“… one day there will be no music,
just possibilities.”
(N. & C. – p. 164)

Noise & Capitalism

november 04, 2010.

You will agree that this is quite some pair. Intended – in this particular context – as the denotation of two categories supposedly in dialectical opposition (the and should of course rather be read as a versus), it is the title of a bundle of essays published somewhat over a year ago by the prolific audiolab division of Arteleku, a contemporary art center in Donostia-San Sebastián, the capital of the province of Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country, Spain.

In full accordance with what appears to be the philosophy and position of the editors (Mattin, Anthony Iles) as well as with the tendency of most of the volume’s contributions, the almost 200 pages (designed in careful black & white that looks and breaths the style and solemnity of academia, but with a little arty touch, like a wink of an eye) are available as a free pdf download at the Arteleku’s website. Writing this blog-entry moreover should earn me a paper copy of the book. Interesting idea, to let reviewers have a physical copy only after their review has been published … Arteleku offers an even more general possibility for exchange. Indeed, anyone engaged in some sort of artistic activity, is invited to send a sample of her/his work to Arteleku and get a hard copy of the book in return. The material sent will become part of Arteleku’s public library.

Noise & Capitalism is a collection of essays by a subtle mélange of leftwing/(neo-)marxist academics, writers & musicians. Each, with her or his own twist, makers of and/or otherwise passionate about noise music. And not satisfied with the fact that the society in which they live, work and create continues to be (even after so many years of worldwide subversive praxis) firmly designed along capitalist lines. Some what less, some what more, some like this and some like that; but all contributors do let us know that at least part of their ambition is to kick and middle-finger established values and practices. Artistically and socially.

But what is ‘noise’? And how does it relate to ‘capitalism’?

Wading through the bundle’s articles (that come with many a chain of long and twisted sentences, crammed with socio-philo-economical jargon and, for broader theoretical perspective, leaning on and borrowing from the usual suspects – Marx, Debord, DeLeuze…) did get me but little further in obtaining an idea more precise than the one that made me download the book in the first place: ‘noise’, as in the designation of a certain (non-)genre or (non-)style that over the past forty years or so has become a firmly rooted mode of expression within the global network of factions of practitioners and producers of improvised/experimental non-academic musical idioms, that may subtly differ from continent to continent, from state to state and from one metropolitan area to the other, but that are all part of a clearly-and-as-such recognizable (though maybe not easily definable) tao.

The word ‘noise’ occurs explicitly on 73 of the book’s pages, and you will find that almost all occurrences of the term are part of but 7 of the 12 papers. The others concentrate on ‘free improvisation’. And on issues of copyright, documentation and distribution of (sounding) results of these ‘free’ practices. The collection is a somewhat curious mix, of journalism, science/scientism, credo and manifesto, that makes for interesting but pretty tough reading.

Of course ‘noise’ is part of the vocabulary used in Anthony Iles’ Introduction, where noise encompasses that which locates itself self-reflexively at the limit of what can be accepted as music or as musical performance. Nina Power, in a short case-study annex review, suggests that, whereas men are the past of machines (Sartre), women will be the future of noise: [n]o longer will the machines dream through women, but will instead be built by them. They will be used not to mimic the impotent howl of aggression in a hostile world, but to reconfigure the very matrix of noise itself (italics are mine).

Csaba Toth, professor and chair of the History Department at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, where he co-teaches the seminar Electronic Culture/Experimental Music, contributes a paper with the promising title Noise Theory (in which each occurrence of the term is written with a capital N, as in Noise). Noise performance, in Csaba’s view, exercises a culturally coded and politically specific critique of late capitalism, and offers tools for undoing its seemingly incontestable hegemony. Though, given that Noise performance operates in the shadow of recontainment by the very commodity structures it intends to challenge, it remains unclear how exactly a such undoing will come about, Csaba gives us hope: resistance to such commodification continues to occur[:] Noise has become a transnational global cultural form capable of mobilizing diverse constituencies. Towards the end of his paper Csaba concludes that Noise is pre-linguistic and pre-subjective. The noise of heavy machinery and the powerful sonic onslaught of a Macintosh PowerBook are acts that actively foreground their materiality and disrupt meaning. Finally, taking a cue from Lacan via Robert Fink, he claims that digital Noise is not ‘the negation of desire, but a powerful and totalizing metastasis [of desire].’

In his Notes Towards ‘War at the Membrane’, Howard Slater, a London-based writer, researcher and trainee counselor, takes this one step further: Under the onslaught of noise the human essence dissolves into an (alienating) diffusion of potential becomings whereby identity can be revealed as a fabrication, as the foreclosing product of endocolonisation.

