Immersion Into Noise

Noise Music

Generally speaking, Noise Music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and, through their work, traces the history of noise. He defines noise at different times as “intrusive, unwanted”, “lacking skill, not being appropriate” and “a threatening emptiness”, and he traces these trends starting with 18^th century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33"—in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence"—that represents the beginning of noise music proper. [84] For Hegarty, noise music, as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie (1866–1925) to NON to Glenn Branca.

Douglas Kahn, in his work, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo and Dziga Vertov. [85]

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society. [86] He indicates that noise music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious of society, validating and testing new social and political realities. [87]

Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noises and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways. One can find the distinct effort to create something harshly beautiful from something perceived as ugly in what can possibly be identified as a search for a post-industrial sublime in art.

In much the same way that the early modernists were inspired by naïve art, some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge, and vinyl records. Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used in creating my viral symphOny). [88]

For me, art noise combines stimulation into an all-inclusive totalization through sympathetic vibration, just as strings of a piano vibrate in sympathetic agreement, especially when tuned to the tuning system called just intonation. Just intonation, in music, is a system of tuning in which the correct size of all the intervals of the scale is calculated by different additions and subtractions of pure natural thirds and fifths (the intervals that occur between the fourth and fifth, and second and third tones respectively, of the natural harmonic series). Supposedly used in medieval monophonic music (melody without harmony) and considerably discussed by 20^th-century sound artists and art-music theorists, just intonation proved impractical for polyphonic (multi-part) music and was replaced at least by the year 1500 by meantone temperament.

Noise art music can feature distortion, [89] various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static, hiss and hum, feedback, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic. The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, [90] as was the Dada art movement [91] (a prime example being the Antisymphony of Jefym Golyscheff performed by Hannah Höch in Berlin on April 30^th, 1919 with kitchen utensils) [92]—and later the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, Yasunao Tone, George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Walter De Maria's Ocean Music, La Monte Young, Robert Watts, [93] Takehisa Kosugi and Milan Knizak’s Broken Music. [94]

During the early 1900s, a number of art music practitioners began exploring atonality. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg proposed the incorporation of harmonic systems that were, at the time, considered dissonant. This guided the development of twelve-tone technique and serialism. In The Emancipation of Dissonance, Thomas J. Harrison, in 1910, suggested that this development might be described as a metanarrative to justify the so-called Dionysian pleasures of atonal noise. [95] Contemporary noise music is often associated with excessive volume and distortion, particularly in the popular music domain with examples such as Boys Noize, Jimi Hendrix’s previously mentioned use of feedback, Nine Inch Nails and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Theater of Eternal Music, Cornelius Cardew, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Jean Tinguely’s recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII'), the music of Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young’s bowed gong works from the late 1960s, for example 23 VIII 64 2:50:45—3:11 am The Volga Delta From Studies In The Bowed Disc' from The Black Record (1969). Genres such as industrial, industrial techno, and glitch music exploit noise-based materials.

Luigi Russolo, futurist painter of the very early 20^th century, was perhaps the first noise music artist. [96] His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works have little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto. [97]

An early Dada-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. [98] His ready-made, With Hidden Noise (À bruit secret), was a collaborative exercise that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg. What rattles inside when With Hidden Noise is shaken remains a mystery. By the 1920s, modernists Edgard Varèse and George Antheil began to use early mechanical musical instruments—such as the player piano and the siren—to create music that mirrored the noise of the modern world. Antheil’s best-known noise composition is his 30 minutes-long Ballet mécanique (1924), originally conceived as the musical accompaniment to the Dada film of the same name by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger. Eventually the filmmakers and composers chose to let their creations evolve separately, although the film credits still included Antheil. Nevertheless, Ballet mécanique premiered as concert music in Paris in 1926. In 1920, the poem Bruits (Noises) was created by Lajos Kassák, a Hungarian painter, publisher and writer who made several visual poems with newspaper fragments and the superimposition of letters and graphics. In this poem, noises are interpreted as interferences of the media.

Antonio Russolo, the brother of the more famous Luigi Russolo, was another Italian Futurist composer. A 78rpm record made by him in 1921 is the only surviving sound recording that features the original intonarumori. Both pieces, Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti also assembled noises into a collage in which silence is an integral part. In 1923, Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. Arseny Avraamov's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922.

In 1930, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese experimented with records by playing them backwards and varying the playback speeds. John Cage started his Imaginary Landscape series in 1939, which combined recorded sound, percussion, and, in the case of Imaginary Landscape #4, twelve radios. [99]

In the 1940s, Pierre Boulez (who made his name with violently expressive scores and opinionated polemics) embodied a strict sound style shorn of Romantic nostalgia and the detritus of a defunct tradition. [100] Boulez moved on to the rigorously organized technique of total serialism, which organized various aspects of sound—pitch, duration, volume, and attack—into a series of twelve, in line with the twelve-tone system. Under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco, Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for "junk" percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately-tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more.

In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially. Following this, both in Europe and America, other modernist art music composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, G.M. Koenig, Pierre Henry, Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, and David Tudor, explored sound-based composition. In late 1947, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu (To Have Done With the Judgment of God), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia. [101]

In 1949, Nouveau Realisme artist, Yves Klein, wrote The Monotone Symphony, a symphony that consisted of one held note, thereby demonstrating that the sound of one sustained tone made viable music. Also in 1949, Boulez befriended John Cage, who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie. John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry. In Paris, Cage encountered the pioneering electronic composer Pierre Schaeffer, who, after the war, began assembling sound collages made up of pre-recorded pieces of tape. The first of Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consists of locomotive sounds that the composer recorded at a train station.

