ is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called “colored noise,” ranging from “violet noise” (a bias on the high frequencies) to “purple noise” (a bias on the low frequencies).
B. Communicative noise
In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like “fuzztone”, “overdrive”, and “distortion” as an easy way to obtain the same effect.
In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier.
When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.
C. Subjective noise
“Unpleasant sounds” – this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are very few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation.
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance. Artists, who deal with noise in their music, as well as their audience, have a different approach to white noise, no longer considering it a nuisance.
One might conclude from this that the subjective definition is not relevant to the aesthetic use of noise in music. But, as I have already suggested, that would be a hasty dismissal of the important tension you get from infusing the formerly negative. To reach a point where a harsh, white noise is not considered unpleasant demands a training of the senses to the point of being familiar with this expansion of musical sounds. Reaching that point, noise will still contain a certain power due to the tension of listening to what used to be dismissed as repulsive (cf. below on the abjective character of noise).
The history of noise – a brief sketch 2
The origin of music was in principle a process of purifying certain sounds by filtering out the irregular sounds, the noise. The church music of the Middle Ages was an extreme in this respect, allowing only the pure sound of the male voice and considering the interval of the third (today essentially consonant) a dissonance. The classical, Western tradition has (generally speaking) fostered instruments of pure sounds and maintained the exclusion of the impure, with some exceptions for dramatic effects (thunder, canons etc.). During the 19th century music became increasingly complex and dramatic, and at the same time the orchestra began to include more percussion instruments that were considered noisy. They were nevertheless far from what is today considered noise.
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto “The Art of Noise” in 1913. He constructed the so-called “intonarumori” (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.
Edgar Varèse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varèse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varèse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises. This vision is still a long way from fulfillment.
After the Second World War musique concrète evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael König, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period. Since then, numerous composers have worked with acoustic as well as electronic noise.
Rock music and guitar noise
Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.
The deliberate use of these effects can be traced back to Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958), but it was garage bands like The Kingsmen, The Kinks and especially The Who, who made it an integral part of their sound. The great innovator, however, was undoubtedly Jimi Hendrix, who constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions.
Aesthetically, however, the influence on noise rock came not from Hendrix, but rather The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts. On tracks like “European Son” and “Sister Ray,” the noise is alarming in ways that has made Velvet Underground a reference point for all noise rock.
In the 70s The Stooges continued the noisy garage tradition, combining it with free jazz elements, and paving the way for the punk rock movement. Lou Reed made his outstanding concept album Metal Machine Music (1975) – four vinyl sides of sheer guitar noise and nothing else, made partly as a provocation directed at the record company, the record has gained a reputation as a place for weird, noisy beauty. I will also mention Pere Ubu’s legendary first single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” (1975), one of the most disturbing pieces of rock music ever made, and the provocative Throbbing Gristle debut 2nd Annual Report (1977).
The term “noise rock” (in Danish: støjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called “the heterogeneous”. This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. Post-punk thus tries to distance itself from the smoothness and cheerfulness of pop, though mostly without discarding its melodic qualities.
One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom. It began in New York under the label of “No Wave” in the late 70’s and in Germany with Einstürzende Neubauten and other bands centered around “Die Geniale Dilletanten” around 1980. In the UK, actual noise rock did not emerge before 1985, when The Jesus & Mary Chain created the British, more melodic, variant.
It is not within the limits of this essay to give an overview of the noise rock and electronica scene and all its different sub-categories, but I will mention some of the most influential styles and names: Sonic Youth took off from guitar composer Glenn Branca to create their very own harmonic style and guitar techniques (see example below). Bands like Swans and Big Black used noise as a dark, hellish force in their aggressive, Gothic tales. Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. and others bridged the gap between post-punk and the impending grunge scene with their straightforward use of noisy guitars. My Bloody Valentine (see example below), A.R. Kane, Lush, Ride and many other British bands used guitar noise to create a more poetic, dreamy atmosphere, labeled ‘dreampop’ or “shoegazer”. Band of Susans made a minimal, mantra-like use of guitar noise with a British equivalent in bands Loop and Spacemen 3. Young Gods and Ministry, among others, used the sampler as a noise generator. In Japan, a noise scene grew out of the 70’s free jazz environment of Tokyo, featuring Keiji Haino, High Rise, The Boredoms, Merzbow and others.
By 1991 the development of guitar noise seemed to come to an end, culminating with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless as a worthy climax. Guitar noise had gone mainstream with blockbusters like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and the sound possibilities seemed permanently exhausted. The place for noise exploration was no longer to be found on the rock scene but rather in electronic music.
Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is “glitch”, where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck. Oval is probably the most convincing glitch-artist, creating a blurred atmosphere not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine. Only few electronic artists, such as Merzbow (see below), deal exclusively with noise.
Four music examples
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth made their debut at the so-called Noise Festival in New York, 1981, an event that marked the end of No Wave and the beginning of something new. With guitar composer Glenn Branca as their father figure, they set out to ‘reinvent the guitar’, considering the guitar a far richer instrument than normally acknowledged, containing a wide range of possibilities.
The guitar can be used as a percussion instrument, beating the strings with a broken drumstick, a screwdriver, or what-ever is at hand. Combining this effect with feedback, Sonic Youth created a bell-like, pealing sound. Every possibility of the instrument - the guitar, the pick-ups, the amplifier, even the electric plugs - were explored, and, as their most original characteristic, the strings were tuned differently, creating a new, more dissonant (sometimes even microtonal) harmonics, far from the general rock idiom. Sonic Youth developed an arsenal of more than 40 guitars each with its own tuning; often the two guitarists play with each their tuning at the same time.
A characteristic trait is what I shall call “the maelstrom of noise,” in which the tune and rhythm break off into a whirl of noise, gradually intensifying tempo and volume, absorbing the listener into its ecstatic black hole. This chaotic vortex is in opposition to the structural, formal elements of music, exceeding the boundaries of the senses, although still controlled on a higher level. The maelstrom is at the same time an explosion of energy and an implosion of meaning, turning away from the distinct and semantic into the sublime and ecstatic.