Maybe then there is no such (one) thing as ‘noise’? Ray Brassier, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, opens his Genre is Obsolete observing that ‘noise’ has become the expedient moniker for a motley array of sonic practices – academic, artistic, counter-cultural – with little in common besides their perceived recalcitrance with respect to the conventions governing classical and popular musics[:] it has become a generic label for anything deemed to subvert established genre. [... T]he functioning of the term, then, equivocates between nominal anomaly and conceptual interference, [...] though ‘noise’ is neither more nor less inherently subversive than any other commodifiable musical genre[:] the categories invoked in order to decipher its political potency cannot be construed as inherently ‘critical’ while they remain fatally freighted with neo-romantic clichés about the transformative power of aesthetic experience.

I found Ben Watson‘s contribution Noise as Permanent Revolution or, Why Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow to be one of the better reads in the book. He observes that the sometime experience of ‘noise music’ as an ‘unflinching barrage’ [...] has more in common with Beethoven’s Große Fuge (1825) than it has with many of the more obvious and contemporary references. Ben also points out that a whole lot of the ‘noise’ indeed is little more than sonic wallpaper, a safe & trendy pose of ‘subversion’, devoid of merit or interest.
Indeed.
As already hinted at above, much of the writing in Noise & Capitalism is about free improvisation. Thus there is Bruce Russell (an improvised sound worker from New Zealand with a life-long engagement in critical theory), who writes Towards a Social Ontology of Improvised Sound Work. Using situationist theory as a uniquely powerful tool for the criticism of culture under the rule of the commodity, Bruce categorizes improvised sound work as one of the key areas of inter-generic hybridity in contemporary music.
There is also Edwin Prévost, percussionist and founding member of AMM (seminal to the development of free improvisation as a practice), whose earlier writings on the subject are extensively cited by some of the other contributing essayists, and who himself contributed an article entitled Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Celebrity. Edwin points out that in some sense the musics under consideration exist precisely because of the socio-economic strictures of a capitalist culture (italics are mine). Moreover, as French musician and researcher Matthieu Saladin points out in his paper, Points of Resistance and Criticism in Free Improvisation: Remarks on a Musical Practice and Some Economic Transformations, the profound mutations carried out by capitalism from the second half of the 1970s (which allowed its redeployment in the following decade) seem to have mainly been brought about by employers’ organizations taking into consideration the demands [for more freedom and individual autonomy] that stemmed from artistic criticism[, refusing] control by hierarchy and the planning of tasks.
It therefore is no wonder, really, that one of the editors (Mattin) and one of the philosopher-contributors (Ray Brassier) – not in the book, but in a related context – arrive at the conclusion that in this day and age, indeed, the “free improviser provides a model of the ultimate capitalist”…

To cut things short: the relation between non-academic experimental musics (in their guises of ‘noise’ and ‘free improvisation’ and whatever else one would like to call it) and the social structures of which they (willy-nilly) are inseparable parts, is a devious one. It is complicated and it’s tricky. The more so because these structures, along with the musics and the manifold motivations and interests of their creators, are of course far from static. They are caught in a flux, with everchanging positions and depths of entanglement. Undoing the knot as it existed at some given past moment in time without damaging the constituents would already be a daunting task, and I have yet to encounter an author able (and willing) to take on this task in a balanced and coherent manner. It will take quite some breath, to come up with a vision that would be approximately complete. For now most of the writings on the subject (also the academic ones) lack distance and overview. Together they add up to little more than a series of afterthoughts, as so many pieces of an image seen in a broken mirror glass.

On the other hand, it of course is a bit of a cheap rhetorical & redactional trick on my side to run you through these 200 pages by means of a collage of ‘one-liners’: a parade of emperors stripped from their clothes. I did so, because (primo) I find the little emperors worthwhile to keep for my own reference and (secundo) because I think they will give you at least a hint of what Noise & Capitalism wants to be about. I doubt that other than the couple of viewers for which reading (and writing) these kind of papers is (part of) their job, few will ever find the courage to delve any deeper. And I will not urge you to. For it may learn you a bit about some things, I’m afraid though that it will learn you little (new) about the music. Except (and that, mind you, is no little achievement) that the music matters. In their persistent stubbornness, the unti(r)ed pursuers of experiments in the far outskirts of our cultural landscape continue to push borders. And they push these borders in public, however small the attention is that their efforts will get, because (citing Ben Watson’s paper) the burning intent and beating heart of every ‘genre’ is proselytising and avid, believing it can burst into universality and reach all ears. It is there, at (h)ear point, that ‘mainstream’ in hindsight continues to pick its lot of the raw diamonds that through the efforts of these pioneers came rising to the surface. And the ‘capitalist beast’ will step in, to cut and polish them, make them glitter, market them, and sell.