Back in New York in 1952, Cage constructed his own tape collage, Williams Mix, made up of some 600 tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art Happening at Black Mountain College, and 4'33", the so-called controversial silent piece. The audience saw David Tudor sit at the piano, and close the lid. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise that may make musical sound is always happening.

In 1957, Edgard Varèse created on tape an extended piece of music using noises not usually considered "musical" entitled Poème électronique. Varèse conceptualized his last work in the immersive, conceiving his unfinished Espace as voices in the sky, as though magic, filling all space, criss-crossing, overlapping, penetrating each other. 

Among the techniques used in this period were tape manipulation, subtractive synthesis, and improvised live electronics.

On May 8^th, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded.

The art critic Rosalind Krauss argued that, by 1968, artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist. Sound art found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution. Anti-form process art became the term used to describe this post-modern, post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made. Serious art music responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example the La Monte Young Fluxus composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore From Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and windowpanes, and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor.

In addition, a process of anti-form free noise emerged out of the avant-garde jazz tradition with musicians such as John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra and the Arkestra, Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann, and John Zorn. In the 1970s, the concept of art itself expanded and groups like Survival Research Laboratories, Borbetomagus and Elliott Sharp embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts.

Around the same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appeared with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and NON (aka Boyd Rice). These cassette culture releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where they may degrade into harsh noise. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Current 93, Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Laibach, Steven Stapleton, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Smegma, Nurse with Wound and Einstürzende Neubauten performed industrial noise music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars and unconventional "instruments" (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise production techniques.

Other postmodern art movements influential to postindustrial noise art are Conceptual Art and the Neo-Dada use of techniques such as assemblage, montage, bricolage, and appropriation. [102] Bands like Étant Donnés, Le Syndicat, Test Dept, Clock DVA, Factrix, Autopsia, Nocturnal Emissions, Whitehouse, Severed Heads, Sutcliffe Jügend and SPK soon followed. For me, their noise stood in defiance of the limits of ordinary perception and representation. Thus it was about the opposition between the various pleasures of standard music and the transgressive/ecstatic moment. In a sense, it attempted to set up a stable form of ecstatic transgression where I could go back and forth at will. This is perhaps similar to the tongue-in-cheek idea behind the amusing Excessive Machine in the film Barbarella. [103]

The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording technology in the 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of punk rock, established the no wave aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.

Lou Reed's double LP album, Metal Machine Music (1975) is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music critic Lester Bangs has called the “greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum”. It has also been cited as one of the “worst albums of all time”. Reed was well aware of the electronic drone music of La Monte Young. His Theater of Eternal Music was a seminal minimal music noise group in the mid-1960s with Velvet Underground cohort John Cale, Marian Zazeela, Henry Flynt, Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and others. The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced John Cale's subsequent contribution to the Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback. John Cale and Tony Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with La Monte Young).

The aptly named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognizable rock instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality, improvization, and white noise. One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth who took inspiration from the no wave noise composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself a student of La Monte Young). Marc Masters, in his book on the no wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars and DNA drew on punk rock, avant-garde minimalism and performance art. Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest that was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns in June 1981, followed by the Speed Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May, 1983. Also notable in this vein is Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, an avant-garde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of repeating tape loops as John Lennon plays on different rock instruments such as piano, organ and drums along with sound effects (including reverb, delay and distortion), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Yoko Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds. They followed this recording with another noise recording in 1969 entitled Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions.

Since the late 1980s in Japan, there has been a prolific output of "harsh" noise music (often referred to as japanoise) by the noise figurehead Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s Merz art project of psychological collage). Other Japanese noise artists include Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Maso’s Masonna, Solmania, K2, The Gerogerigegege, and Hanatarash. [104]

Following in the wake of industrial noise music, noise rock, no wave and harsh noise, there has been a flood of noise musicians whose ambient, microsound or glitch-based work is often subtler to the ear. [105] Kim Cascone refers to this development as a postdigital movement and describes it as an aesthetic of failure. [106] Post-industrial noise artists from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s include Alva Noto, Nicolas Collins, Boyd Rice, The Psychic Workshop, Signal, Stephen Vitiello, If, Bwana, PBK Phillip B. Klingler, Aube, Crawling With Tarts, Andrew Deutsch, Randy Grief, Robin Rimbaud, Minoy, Kim Cascone, Master/slave Relationship, Oval, Boards of Canada, Maybe Mental, Kenji Siratori, Thanasis Kaproulias (Novi-Sad), Fennesz, Matthew Underwood, Yasunao Tone, Noise Maker's Fifes, Pole, Arcane Device and Francisco López, among many others. Richie Hawtin, Jan Jelinek, Ricardo Villalobos, Decomposed Subsonic, Trentemøller and other Minimal techno and Microhouse DJs have been using noise elements such as buzz, hum and clicks as sonic flavor since the early 1990s. [107]

Their noisy view of post-industrial society takes into account the rich ensemble of possible relations (the diversity, the unexpected links, the ruptures, the amalgamations, the connected heterogeneity) that Deleuze and Guattari showed us. Indeed for many artists, myself included, Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of post-industrial life re-opened a way for the production of subjectivity in art [108] by affirming the befittingness of multiplicity coupled with the necessary right to dissension typical of art noise.