The common effect of noise in music is the aggressive, raging expression also found in the maelstrom of Sonic Youth. Noise is a vehement means, reflecting inner and outer chaos and conflict. But, as the next example will show, noise can also be used to evoke a very different experience.
My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine also had the ambition of reinventing the guitar, albeit with entirely different means and effects than Sonic Youth. In their music, noise is not aggressive, but low-key. Noise becomes introvert, dreamy, almost languidly erotic. This especially goes for the album Loveless and the related ep’s Glider and Tremolo.
Listening to My Bloody Valentine one encounters a diffuse blurred harmonics. The guitar chords are gliding, swimming in a muddy sea of distortion. The guitarists’ strokes are cut off in the mixing process, so that every sound seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. My Bloody Valentine extract all kinds of sound from the guitar, manipulating it in different ways, also by means of the sampler, so that, for instance, feedback can be transformed into a whistling, melodic instrument. The vocals are placed in the background of the sound stage on the same level as the other sounds, making the words almost undecipherable. The noise on Loveless is extraordinarily integrated in the music, not as a distinct layer of sound and not placed in opposition to an otherwise structural clarity.
All these effects put together with the sleepy motion and sweet, dreamy tunes, form an unreal, disorienting sound picture, “the-not-quite-really-there-sound”, as they themselves have called it. The dense sound makes no illusion of an acoustic space. It is claustrophobic; almost like being in an infinitely intimate place. There, the music affects you like the most coveted, yet vulnerable, states: tenderness, love, sex. You have to get very close, to immerse yourself in the web of noises to be able to let the vocals whisper sweet words in your ear. The blurriness of My Bloody Valentine’s sound is like the blurriness of getting so close to an object that you lose the outlines of it. And this object is as soft as a tender body.
But the disorientation takes the experience even further than a concrete sexual encounter, towards a more abstract, impersonal intimateness. There is not really an I-you-relation (as in a normal pop song), there is no room for such a distance; the intimacy is overwhelming, ambivalent and transgressive of any subjectivity, suggesting something akin to an incestuous, narcissistic or pre-oedipal relation.
My Bloody Valentine has made a new psychedelia without turning to the effects of the old; a psychedelia of noise. At their live concerts the band experimented with ending the performance with a sustained dose of sheer noise. They developed this stunt to perfection, culminating on the Loveless tour 1992, where a piercing, dazzling white light was thrown out into the faces of the audience while the pure noise took on new dimensions in volume and lasted for more than 15 minutes. This was a stark contrast to the soft, colorful preceding concert and provoked two different reactions: half of the audience left in protest or aural pain, while the other half stayed to find out what this would bring. And the experiences were very special. People underwent different ecstatic states, all pertaining to the trans-individual or pre-subjective: out-of-body-experiences, nirvana-like states, visions of being swallowed up by a giant vagina; and my own: hearing phantom lullabies that I’ve never heard before – very detailed and continuing to play in my head when I got home in bed. These experiences are not only an effect of an overload of the nervous system but are also inextricably tied up to the preceding concert, opening the mind towards the most intimate feelings.
Merzbow
Under the name of Merzbow, Tokyo based Masami Akita has produced pure noise music since 1979, and especially in the 90’s he has released a staggering number of electronically based releases, culminating in the 50 CD (+ artwork and CD-ROM) set Merzbox, a giant compilation of his finest work. Not only very productive, but also very consistent, he is constantly operating close to the limit of what can meaningfully be called music. Starting from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, considered by many a terminal point for music, he exploits the varieties of noise without supplying it with any melodic material. Merzbow’s music is an ear-splitting assault on the body, at least, that is, until the nervous system is allowed to gradually relax from the state of alarm and enter the world of sensing extreme noise as music.
The name Merzbow is derived from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (aka Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a work in progress built by the use of found garbage material. If noise is the trash of music, the sounds that we traditionally discard as non-musical, then Merzbow is a trash artist, tirelessly seeking odd and convulsive beauty in the garbage cans of sonic waste. And, like Schwitters, Merzbow’s art is essentially urban, reacting to the overload of sensuous impressions in the big city. As a sort of apotropaic3 shield he throws the noise of Tokyo back into our ears, transforming it into an aesthetic experience.
No specific phenomena are recognizable, though. The Merzbow noise is abstract, minimal, deprived of mimetic content. Its effect is immediate, an overload of the nervous system, not being able to sort out the information into categories of relevant and irrelevant – hence the normal reaction of fear and discomfort when confronted with Merzbow noise. “Noise is the unconsciousness of music”, Merzbow states, in the same way as his other main interest, pornography and
bondage, is the unconsciousness of sex.
Merzbow noise is linked with fear, conflict and aggression as in rock music, but defying any melodies, the pure noise does not incite the listener to ecstatic bliss, but remains hard and somewhat conceptual to most of its audience.4
Curd Duca: Touch
Curd Duca’s “Touch” (1999)5 is a recent example of communicative noise, continuing a tradition of cut-up vocals that can be traced back to Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). A female voice sings a line with a keyboard in the background, but we never hear it as a line, it sounds like the CD is damaged, causing it to stutter for a while and then jump to another stutter. The message is disturbed, almost indecipherable. The word “touch” is clear, though, several times manifest in its full length followed by a few notes before it collapses into the ongoing fragmentation. It is almost like a cubistic painting, a fractured view seeing things from different angles, constantly shifting its focus.
The music of this radical sample collage is beautiful. The vocal is gentle and sensually affectionate, singing the few notes of the sample in a longing way, as if reaching out to touch someone. Actually, after a reconstruction, the words seem to be “you’d be like heaven to touch”. This message, this gesture, is too disturbed to be communicated. The disturbance is, of course, not really a device error, but it hints at the familiar sound of a CD player not being able to read the digital information on the disc.