Personally, I find this process fascinating. More than this: it actually serves the music, not in the least because it entices those that have chosen to pioneer and work in the bare fields and trenches to move on and dig even deeper.

Which, finally, brings me to the upshot of all that went before.

Part of it is a CDR (and – soon to be – free download) by noish~ (moniker of Oscar Martin) that has appeared as the 15th release in the Free Software Series, promoting experimental works that were realized using free software.
Being a digital file, the pdf version of Noise & Capitalism at heart is nothing but a mass of 0′s and a 1′s, which – with suitable tools – can be materialized in whatever form one chooses. Oscar Martin choose to let his free software read Noise & Capitalism‘s pdf as an audio file.
When doing so, at least in theory, anything could happen. Interpreted as sound, sequences of digits encoding the text might correspond to sequences of digits of some encoding of a hypothetical audio recording of the voice of Karl Marx himself.
In practice, though, I guess that chances that a certain decoding will make such a thing happen are as slim as the chance that a randomly generated sequence of letters and spaces turns out to be the same as the first chapter of Graham Greene’s The Human Factor.

What it does – in both cases – bring on, is a glorious heap of noise.

I like the idea of transcoding. It is a means to perform ‘cultural hacks’ which is easy to use and accessible, but at the same time remains highly abstract. And I like even better the conceptual twist of thus ‘hacking’ precisely this Arteleku book, and make it come out as (technological) noise. (The fact that whatever other pdf encoded document is very likely to transcode into a similar type of audio, is beside the point.)

The resulting sound piece – “noise&capitalim.txt >> /dev/dsp” – lasts somewhat over 26 minutes and – as far as I am concerned – stands out as a highly enjoyable and varied sonic metaphor for the text from which it is derived. (No, I do not think that the ‘s’ missing in ‘capitalim’ is intentional.) The piece is composed: like the ideas and words in the book, the raw noise that resulted from the raw data has been subjected to a transformational and editing process, that you find schematized in the picture above.
In his review of the piece on the furthernoise website, Derek Morton provides a detailed log of his personal listening journey. Here is my rendition of Derek’s impressions:

00:00-00:32 * Ear prickling stereophonic grit
00:33-01:30 * 3 to 4 timbres of static interspersed with feedback
01:30-02:25 * White noise floods the mix; track now raging loud
02:26-03:10 * Circuit bendy type bleeps and noise
03:11-05:40 * Noise swell followed by erupting random deeper bass tones; watch the speaker cones dance
05:40-08:33 * Random waved shaped tone blips doing ‘sample & hold’ dance
08:33-09:15 * Waves of granulized sound swing back and forth like pendulum
09:15-10:53 * Motor-like noise with distant subtle drone
09:15-12:22 * Soothing static wiggles into recognizable patterns with rising 60 Hz hum
12:23-15:50 * RF interface, loud rumbles and sine tones fighting for the spotlight; flavors of white noise mixed and panned around
15:51-19:06 * Thinning out, noise subsides to a skittering electronic voice which eventually evolves into rapid fire machine gun serenade
19:07-20:43 * Valley of BUFFER OVERRIDE
20:44-24:13 * Resonating metallic sound undulates amidst dense forest of harsh scraping static
24:13-26:11 * The slithering digital beast makes its way back to its cage.

[logged by: Derek Morton (furthernoise.org)]

The combination of the textual and the sonic version of Noise & Capitalism actual confirmed my conviction that here and now (in this badly capitalist world) we need not worry about the music’s future. I deeply believe in a ‘music’ doing very well also without us reflecting upon it, without us scheming and plotting to have it run a certain course rather than another. Though admittedly there may be limits to what we are able to imagine, the music – such is my profound conviction – will take care of itself, in whatever future context one may envision. All that it needs are dedicated individuals, and a society that allows them unrestricted freedom of speech and access to the means to express themselves in whatever way they seem fit.

As long as these basic conditions are met, the music will continue to thrive.
There will be ups, and there will be downs. Of course.
I never said it would be easy.

Is there any reason why it should?

http://www.mattin.org/Aitor_Izagirre.pdf

Noise & Capitalism, Mattin & Anthony Iles (Eds.) Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series), Donostia, 2009

