Immersion Into Noise

Tabulating Power Electronics

My increased involvement in this topic of noise music was launched in downtown Manhattan during the heyday of no wave music. My enjoyment of the music of Glenn Branca, DNA, Rhys Chatham (with whom I played music, but more importantly collaborated with on a no wave noise opera called XS) [115] and others, coupled with my growing knowledge of Fluxus and Minimalist art music as archivist to La Monte Young, led me to curate two noise issues of Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine: [116] Power Electronics (1986) [117] —which led me to meeting Merzbow, and later, Media Myth (1988). [118]

Figure 3

XS the Opera: Shakespeare Theater Boston 1986

The basic premise behind Power Electronics and Media Myth was the exploration of the introspective world of the ear under the influence of the era’s high-frequency electronic environment. Since it was difficult making sense of the 1980s’ swirling media society, the general proposition behind Power Electronics and Media Myth was to look for a paradoxical summation of this uncertainty by looking for artists who took advantage of the time’s superficial saturation—a saturation so dense that it failed to communicate anything particular at all upon which we could concur, except perhaps its overall incomprehensible sense of ripe delirium—as the Reaganomic reproduction system pulsed with higher and higher, faster and faster, flows of senseless info-data to the point of near hysteria.

Perhaps the result of this ripe information abundance was that the greater the amount of Reaganomic information that flowed, the greater the incredulity which it produced, at least for thinking, questioning artists. So, the tremendous load of data produced and reproduced all around us ultimately seemed to make less, not more, conventional sense. Indeed, this feeling became the premise of both Power Electronics and Media Myth.

This supposition about noise and noise music, it seems to me, plays into the history of abstract visual art which teaches us that art may refuse to recognize all thought as existing in the form of representation and that, by scanning the spread of representation, sound art may formulate an understanding of the laws that provide representation with its organizational basis. As a result, in my view, as mentioned above, it was electronic-based sound art's onus to see what unconventional, paradoxical, summational sense—in terms of the subjective world of the imagination—art might make based on an appropriately decadent reading of our time’s paradoxically material-based (yet electronically activated) media environment.

Such a basically abstract, artistic, paradoxical/summational fancy began with the presumption that an information-loaded nuclear weapon had already exploded, showering us with bits of radioactive-like informational sound bytes, thus drastically changing the way in which we perceive and act, even in our subconscious dream worlds. It is this internal, subconscious, paradoxical drama of the Reaganomic, 80s—this subconscious contradictory tension—that I found potentially interesting in conceiving Power Electronics and Media Myth and as a subject specifically suitable for electronic-based sound art.

Electronic-based sound art, by virtue of its distinctive electron constitution of fluidity, floats in an extensive stratosphere of virtuality. Hence, the particular constitution of Power Electronics and Media Myth is best seen, perhaps today, as an osmotic membrane: a blotter of the 1980’s instantaneous ubiquity/proliferation. Consequently, Power Electronics and Media Myth reflected (and worked with) social power. Power Electronics and Media Myth, when viewed as shaped by the de-centered electronic overload of the 80s, is understood today as a flustered code of digital signifiers, a confused collective representation that bewilderingly mutated the ideology of its own reproduction.

So, the question for these projects was, how could artists symbolically turn these de-centered power codes into artistic abstractions of social merit? Perhaps it was possible because I knew, somewhere, that these symbolic codes—which, after all, helter-skelter, make us up—are positively phantasmagorical.

This is still, of course, true today. Based on the premises of Power Electronics and Media Myth, perhaps a socially relevant digitally-based audio noise creativity can be found also in today's electronic-based art's ecstatic potentiality—in that electrons partake (and make up) the all-encompassing phantasmagorical/technological sign-field in which we live and which defines us (at least in part). Since prevailing representation is made up of conventional, rigid social signs (and sound art typically of unconventional irresponsible signs—the mode that represents the real arbitrary nature of all signs as it subverts the socially controlled system of meaning), electronic-based sound art may offer us the opportunity for the creation of relevant and applicable anti-social phantasmagorical signs (hence, abstract ecstatic anti-signs) which may continue to mentally move and multiply us without stop. Yet this fancied aesthetic non-knowledge is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious area of our current identity, as it is also the phantasmal depths from which all digital representation emerges in its precarious, but glittering, existence. Indeed it was this quivering phantasmal cohesion that maintains the sovereign and secret sway over each and every audio sample—this phantasmal vibrating—which I found interesting in conceiving both Power Electronics and Media Myth; a sway beyond reductive minimalist abstraction into an excessive hybrid abstraction—an audio art, which is in theory opposed to the tabular mental space laid out by classical thought. [119]

Surely such a hybrid electronica/phantasmal impetus can help release pent up ecstatic energies in that the more overwhelming and restrictive the social mechanism, the more exaggerated are the resulting effects—and hence excel the assumed determinism of the technological-based phenomenon inherent (supposedly) in our post-industrial information society. Therefore, in this way, I hoped Power Electronics and Media Myth served as an ecstatic impulse/phenomena that proliferates in proportion to the technicization of society—as such a nervous electronica-ecstasy may occur as a result of technological society's obsession with the phantasmal character of electronic speed-proliferation.

My contention is that, as human psychic energies are stifled and/or bypassed by certain controlling aspects of mass technology, such a nervous ecstatic phenomena will increasingly break out in forms of noise art. Similarly, simulation technology—when used in the creation of electronica-based art—promotes an indispensable alienation from the socially constructed self, necessary for the outburst of such nervously ecstatic experiences/acts. Inversely, electronic technology enables the contemporary artist to express nervous ecstatic reactions in ways never before possible. Thus, this nervous ecstatic counteraction provides a phantasmal defiance through transport aimed against the controlling world's blandness and self-destructiveness. This aesthetic noise philosophy provides a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the controlling technical world.

May I just say that the nervous phantasmal play of noises found in Power Electronics and Media Myth (using strategies of jamming, non-communication, miscommunication, interference and disruption) has urgent political/social ramifications in our media-saturated society today. The artists’ well-founded but ambiguous phantasmal model for noise art indicates the capacity for electronic media to jolt consciousness, as it provides the explication of the nervous phantasmal links that abet communications. Hence, excessive and noisy audio abstractions, such as those found here, can be (in a sense) the representation of all representation when they attempt to represent the unlimited field of representation via noise, a noise which non-utilitarian phantasmal ideology attempts to scrutinize in accordance with a non-discursive method. An unlimited field of representation that now appears as an abstract din of nerve-noise where excessive abstraction helps us to step outside of representations to posit us outside of the mechanics of uniform and anthropomorphic dogmatism.

With this art of noise as an unlimited field of representation in mind, we will now open our eyes.