A work like this could be seen as a reflection of a cultural situation in which clear communication is disturbed and direct exchange of affections is threatened. The undamaged sample would risk being too sentimental, too pathetic to survive as more than a cliché in a postmodern world of information overload. Cutting it into pieces and transforming its banal statement into a more disturbing beauty actually makes it more authentic by virtue of alienation.
In this piece, noise is not a certain acoustic quality, as in the other examples, but a distortion of the message and of the melody by use of malfunction-like effects
Towards an aesthetics of noise
In various ways, noise as a sensual, aesthetic phenomenon points out of the field of the subject as a divided entity, towards what could be called the transsubjective, that which transgresses the individual. This applies to the explosive ecstasy as well as the implosive intimacy. This transsubjective point is also bridging the gap between rock music, normally considered subjective, and electronica, normally considered objective. With noise, rock turns away from its standard focus of a subject expressing his/her feelings, towards a more anonymous state. This was manifested on stage by My Bloody Valentine, having no focus on the band members, who appear only as shadows in front of a big screen with abstract psychedelic films projected on it. The following reflections on noise as Dionysian ecstasy and as abjectal intimacy points in this direction.
The Dionysian and the sublime
The ecstasy of noise is predominantly aggressive and vehement, as the maelstrom of noise in Sonic Youth. This is often an aesthetization of violence and suffering, the noise being an ingredient in what one might call a Dionysian aesthetic. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Friedrich Nietzsche described the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two principles of aesthetic attitudes toward suffering, working together in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.
Apollo represents appearance, form, individuality, beauty and dream; the Apollonian aesthetics is an embellishment of suffering, a self-conscious lie, a veiling of
cruelty by use of form and elegance, a semblance of beauty. Dionysus, on the other hand, represents ecstasy, being, will, intoxication and unity; the Dionysian aesthetics is a direct confrontation with the terrible foundation of being, an absurd will driving us all in our meaningless lives. In the Dionysian ecstasy individuality is transgressed6 in favor of identification with the universal will - a frightening yet blissful experience. Frightening, that is, because it is a death-like giving up of the Ego, if only for a few seconds; blissful in letting go of the responsibilities of being a subject. The Dionysian experience is a “metaphysical comfort”, knowing that suffering is a necessary part of the effects of the eternal will – the destruction of things in order to create anew. In the Dionysian ecstasy one is no longer concerned with one’s individual suffering, seeing instead things from the universal point of view.
In music, the ecstasy of noise is undoubtedly a Dionysian effect, as opposed to the Apollonian melody and form.7 As mentioned above, the German words Rausch (ecstasy) and Geräusch (noise) are related, pointing towards this fact. The Dionysian is that which is not totally controlled or formed, e.g. screams and noises. The Apollonian elements are seductive, inciting the listener to enter the ecstatic bliss of the Dionysian, enabling the listener to dare the confrontation with the dreadfulness of existence. Therefore, Nietzsche says, the Dionysian needs the Apollonian.
Merzbow is so demanding exactly because he refuses this; he does not soften the harshness of noise with any Apollonian elements. Listening to Merzbow is thus a very different experience from the Sonic Youth maelstrom.
One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable.
Abject noise
As mentioned above, noises are the sounds that are discarded as being impure, unmusical. Music traditionally expurgates the dirty noise and fosters the pure tones. But noise belongs to the same pool of sounds from which music stems. Ideally, music is thus defining itself by a detachment from its origin. This is abjection, using the term coined by Julia Kristeva.
The abjects, in Kristeva’s sense, are the rejections from the body: stool, sperm, spittle, snot, nail clippings etc., considered dirty and repulsive. The reason why we are (more or less) repelled by the abject is that it threatens our individuality, being neither subject nor object, but something in-between, confusing our delimitation as individuals. The bodily cleansing process is a way of upholding one’s individuality, fearing the blur between the objective surroundings and ourselves. To confront ourselves with the abject is strongly ambivalent, a combination of pleasure and fear, reminding us at the same time of the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother and of death, the end of individuality.
Taking noise back, music confronts itself with its abject, plays with it, like a child playing with its stool, metaphorically speaking. This is perhaps a reason for the effects of My Bloody Valentine’s music, combining extreme intimacy and noise into something very sweet, but also implementing the fear of this (almost incestuous) closeness.
Noise as multiplicity
In his book Genèse the French philosopher Michel Serres develops an idea of the ultimate being-in-itself as noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive) is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude, an analogue to white noise. All concepts, all understanding of the world is an ordering of this chaos,8 this multiplicity, “noise.” Serres uses the term “noise” with two meanings: the English (noise) and the old French word “noise,” meaning quarrel. He also hints at the Greek, maritime origin, “nausea” (see above). The multiplicity is conflict-ridden and noisy.
Noise and conflict are normally closely related in music as well. This aspect of noise is the reason why it is often used to express anger, fear and violence. Noise in music belongs, of course, to the phenomenal world, but exists at the limits of our senses, pointing metonymically towards a more fundamental noise, the chaos of the pre-phenomenal world. When we are confronted with a massive dose of noise, we often create our own sounds in our heads, “phantomic sounds”, as a desperate way of relating to the audible chaos.
There is also, I think, a more sociological perspective to this. In today’s society it is impossible to take in all the information that surrounds us; we are constantly forced to sort out loads of information to be able to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. Information society is verging on noise society, a state in which the information, meant to convey knowledge, ends up losing the ability to speak at all. Our culture becomes taciturn without being silent, moving towards a noisy muteness.
So what?
I have often been asked whether noise is subversive. I tend towards the answer “no, not directly, but it has a critical potential.” If subversion is what punk imagined itself to be, a riot that shocks bourgeois culture, I do not see any such possibilities in music. It might even be questioned whether punk really had that kind of effect. In the present historical situation, youth culture riots are verging on kitsch. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most visible being that rebel youth has become a lifestyle segment in commercial marketing.