Editado por Arteleku Audiolabⁱ , Noise & Capitalismⁱⁱ no es un libro académico, se trata más bien de un libro editado al modo de comisariado artístico, donde se convoca a un grupo de personas a participar. Mattin (mattin.org) es un artista vasco que trabaja con la improvisación y el ruido tratando de analizar las implicaciones sociales y económicas de la música. Anthony Iles es escritor y editor londinense en proyectos como la revista Mute (metamute.org). La lista de colaboradores y los temas tratados en el libro vienen de vínculos y relaciones creadas en contextos de práctica de la música experimental, y no de un centro académico. Una buena forma de acercarse al libro es entendiéndolo como una improvisación colectiva donde, bajo las nociones generales del título, cada cual va aproximándose desde su individualidad a un espacio común. No hay una tesis principal en el libro, hay una cadena de preguntas, respuestas, sugerencias. Hay disonancias, posiciones contradictorias pero también lugares comunes. Empieza con una portada experimental donde se transcribe el proceso por el cual se ha ideado la portada misma y las relaciones que se han trazado para ello. Los estilos (discursivos) son muy distintos entre sí; hay músicos, filósofos, artistas y críticos hablando. El tema sobre el que orbitan es la música experimental y las relaciones de ésta con el capitalismo. ¿Qué tipo de relaciones son estas? Son relaciones de sometimiento a la vez que de resistencia, entendido el ruido como un aspecto implícito al capitalismo y su despliegue de poder, o como la distorsión de su orden que se cuela por las fisuras desde abajo, desde las resistencias.

Introduce el libro Iles. Tomando el caso The Foundry (Hackney) repasa cómo el capitalismo en mutación permanente se sirve hoy especialmente de los artistas (de su creatividad y su rol social) para reforzarse en beneficio propio. El caso de la gentrificación mediante el artista es paradigmático. A partir de esta reflexión va presentando algunas ideas relevantes de los textos.

Mattin abre y cierra el libro con dos ensayos. En el primero explora el potencial de la improvisación a través de la idea de “fragilidad” tomada de Radu Malfatti. Al improvisar el músico se expone a situaciones de fragilidad que según Mattin son las realmente interesantes, las que hacen ampliar el campo. En el último aborda otra cuestión crucial para entender la situación de los “creativos” hoy: la propiedad intelectual. Plantea, como inherentes al noise y a la improvisación libre, una relación problemática hacia la idea de autoría, tratando de defender el anti-copyright y su papel en el contexto de economía informacional como una consecuencia natural de estas prácticas de resistencia (más allá de los sonidos hacia la producción-distribución).

En los 90 se pensó el “género” noise como algo fascinante. Pero esa categoría es muy vaga. Csaba Toth trata de defender que el noise como género se define por “toda una matriz socio-cultural”. Si la sociedad del espectáculo es, siguiendo a J. Attali, la sociedad del silencio, entonces el noise actuaría como disonancia y fuerza crítica. Los cambios en el capitalismo habrían traído la “rehabilitación visible y audible” de la ciudad, imposición neo-fascista del silencio como único código. El noise por tanto entraría en este contexto como forma cultural de resistencia.

Edwin Prévost (AMM), ve en la música improvisada una alternativa a las relaciones sociales mercantilistas. Al margen de la conciencia política de los músicos, al improvisar hay implícitamente un modelo de resistencia, alternativo al de mercado. Aborda la conciencia política de los músicos después de haber hecho unas consideraciones sobre sus relaciones básicas con el mercado. Al tener que auto-inventarse constantemente y ser intrínsecamente dialógica, la identidad del grupo tiene que aflorar por encima de las individualidades autoritarias cada vez que se toca. Aunque ve antecedentes claros en el grupo de New York en torno a J. Cage y la escuela de Darmstadt, la improvisación libre llega a otro campo más anti-autoritario donde la “producción de sonidos” se entiende cultivada de forma fuertemente personal en un contexto social sin mediar (por partituras, etc.) que choca contra ideas como “celebridad”.

En el discurso de Ray Brassier se aprecia una dedicación filosófica. Su acercamiento es interesante ya que extiende el ruido más allá de su aspecto acústico. A través de dos grupos de música ruidista propone que el ruido, por definición, es una “interferencia conceptual”. Traspasa los límites claros de la categoría y es por naturaleza anti-genérico. En el noise colapsan los límites y se abre el nuevo campo de la anomalía. El género está muerto precisamente por eso, por la irrupción del ruido dentro del campo musical (artístico y deberíamos de entender también, social). De aquí la contradicción inherente a los intentos del mercado por crear una parcela general “noise”.

Una idea de gran interés que encuentro en el texto de Bruce Russell es la relación entre práctica artística y toma de conciencia colectiva de la realidad social o de alguno de sus aspectos. Un texto extenso y lleno de ideas interesantes, que toma de la tradición marxista más heterodoxa (Gramsci, Lukacs, Lefevre…) ideas como la de “ontología social” y se sirve del aparato teórico situacionista para trasladar algunas ideas clave al terreno de lo que define como “trabajo sonoro improvisado”. Tras entrar a analizar las claves teóricas de esa tradición que desemboca en la Internationale Situationniste, ve en la práctica de la improvisación no idiomática un lugar de sentido contemporáneo para ideas como la de situación construida, o détournement. De ahí pasa a aspectos de esta “praxis crítica” como son el rechazo al “culto del compositor”, de las reglas musicales, de “los modos jerárquicos de composición, lectura de partituras y conducción”. Al final del trabajo la idea de “tiempo” y “unidad de la experiencia” aparecen centrales para el análisis crítico del valor de la improvisación.