Noise does not have a fixed, aesthetic meaning. Its phenomenological character depends on the musical as well as institutional context in which it is integrated. As we have seen above, noise is for instance not always aggressive and loud. Still, there are some common features: noise tends to abandon subjectivity, individuality, rationality, homogeneity and control in favor of the objectively irrational, the pre- or non-subjective sublime, something unstable and complex. This is a marginal phenomenon and not a permanent realm for anyone to enter. Still, it has (or has had) the potential of being critical of smooth calculation, ascetic rationality and habitual life. Such a critique does not come automatically with noise, of course, but only when reflecting a historical situation and at the same time embodying what is culturally repressed.
How does the African noise composer adapt the forms and conventions of Japanese noise to his cultural setting in order to create a noise at once aesthetically valid and recognisably African?
On the face of it, noise is by no means a genre of African origins. It has been claimed that Noise is a lavish, elitist, Japanocentric artform that bears no relevance to the realities of Africa in the post-colonial, post-apartheid dispensation. But the African Noise Foundation has been set up with the mission to explore the possibilities whereby noise too can be localised and indigenised in order to embody and reflect the collective memory and identity of the diverse peoples within the South African context. By exploring what the idea of an ‘African Noise’ can entail, we hope to claim a rightful space for noise within the cultural milieu of South Africa in the post-apartheid era.
To begin with, what exactly constitutes African Noise?
Various practitioners feel compelled to site here the way noise has been made ‘relevant’ in South Africa, especially through the efforts of the african noise foundation (founded in 1994), whose productions have ranged from an Afrikaans setting of Einsturzende Neubauten’s Hamletmaschine (1996), an isiXhosa language African’ setting of Merzbow’s Music For Bondage Performance (2004) to the experimental new composition, Aryan Kaganof’s ‘G-String Blues’ (2009). The extent to which these noises are African or can be deemed African could be the subject of a thesis on what constitutes the African essence in composed art music. (For an illuminating discussion about ‘African essence’ see Irele 1991).
There have been other projects with a fair claim to lacing noise with ‘African Elements’, such as the Kalahari Surfers which produced Gross National Product (1983), and Righard Kapp’s noises such as skrop 1 (2003) and traces (2004). What remains problematic in some of these companies and productions is how the idea of Africa becomes essentialized, reduced to time past, to some forgotten pastoral idyllic settings, during what Coplan (1994) terms ‘the time of the cannibals’, where sets have skins, some medicinal gadgets and singers are clad in traditional garb. This is not to negate the importance of the country’s African cultural heritage and history, what I will call here umlando nembali yemveli (indigenous history). After all, it is this aspect of African life that characterised the point of both schism and contact between the West and Africa, and it was such a cultural heritage that the West sought to annihilate through its proselytising and ‘civilising’ mission. (see Western 4.33).
What is the aim, the outcome, of whatever product we might call ‘African Noise’? In our view, two possibilities exist, and the first should be that of nation building. If this genre contributes to this ideal through creating access to equal noise education opportunities and performance venues and possibilities for future development, that substantially bridges the gaps created by apartheid. In this way, noise promotes ideals of ubuntu where participants and audiences can see themselves as one through the entertaining and healing powers of noise performed. In addition, noise conceived in this way can create the entry of the previously marginalised into the global arena.
The second outcome would be that of form and content. A willingness to experiment with possibilities of what African noise should be is refreshing and welcome. Whether such noise reflects the diversity and noisical aspirations of the cultural mix of Hillbrow, or tells the stories of the rural hinterland with its traditional noise, most importantly, what audiences listen to and performers sing must create some forms of identification. When noise does not alienate or feels foreign, whatever form it eventually takes, will show that ‘African Noise’ has arrived.
This discussion creates more questions and arouses more problems than it manages to solve. It proceeds as if premised on a unitary idea of what an African noise can be; but this is certainly not the intention. The idea of Africa is not unitary. Any description of what an African art form should entail must therefore derive from numerous and possibly contentious trajectories. With such a force as a background, it stands to reason that the outcomes will also not be monolithic.
In South Africa the debate on the Africanness of noise was sparked by politics of transformation closely linked to the latter philosophy of disgraced ex-president Thabo Mbeki’s “African Renaissance”. As his much publicised speech reveals, Africa is characterised by those who reflect loyalty and celebration of its diversity. Subsequently, as our imagination of what makes us African is also fluid and fragmented, so will experimentations to produce the ideal African noise be. In my view, it is equally possible that African noise will be what the masses like. In other words, if the original texts, costumes, and stage settings and other conventions of grand noise are what audiences cry out loud for, be it in a packed township hall or a decadent suburban theatre, then we might not need to experiment with indigenous noise. The Japanese and German conventions might find a home among locals just as much as hijacking and phone tapping have, without changing any technical aspects of the crimes to suit African ideas of ‘corruption’.
Nothing is more clear than that every African Noise, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the ear.
It is only with the denouement constantly in mind that we can give an African Noise its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
We commence, then, with this intention.
What we term a long noise is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones - that is to say, of brief noisy effects.
It is needless to demonstrate that a noise is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychic necessity, brief.
It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of African Noise - this, with one proviso- that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any noise at all.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the African Noise Foundation.
That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure is, we believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful.
When, indeed, Africans speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect- they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul- not of intellect, or of heart- which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the “beautiful.”
Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the African Noise tones.
Of all melancholy topics what, according to the African understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?
Death, is the obvious reply.
An african noise foundation remix of “dans” by whitehouse, featuring new lead vox by aryan kaganof and a soothing subliminal binaural beat by joel assaizky.
“There are channels and thus there must be noise.”[10]
In a usual understanding of communication, noise is an unwanted third thing that interferes in what would otherwise be a clear connection between a sender and a receiver. On closer reflection, though, noise is more complex. To begin with, it always indicates the wider context or milieu in which communication takes place. A message must pass through a medium. The medium generates effects that attach to the message. Noise, therefore, is a constitutive feature of any communication. Noise is the presence of the medium through which the message must pass. Each new innovation in media promises to minimize noise, but inevitably generates its own new brand of clamor. This battle with the medium is never entirely successful because we can never eliminate the space of transmission. There is always a context of communication, or an environment and so there is always a noisy third term. Serres writes: “…We are surrounded by noise. We are in the noises of the world, and we cannot close our door to their reception. In the beginning is noise. The real seems to me to be stochastically regular.”[11]
The analysis of noise therefore proves to be far more interesting than we might have suspected. Noise directs us away from the message itself toward the medium in which it occurs. In Serres’ image of communication, noise is the “third man,” always on the perimeter of any circuit of senders and receivers. In order to communicate, sender and receiver have to battle with the clamor of the milieu. No matter how opposed the terms of their debate, they proceed on the understanding that they can minimize the threat of noise and control the environment in which they operate and transfer messages.
The attempt to eliminate the noisy middle changes the relation of sender and receiver. Security measures we introduce to protect us from the threat of terrorism, for example, change the very community we set out to protect. Every attempt to create better channels of communication between parents and children, by aping the language of our children, or compelling them to be clearer with us, changes the relation of parents and children. The reaction to noise, whether it is to incorporate it, or to try more effectively to expel it, transforms the communicants.
Serres’ theory of noise changes in important ways through his career. In his early work, noise appears to interfere in communication. He wonders how we might render the translation inert. Critics have pointed out an element of idealism in his early Hermes work, where he sees the empirical variations in communication — accent, misspelling, etc — as the extraneous stuff to be removed. In his later works, however, he begins to see noise as a positive force in communication.
Why look to parasites for insights on the relation of noise and communication? The simple answer is that in French, parasite can mean one of three things: an organism that lives off a host, a social loafer who takes a meal and gives nothing in turn, or static/white noise in a communication circuit. These very different senses of the term — biological, social, informational — share a common principle that we might call simply interference. In each case, the parasite interferes in, and ultimately upsets, some existing set of relations and pattern of movement. It compels us either to expel it, or to readjust our internal workings so that we can accommodate the needs of the parasite. Noise, in other words, is to communication what a virus is to an organism, or a scapegoat is to a community. It is not simply an obstacle, but rather a productive force around the exclusion of which the system is organized.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the full implications of the biological theory of parasitism, but I will mention in passing that recent work in virology supports Serres’ claim of the productivity of the parasite. Luis Villareal, a leading virologist suggests that new work on the role of viruses in evolution challenges our accepted ideas of “life.” Viral research places in doubt the common doxa that the cell is the basic unit of life, because it contains the material for its own replication. Viruses are purely relational beings that must live off the life force of some other thing. Because they lack the capacity for self-replication, viruses have been thought to be only partly in being, or to have some problematic, liminal status outside the web of life. Villarreal and others now believe, however, that viruses are far more complex and challenge our ideas of what constitutes life. In fact, they even suggest that cells may have required viruses in order to evolve. All of which affirms Serres’ basis premise of the productivity of the parasite and, more generally, the principle that relations precede being.[12]
Serres’ revaluation of “parasitic” noise builds on a basic principle of information theory. In Claude Shannon’s pioneering work in information theory, noise is recognized as a necessary consequence of transmission. The snow on the television set, the hiss on a tape, or a missed registration in a printing operation are all instances of noise, or parasitism. In each of these cases, the presence of the medium is registered in what would, seemingly, otherwise be a clear transmission.[13]
Claude Shannon recognized that whether or not a certain effect is considered noise depends on one’s position in the listening chain. Noise is interference only from the sender’s point of view. From the point of view of the receiver it may be considered a part of the information packet that is transmitted along a channel. When we hear the earliest sound recordings of Tennyson reading Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, the watered down and scratched out sound conveys the enormous passage of time, just as the static sound of Neil Armstrong’s voice on the moon tells us something about his physical distance from us and the newness of space technologies in the 1960s. It would not be difficult to think of countless other cases in which the presence of the medium mixes in with the intended message to produce some whole new effect, not intended by the sender, but taken as information by the receiver. In these cases, noise is not simply an extra third thing to be discounted. It has entered into the message and become part of it. To speak technically, the signal now has an “equivocation,” which is to say that two messages pass along the same channel. The sender may not have intended this, but the receiver may welcome it.
The detective genre offers interesting examples of this productivity of noise. The popularity of shows such as C.S.I. lies not so much in their capacity to puzzle out the mind of the killer, as in the kind of “media analysis” one finds in them. Typically, the killer wants to send a message by marking up a body, or dressing his victim in a certain way. The police, being good hermeneutists, ignore this message and seek out the unintended communication, the way that the medium attaches itself to the signal. They look, in other words, for equivocation in the message.
It is because the killer, or thief operates in an environment that is, in itself, a medium that he can be detected. The dirt that attaches itself to the car, the fiber from a couch, and the procession of insects that arrive at a dead body in a predictable and datable sequence are all things over which the killer exercises no mastery. The police recognize a basic principle of information theory that is also the starting point of Serres’s work: noise does not indicate a lack, but a surplus of information. And a medium/milieu affects, or acts upon, the signal. The active intention to transmit a signal requires that we open ourselves to the passive reception of the medium in which it can occur. The user is used by the medium. Marshall McLuhan began his media analysis on exactly the same point. “The medium is the message,” he explains, means that the user becomes the content of the message. The user is used by the medium.
Serres takes this principle in new and interesting directions. He follows the French biologist Henri Atlan in arguing that equivocation, or noise, in a system should not be seen as a lack that takes away from communication; rather, it is a positive force that does something. Atlan argues that noise prompts a system to reorganize in a more complex form that incorporates the disturbance.[14] Here we really find the heart of Serres’ theory of the parasite.
stephen crocker
noise is the presence of the medium
this excerpt originally appeared on ctheory.net
“The coronal suture of the skull bears a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally – well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?