Nina Power, intenta aproximarse a la cuestión del ruido a través del género. Analiza la relación entre máquina, ruido, trabajo y mujer. Las mujeres habrían guardado una relación especial con la máquina y, por tanto, concluye (en lo que a mi parecer es una falacia) con el ruido. ¿Qué pasa cuando la mujer crea sus propias máquinas? se pregunta. Para ello toma como ejemplo el trabajo de Jessica Rylan música que construye sus propios instrumentos sonoros y produce con ellos un ruido que sería alternativo al tradicionalmente hegemónico masculino. El ruido de Rylan es un ruido personal. Al hilo de esto predice un nuevo imaginario ruidista femenino.

Ben Watson (quien sugirió el título del libro) es conocido por su trabajo sobre F. Zappa y por el extenso trabajo sobre la obra de D. Bailey. En este libro nos hace un repaso a las relaciones de la música con el mercado. Para ello se desplaza desde el músico al papel del crítico musical que trabaja para el sistema a través de medios como la revista The Wire. Aquí se plantean problemas como el del “nicho”, por el que se pretende buscar a una práctica tan incómoda como es el ruido (y la improvisación que los incluye), su casilla apropiada que la categorice y funcione así en el sistema de mercado. Matthiew Hyland continúa con Bailey para llegar a los músicos-artistas contemporáneos. Así entra en la cuestión de cómo se relacionan como músico con el mercado.

Matthieu Saladin es músico y filósofo y ahonda en conceptos centrales desatendidos para el análisis de la relación improvisación-capitalismo. Primero entra en los aspectos de resistencia intrínsecos a la improvisación. Después, de la mano de investigaciones sociológicas va a considerar “el nuevo espíritu del capitalismo”, y cómo éste ha mutado para seguir reproduciéndose, empleando una serie de elementos asimilados de la crítica social de movimientos obreros y de algunos elementos críticos centrales de las vanguardias, especialmente presentes en la improvisación no idiomática (creatividad, adaptación constante a nuevas situaciones…). Las nuevas formas de gestionar el trabajo en las empresas, reproducen estos modelos, trasladados al orden económico, en su precariedad y fragilidad. Saladin se refiere a cómo han cambiado también las audiencias desde los 60-70 a hoy en conciertos de música improvisada. Hoy la conciencia política está casi ausente. Sin embargo, la dimensión política de esta música mantiene su aspecto crítico que aflora en su estética. Su ausencia de identidad apunta a una diversidad innata como un espacio vacío que la permite existir. No preexiste sino que tiene su razón de ser en la pura práctica. Refiriéndose a J. Ranciere advierte que es el “disenso” el que viene a ocupar el espacio vacío en esa práctica, no porque no se llegue a consensos en ella sino porque éste no se persigue necesariamente como en otras músicas. El ruido aflora en el impredecible encuentro de esas diferencias contribuyendo al cuestionamiento de las divisiones estéticas.

El texto de Howard Slater es el más confundente, retóricamente mucho más hermético, en ocasiones como conteniendo ruidos, sugiere sin embargo una serie de ideas de gran interés para el análisis del nuevo capitalismo y sus relaciones con la música (y con todo el orden sensible de lo social). El tiempo-espacio de producción se ha extendido fuera de la fábrica tomando la vida humana entera. Ninguna actividad queda fuera del orden productivo, incluso nuestras propiedades-afectivas. Así, nuestros sentidos (membranas) serían, no sólo puntos estimulados por los mensajes de los medios sino “puntos cruciales para el constante mantenimiento de nosotros mismos como ‘puntos de circulación’”. El capitalismo automatizaría así nuestros sentidos y afectos como primer golpe para seguir reproduciéndose. Es el campo de batalla para la “guerra en la membrana”. Aquí es importante el papel de agente antagonista que otorga a las prácticas estéticas de vanguardia cuya más importante labor, sería la desautomatización de los sentidos otorgándoles una tarea crítica en la “construcción de nuestra subjetividad” autónomamente. Así la improvisación y el noise jugarían un papel crucial contra la forma de alienación más radical, la de la percepción, produciendo un nuevo nivel de “percepción de la percepción”.