A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings – which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe – which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”
Music Today fund raising concert hosted by New Music SA 28th March, Howard College Theatre
Wine was sponsored by the Distel Foundation for the Performing Arts and artists performed without charge.
A world renowned (and controversial) film director creates a piece of music which is to be played by a world renowned guitarist and Durban hardly knows of the event!! But I am not complaining, just pointing out the curiously ever baffling Durban audience ethos that absolutely passeth all understanding. The ever sloppy Durban press need to be upbraided, for a large portion of this continuing vexatious situation must surely rest on their shoulders fairly and squarely. Unless of course, that by making this statement I completely overestimate their importance on Durban’s cultural scene and they carry not an iota of credibility anyway. Then of course, one needs to look to the Music Department of the University itself. Have the students all become so jaded that nothing interests them anymore? And then - touchy subject - one needs to look at the racial demographics of the audience: completely White except for a Black couple and no Indians. Are there no black or Indian students at the University? Are Whites the only racial group interested in progressive music, or is this still regarded as a ‘colonialist pastime’?
I was once again struck by the excellence of the acoustics in the Howard College Theatre!
The event was hosted with professional ease by Fiona Tozer who contributed to the evening with her composition “Snapshots for piano and recorded voice” performed by Catherine Morrow. This ‘streetwise’ performance piece began with Catherine, in jeans, T-shirt, unmarked plastic carry-bag with an assortment of musical paraphernalia - not to mention chewing……gum - slopping onto the stage ready for the shopping mall…percussionist in tow. Snippets of overlaid (mostly female) conversations (in various languages) timed to interweave with the inventive piano narrative began and interjected the performance. Underpinning this interplay was the necessity for dexterity interwoven with a ‘chance factor’ (the steel pipes placed on the piano strings) which I found intriguing. Some wonderful melodies emerged between the latter half of the ‘snapshots’. I wondered whether it was not Fiona Tozer’s intention to evoke the sense of travelogue where the shopping mall (more so than the airport) becomes the unifying factor of what has undoubtedly now become a global village.
The next piece I really enjoyed was Andrew Beall’s composition ”Song for Almah” for marimba (Ilse Minnie) and cello (Jennifer Cox). The warm integrated tone of these two instruments wafted across the auditorium with a clarity and perfect pitch that was aurally beyond reproach. I particularly appreciated the rhythm and ‘drive’ within the piece where the two exquisite melodies, never pulling apart yet stretching the boundaries of exploration in parallel universes, sought to transgress those boundaries by locating points of harmony: space creating space, relating with ease through a common time frame, a win-win situation. An enlightening and truly worthy tribute to Almah.
And then there was Syd Kitchen performing Aryan Kaganof’s “Blues for G string”. What I found most ‘contrasting’ about this performance in particular was the musicians involvement with his instrument: a Mervyn Davis custom built wonder guitar with banjo-lyre-like influences that leant to the performance a uniqueness of style that lifted this manifestation into the extraordinary. Here, Kitchen enveloped a refreshing ‘oneness’ with his instrument which transmuted into an authentic link with ‘self’. The performer, thus so well grounded, confidently launches himself into the given framework (the composition) in virtually any direction and succeeds. The interplay of musical improvisation connects with intent and ease of open-minded interplay and the musician gains an energy that he imbibes back into his craftsmanship becoming that rare muscial magus one is indeed privileged to witness. However, the launchpad, so artfully provided by Kaganof (whose own commitment to the four minute event is evidenced by him flying up from Cape Town and spending the afternoon with Syd Kitchen in rehearsal/discussion) took absolute precedence within the integrity of sovereignty, while allowing the artist/performer the utmost freedom of expression: the bluesy tone, subtly framing Kaganof’s oeuvre of melancholy, a pensiveness, with a repeated note, echoing, founding…running through the sub terrain of Kitchen’s skilled foreplay. I was further struck by what has become for me an added insight into Kaganof’s work - whether directing a film, creating a painting, music, acting, organising the Kagablog - his absolute humanity tied in with an innate creative gift: to inspire nothing but the best from (himself and) his collaborators.
“At the beginning of electronic music, some German studios claimed that they could make every sound that a natural instrument could make - only better. They then discovered that all their sounds were marked by a certain uniform sterility. So they analysed the sounds made by clarinets, flutes, violins, and found that each note contained a remarkably high proportion of plain noise; actual scraping, or the mixture of heavy breathing with wind or wood: from a purist point of view this was just dirt, but the composers soon found themselves compelled to make synthetic dirt - to ‘humanize’ their compositions.”
Peter Brooks “The Empty Space” (1968: 74, London, Penguin Books)
“it’s all noise, of course, everything that’s ever been written about in the
wire. the territory staked out by the magazine since 1982 is one whose
marginal nature means that it’s only willingly explored by we few intrepid
souls. the territory contains stuff that we know to be music, but that we
also know, deep down, everyone else thinks is anything but. it’s always been
about us and them; why be coy about it? after all, how else can we make
sense of the phenomenon we call noise-with-a-capital n? if we accept its
usual definition as ‘unwanted sound’, we need to have some idea of who
exactly it is that doesn’t want it. obviously, it’s not us – here we are
listening to it, reading about it, writing about it, making it. what makes
it noise is what they think. or rather, what we think they would think if
they ever listened to it. which they don’t.”
there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document
of barbarism.
walter benjamin
Since 1994 when the contagious enthusiasm for it broke out in South Africa, ‘noise’ has maintained its place as a mass phenomenon. Its methodology, all declarations of propagandistic historians notwithstanding, has essentially remained unchanged. Yet none of this alters the fact that noise has in its essence remained static. Nor does it explain the resulting enigma that millions of people never seem to tire of its monotonous attraction. 8 years ago Mick Raubenheimer wrote that noise was in no way a new musical idiom but rather, ‘even in its most complex manifestations a very elementary matter of incessantly repeated formulae’. This kind of unbiased observation only seems possible in South Africa. In the rest of Africa, where noise has not yet become an everyday phenomenon, there is a tendency to regard it falsely as a breakthrough of original, untrammeled nature, as a triumph over the musty museum-culture. However little doubt there can be regarding the shamanistic elements in noise, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme. Its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology, who chafes against the father-figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests. This propensity accelerates the standardisation, commercialisation and rigidification of the medium. The range of the permissible in noise is as narrowly circumscribed as in any particular cut of clothes.