Se trata en definitiva de un libro rico en preguntas abiertas y sugerentes para quienes quieren introducirse o ahondar en las relaciones entre música, política y economía difícilmente resumible en un espacio tan corto como este. Creo que es fácil ver algunos precedentes a este proyecto en los libros de C. Cardewⁱⁱⁱ, y especialmente en el trabajo de J. Attali sobre la economía política de la música^iv. Sin embargo el enfoque de Noise & Capitalism difiere de aquellos. Hay más puntos de vista y encontrarle un centro es una tarea imposible. Lejos de teorizaciones ajenas a la actualidad y enquistadas en problemas alejados en el tiempo, nos sitúa en el momento preciso en el que estamos y en la clase de problemas derivados de una sociedad dominada por el orden económico actual. La cercanía de los contribuidores con las prácticas más contemporáneas evita que nos alejemos de una serie de problemas urgentes y actuales. Es una pena, sin embargo, que nadie se haya atrevido a tratar de forma explícita y sistemática los aspectos básicos de la relación entre el capitalismo y el ruido como fenómeno acústico.

A. Izagirre

http://gabone.info

From Dubstep to Free Improv to Noise, people turn to music to express something about the world that words alone can’t. How well, then, do two recent books – Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare and the group work Noise & Capitalism – serve their listener-readers? A review by Paul Helliwell

In case of sonic attack on your district follow these rules…

- ‘Sonic Attack’, Hawkwind/ Michael Moorcock, sometime in the 1970s.ⁱ

‘The twenty-first century started with a bang’ says Steve Goodman (nearly) at the start of his 2010, MIT published Sonic Warfare. Taking us to the darkside of sound, Goodman focuses in on vibration, on a politics of frequency rather than volume, in particular the ‘bad vibes’ from the infrasonic bass frequencies of dub sound systems to those that engender fear and dread from military special weapons.ⁱⁱ He replaces the linear speed – a conjoined marker with the war and noise of the Italian Futurists at the start of the 20^th century – with the angular velocity of afrofuturist music’s rhythmic vortices at the start of the 21^st.century. Sonic Warfare moves an optimistic reading of Deleuze, based on flows, to one based on the vortex, ‘the model for the generation of rhythm out of noise [...] (that) blocks flow while accelerating it [...] the abstract model of the war machine.’ The vortex changes noise into rhythm, futurism into afrofuturism, and enables a hijack of the academic discourse on noise from within. But for Deleuze and Guattari ‘a war machine tends to be revolutionary, or artistic, much more so than military.’ⁱⁱⁱ Why then does Goodman read it so literally?^iv

War – What Is it Good For?

Music is joy. But there are times when it necessarily gives us a taste for death …music has a thirst for destruction

- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980^v

For an activity that so many people pin their hopes on, the philosophical position of music seldom rises above it being a distraction, and claims for its radical potential seem to be made more out of habit rather than real belief. As a weapon of war Goodman may believe he has found an example of sound working directly that cannot be ignored. If Deleuze’s philosophy is one of connection then Goodman uses it to draft the usual noise/war/speed suspects Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Manuel DeLanda, Friedrich Kittler and many others into his own war machine.^vi There is the omnipresent ecology of fear of the war against terror but also a militarisation of theory here; war – what is it good for? Kittler in tracing the roots of almost all media technologies to war would say that it is the father of all things, like the Italian futurists he must admit its value in shocking passeists, the ‘has beens’.^vii As does Goodman, whose Sonic Warfare is both Deleuzian nomadic war machine and literal state war machine (this is a contradiction in Deleuzian terms but not an insurmountable one – the state may absorb the nomad war machine by capture).^viii This gives the book a somewhat queasy affective tone – one too dark for music, but too flippant and celebratory for sonic warfare.

For Goodman these proliferating ‘Black Atlantean’ musics (dubstep, crunk, grime, baile funk, reggaeton, kwaito, hyphy) are a better fit to Deleuze and Guattari’s theories than the modern composition, literary, artistic, and B-Movie examples that litter their work, and more interesting than the Improv, guitars, and above all noise music that hog academic debate. In academia, music has been thought of in a number of ways, first it was understood (musicologically) in terms of the score, with black, popular and dance music discussed only as directly sociological documents largely in terms of lyrics, and only later did it come to be understood as sound. Goodman is still fighting this war against the lyric, and he acknowledges his formation in that Deleuzoguattarian swarm incubator the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University. Curiously, Goodman and the CCRU’s reliance on music’s (or noise, or rhythm’s) formal properties is little used by Deleuze and Guattari who are much more interested in its content ‘a child dies… a woman is born… a bird flies off’.^ix Badiou dryly observes that Deleuzian concepts are often transported to another field only ‘to say that they function well’.^x How has Goodman used Deleuze?