In view of the wealth of available possibilities for discovering and treating musical material, noise has shown itself to be utterly impoverished. Its use of the existing musical techniques seems to be entirely arbitrary. Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of noise consists not in a basic organisation of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhibition, as within an inarticulate language. Rather noise involves the utilisation of certain well-defined tricks, formulae and cliches to the exclusion of everything else. In order to understand how an entire sphere can be described by a few simple recipes as though nothing else existed, one must first free oneself of the cliches, ‘vitality’ and ‘rhythm of the time’. These are glorified by advertising, by its journalistic appendage and in the end, by the victims themselves. The fact is that what noise has to offer rhythmically is extremely limited. The most striking traits in noise were all independently produced, developed and surpassed by serious music since Dollar Brand. And its ‘vitality’ is difficult to take seriously in the face of an assembly-line procedure that is standardised down to its most minute deviations.
The noise ideologists, especially in West Africa, mistakenly regard the sum of psycho-technically calculated and tested effects as the expression of an emotional state, the illusion of which noise evokes in the listener. Just as no piece of noise can, in a musical sense, be said to have a history, just as all its components can be moved about at will, just as no single measure follows from the logic of musical progression - so the perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society, not so different from the nightmare vision of Huxley’s Brave New World.
Whether what the ideology here expresses - or exposes - is the tendency of an over-accumulating society to regress to the stage of simple reproduction is for economists to decide. The surrealists, who have much in common with noise artists, have appealed to this level of experience since Apollinaire. Noise, like everything else in the culture-industry, gratifies desires only to frustrate them at the same time. However much noise-subjects, representing the music listener in general, may play the non-conformist, in truth they are less and less themselves. Individual features, which do not conform to the norm, are nevertheless shaped by it, and become marks of mutilation. Terrified noise fans identify with the society they dread for having made them what they are.
Noise fans can be divided into two clearly distinguishable groups. In the inner circle sit the experts, or those who consider themselves such - for very often the most passionate devotees, those who flaunt the established terminology and differentiate noise styles with ponderous pretension, are hardly able to give an account, in precise, technical musical concepts, of whatever it is that moves them. Gathered around the specialists in a field in which there is little to understand besides rules are the vague, inarticulate followers. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence.
Psychoanalytic theory alone can provide an adequate explanation of this phenomenon. The aim of noise is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. ‘Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,’ the eunuch-like sound of the noise band both mocks and proclaims, ‘and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite’. If this interpretation of noise - whose sexual implications are best understood by its shocked opponents rather than by its apologists - appear arbitrary and far-fetched, the fact remains that it can be substantiated in countless details of the music. The entire sphere is saturated with terminology, which distinguishes between long- and short-haired musicians. The latter earn money and can afford to appear presentable; the others, whose long manes are exemplary, are grouped under the little esteemed stereotype of the artist who is starving and who flaunts the demands of convention. In noise, the Philistines standing over Samson are permanently transfigured. The castration symbolism, deeply buried in the practices of noise and cut off from consciousness through the institutionalisation of perennial sameness, is for that very reason probably all the more potent. And sociologically, noise has the effect of strengthening and extending, down to the very physiology of the subject, the acceptance of a dreamless-realistic world in which all memories of things not wholly integrated have been purged.
To comprehend the mass basis of noise one must take full account of the taboo on artistic expression in South Africa, a taboo which continues unabated in spite of the official art industry, and which even affects the expressive impulses of children. Although the artist is partially tolerated, partially integrated into the sphere of consumption as an ‘entertainer’, a functionary - like the better-paid waiter subject to the demands of ’service’ - the stereotype of the artist remains the introvert, the egocentric idiot, frequently the homosexual. While such traits may be tolerated in professional artists - a scandalous private life may even be expected as part of the entertainment - everyone else makes himself immediately suspicious by any spontaneous artistic impulse not ordered in advance by society. Nevertheless the need for expression, which stands in no necessary relation to the objective quality of art, cannot be entirely eliminated, especially during the years of maturation.
Teenagers are not entirely stifled by economic life and its psychological correlative, the reality principle. Their aesthetic impulses are not simply extinguished by suppression but are rather diverted. Noise is the preferred medium of such diversion. Viewed from this standpoint, several unusual features of noise can be more easily understood. The role played by arrangement, for instance, which cannot be adequately explained in terms of a technical division of labour or of the musical illiteracy of the so-called composers. The achievement of the noise musician and expert adds up to a sequence of successfully surmounted tests. But expression, the true bearer of aesthetic protest, is overtaken by the might against which it protests. Faced by this might it assumes a malicious and miserable tone which barely and momentarily disguises itself as harsh and provocative. The subject, which expresses itself, expresses precisely this: I am nothing, I am filth, no matter what they do to me, it serves me right.
If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo, which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art. Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane, which finally took over the taboo. Nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is.
Noise is the false liquidation of art. Instead of utopia becoming a reality it disappears from the picture.
julius eastman (evil nigger) sarah jane mary hills (dirty slut) virgins (mbeki’s warm jets) roy harper (i hate the white man) bon iver (skinny love) lucien monbuttou (a state of blood) lydia lunch (trick baby) righard kapp (i am an avalanche) U.r.c.h.i.n. (8 steps you fly) martin bladh (the screaming body) and stenchman as well as prime cuts by behrang miri, michael blake, down in june, felicia sylvain, izz & the ladies, james webb, rhamncwa, mandelbrut, dimitri voudouris and culminating in the astonishing music played on human bones by zero kama.