Wardance

One key CCRU debt would be to Erik Davis’s more than a decade old essay ‘Roots and Wires’, a reworking of John Miller Chernoff’s writing on African polyrhythm. This reading is the still present fossil-seed of the rhythmanalysis Goodman conducts. Erik Davis took Chernoff’s work on African polyrhythm and used it to provide a theory of the then current UK music jungle/ drum and bass in terms of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.^xi When listened to, danced to, polyrhythm immanently appears as a steady metering beat (repetition), with a beat playing off it between these beats (difference). When composing or reading (viewed transcendentally) it appears as the interplay of a number of rhythms running in different time-signatures or perhaps at different metres (speeds). Rhythm here is an active relation of different regions, a productive tension. Crucially, what you take to be the metering beat can change – but no one dancing is going to thank you if you actually do this to them while DJ’ing. Repetition and metre are key in our collective mobilisations on the dance floor, in military drill, in the orchestra, in synchronising emotion, in synchronising labour – repetition and obvious, pulsed metre are the popular, the low, machine-produced prole-feed, and art music becomes itself by appearing to eschew them.^xii Art reacts against the machines and views repetition as fatal and inhuman, we react with the machines, viewing the repetition they offer as cyclical and generous.

What Goodman is looking for here is perhaps not a theory of an already obsolescent musical style, but a means of connecting polyrhythm with Deleuze and Guattari. Surely, though, they should have commented on it themselves? He stumbles over his key problem in moving from the modern composition examples used by Deleuze and Guattari to other musics.^xiii For Goodman the musical sources they draw on rule out a collective mobilisation. One example they use is Oliver Messiaen whom Goodman disparages for saying jazz and military marching are not rhythmic (but metered) and accuses him of being part of the ‘European musicological elite‘ (with Adorno – Ouch!), but a few lines later he must also acknowledge that Deleuze and Guattari say exactly the same thing. Goodman goes no further than to bemoan their snobbery, and then apply them as if nothing were the matter.

But perhaps Goodman is on more orthodox ground than he realises. In Messiaen’s music, elaborate strategies are adopted to produce a non-pulsed time – the Aion; for Deleuze and Guattari this is an elusive, fluctuating ‘time out of joint‘ in which new events may happen as opposed to the pulsed Chronos of steady metering historical time. In Deleuzoguattarian terms the time of the virtual is the Aion, its smooth space is of the nomadic war machine. But Deleuze has ignored the fact that metre is still relied upon by the musicians to produce an experience for the audience of non-pulsed time (how else could the musicians act together?).^xiv The distance between Deleuze’s non-pulsed time and polyrhythm Goodman thinks unbridgeable, so he passes on quickly, but they may not be as far apart as he believes.^xv

Rhythmanalysis

We have already seen the substitution of the vortices of a (black) afrofuturism for a linear speed of a (white) futurism, retaining the tropes of noise and war and a refusal of the original musical examples of Deleuze and Guattari. But Goodman also attempts a rhythmanalytic opening up of Deleuze and Guattari themselves, of their own influences/ connections (not Spinoza but Lefebvre, Bachelard, Bergson). Of the three inventors of rhythmanalysis acknowledged by Goodman, it at first looks as if Henri Lefebvre’s 1980 work will be marginalised in favour of an unpublished1931 manuscript by Pinheiros Dos Santos, but of the three Lefebvre is ultimately the most discussed. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis arrived late in the Anglophone countries due to a 20 year gestation and a 28 year delay in translation. There is a further hangover – even Stuart Elden, in his translator’s introduction, cannot see Deleuze and Guatttari as adopters of Lefebvre’s technique, as if the writing on repetition and difference did not exist in both. To rephrase Lefebvre, is not a part of Deleuze and Guattari’s project a criticism of reification in the name of becoming, is it not taken up in what is most concrete; rhythm?^xvi

This would be Goodman’s strongest argument – a way to overcome the view that (other than the refrain) Deleuze uses musical examples only as a metaphorical explanation of his arguments. Brian Massumi (the translator of A Thousand Plateaus) licenses us to make analogies from these when he enjoins us to treat that book as a record, as something that can be dipped into rather than read as a whole. In contrast Ian Buchanan and others argue we must build a properly Deleuzian theory of music – high or low – using Deleuze’s own tools.^xvii

Life During Wartime

For me the smooth ride of Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun (a sonic f(r)iction where musical example and Deleuzian text are in a state of mutual excitation) has not been achieved – the full torque Deleuzo-speak and the balancing statements required of academic writing don’t hold each other in constructive tension like the elements of a good polyrhythm ought to.