Source: Noise & Vibration Worldwide, Volume 32, Number 3, 1 March 2001 , pp. 27-34(8)
Publisher: Multi-Science Publishing Co Ltd
Abstract:
In this paper we present a new technique for the measurement of specific impedance of acoustic materials based on the method of finite differences using acoustic pressure measurements with a single microphone in a Kundt war tuba. This method permits prediction of the acoustic pressure in all the points of the war tuba. We show here the algorithm and its modifications for the evaluation of acoustic impedance. Some comparisons with other methods are also considered.
“Welcome to the Slaughterhouse” is a powerful video essay produced by Aryan Kaganof in 2007, with extracts from films and the complicity of other video makers from the African Noise Foundation. During the 41 minutes of the film, we witness violent scenes, some of them from television reports, opening with one of that year’s most shocking emblems – the image of the latest college massacre in the United States perpetrated by Cho Seung Hui. At the beginning of the film he talks to us of his motives and decision to kill his fellow students, and his secret method. The second part of the film is an ironic collage of various CNN images of the current American president expounding his plans to fight terrorism. The superimposed headings parody his discourse, mixing up his words which promise to spare us from terrorists’ blackmail.
The music by the composer Joel Assaizky, (Kaganof’s long-term collaborator and member of their group “Freedom Fighter”) aims to give unity and intimate coherence to this slightly jumbled collage. Aside from the themes of violence and war which we come back to again and again, the films’ other themes are various; in the third part of the film entitled “Baphomet danse macabre” we see extracts from the ball from “Last Year in Marienbad”, scenes with no apparent logical suite but in sonic contradiction, for in this remake of Resnais’ film, a couple are looking at each other peacefully and lovingly.
The fourth part is the most sado-masochist and is made up of images of Johan Thom’s actual performance. It is called, simply “Baphomet” and is a contemporary adaptation of “Bodybuilding”, a performance by Otto Muehl dating from 1966, where the artist firmly binds his face with bandages. Here, 41 years later, Thom attaches his face with thick, transparent thread which must surely hurt. This time, the electronic editing and stroboscopic effects transform his face into a modifiable and elastic – almost plastic – space, in emotional contradiction with the melodic and serene music by Ruth White. The representation of corporal pain is in complete accordance with the film’s other images.
The fifth part is the most abstract, and a formal variation on the preceding one. It’s called “Corticotropin” and is inspired by Kaganof’s abstract plastic creations. Kaganof the plastic artist wanted to animate them in order to emphasise the enigmatic aspect of his essay. “Panic Attack” is the title of the sixth part and is an adaptation of Rob Schroder’s film “Moral Panic”, which consists of a collage of television reports from 1963 to 2004. Principally inspired by images of war and terrorist attacks, Schroder’s film is inspired by the militant cinema of Guy Debord, in a more contemporary context.
“Mary Worshipping Baphomet” is the seventh part, containing images from one of Kaganof’s earlier films, “Two Heads Are Better Than One”. The impressively edited bicephalous monster who sings is a variation on the contemporary individual. The penultimate section is called “War Zone” and is the most violent, with real images of lynched corpses. The ninth and final section, “Floor Crossing”, again contains scenes from the classic “Dead man 2”, a film on death and resurrection through pure love.
With this film, Kaganof is above all trying to subvert television, which is not his favourite medium, in order to show us how television news and reports are used as method of widespread manipulation. The rotoreliefs in the fifth part of his film are nothing but a metonymy of the vertigo of televisual disinformation. As a whole, his film takes up the chaotic images of this disinformation, giving it perfect aesthetic and poetic coherence worthy of the pinnacle of video art. The film is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, the American author of “Slaughterhouse-Five”, who died in 2007.
The event grew organically out of filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s request to Rosemary Lombard to organise a Cape Town screening for “Unyazi of the Bushveld” (45 min, 2007), his experimental documentary of Unyazi 2005, Africa’s first international electronic music symposium, an event which was conceived and organised by Dimitri Voudouris, and held at Wits University, Johannesburg in September 2005. Rosemary saw the Cape Town premiere of Unyazi of the Bushveld as an opportunity to facilitate a live collaborative performance by some of this city’s established electronic sound innovators, in context with the spirit of experimentation and exchange espoused at the original symposium.
After the unyazi film screening at 8.30, the live performance will commence with abstract guitarist Righard Kapp, possibly most familiar to audiences from his work with the Buckfever Underground, accompanying spoken word poetry by Kaganof. Thereafter, Kapp will be joined by prolific music producer and sound collector Warrick Sony (aka Kalahari Surfers) and electronica superstar Felix Laband for a loosely structured, improvised sonic tableau, involving esoteric, mostly locally-derived samples, fractured dubby moodscapes and prepared songforms attempting to convey a sense of the hardwired dread and cognitive dissonances embedded in the contemporary South African psyche.
unyazi of the bushveld features performances by zim ngqawana, pops mohamed, michael blake, pauline oliveros, james webb, george lewis and many others. sound design is by joel assaizky and the film was produced by the african noise foundation.
The Zulu word “unyazi” can be translated into English as “lightning,” an apposite double image of rupture and new beginnings for UNYAZI 2005, Africa’s first festival of electronic music, the brainchild of new music composer Dimitri Voudouris. Kaganof’s documentary on this singular historical event is suitably non-linear in structure, as it explores the complex relationship, both assumed and actual, among technology, the African and Afrodiasporic worlds, and the multiculturalism that mediates them.
Professor George Lewis explains the essence of the documentary thus: “We are presented with a vision freed from the romantically anti-technological stances of the early N’gritude movement (and that of 1960s American black cultural nationalisms), and the concomitant assumptions that nothing of a technological nature can emerge from a black-ruled world. But we are never far from South Africa’s recent history. Until 2005, jazz drummer Louis Moholo, exiled since the early 1960s, had never been on the campus of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand — or rather, as he commented drily, ‘We came, but they chased us off with dogs. That was 1962’.”