The book claims to be in a state of oscillation between ‘dense theorization’ and ‘exemplary episodes’ but none of these are from the author’s own experience as dubstep producer, record label manager and DJ, Kode9. He never intrudes upon his own text and there are no equivalents of the ornery Improv musicians who stifled Ben Watson’s monograph, Derek Bailey, in their emphasis on praxis. He takes us to a pirate radio station but don’t go expecting to meet the massive – it is as if the rapture has already happened. There’s no sweat, no sex, no dancing, no bodies, no violence, no records and little MC chatter. We are offered the rhythmic nexus but not the cash nexus. There is no testimony from the victims of sonic warfare either; most examples are internet rumour, urban (warfare) myths, Men Who Stare at Goats.^xviii War here is remote, bloodless, simulated; war as we are increasingly offered it while our armies wage it at the peripheries – another training simulation of the Military Entertainment Complex.^xix

Why this repression of example? When Melissa Bradshaw reviews Sonic Warfare in terms of Goodman’s recently released Hyperdub 5 compilation, he advises against it saying he is more interested in the inconsistencies and divergences between the book and the label.^xx It’s not just the women who are missing from the book, she notes, it is humanity as a whole. She sees its being anti-anthropocentric as a good thing.^xxi Having recently watched the UK reggae soundsystem film Babylon I cannot agree. Shorn of the people who improvise the combination of records and lyrics there is no understanding of the political economy of the soundsystem and why it has gone global. There is no understanding of these increasingly local scenes without recourse to the local and particular. Goodman has committed the cardinal Deleuzian sin of talking about communication rather than engaging in dialogue.

The book that Goodman meant to write, the one full of global Ghettotech, is announced in the forward and then banished to the footnotes, exiled by an editor as something that can only travel across the black Atlantic steerage. When, nearly at the end of the Sonic Warfare, Goodman enjoins us to ‘(listen) [...] for new weapons’ he also shies away from making ‘grand claims regarding the spontaneous politicality of the so-called emergent creativity of the multitude’ – this is the discussion he can no longer have with us because we are no longer there and neither is he.

The everyday is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in, a conflict between the great indestructible (cyclic) rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production, consumption, circulation and habitat… a bitter… dark struggle round time.

- Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier.^xxii

Noise in this World

Noise and Capitalism has the 11 authors’ experience built in (rather than designed out) – and after Sonic Warfare we might expect gains from this. Six of the authors I’ve met, two play free Improv, two play other kinds of music, Anthony Iles is a dubstep fan, Nina Power likes noise, Matthew Hyland reviewed the same copy of Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation that I did (and still has it), but then I’ve also met Steve Goodman (at the Noise Theory Noise conferences at Middlesex). Can these two books be brought into a productive tension?^xxiii

First off the title, Noise and Capitalism, suggested by Ben Watson, (nearly) does what it says on the tin. The connection between noise and capitalism is the books problematic, it is a provocation designed to annoy the Wire, but the strengths of the essays on Improv pull the book in that direction. Are there problems in this doubling of improvisation and noise, last attempted in Jacques Attali’s Noise? – nothing happens without noise (says Attali) but little happens without improvisation (that is why the ‘work to rule’ is so effective). Both partake in the avant-garde fusion of art and life, one that, as Howard Slater argues, has become central to capitalism. Nonetheless before it can be compared to anything else, Noise and Capitalism must be brought into some kind of productive tension with itself. ^xxiv

If the free liberated without a doubt and in the poetic way in the 1960s, today it is only liberal.

- Free Improv’er Noël Akchoté

For Mathieu Saladin the Improv scene is composed of both Boltanski and Chiapello’s ‘social critics’, who are concerned with equality and denounce both exploitation and individualism, and ‘artist critics’ who resist the oppression of standardisation and commodification. If these currents were furthest apart in Dada and Italian Futurism, arguably the precursors of Improvisation and Noise, then May 1968 was the moment when these two were closest together. If the subsequent years have been marked by a recuperation of ‘artist criticism’ to the point where it has become ‘the new spirit of capitalism’, then ‘social criticism’ has also had its share of defeats.

Against this Saladin seeks, again, the improvisatory moment and Rancière’s degree zero gesture of ‘dissensus’ – that each work of art, or each such moment is a politico-aesthetic re-ordering of (not just) what can be said but (crucially) who can say it. The actually existing scene’s defects await new improvisers and a new audience to come. This separation of scene and practice, genre and concept that Mathieu makes is ahistorical, (and improviser Radu Malfatti is clear that without time/history we cannot assess stagnation or progression), but in holding them apart he at least makes the practice visible again.

But if the Improv was free, so now are the recordings. Mattin’s investigation of copyright and Myspace with Walter Benjamin’s Author as Producer in one hand and his Critique of Violence in the other leads him to a call for improvisation ‘changing the conditions in which the music is produced’ in such a way as to refuse the law (and violence) that guarantees copyright. In his interview with Radu Malfatti and a recent Mute article, Mattin reveals this would require the annihilation of Free Improv,

We are forced to question the material and social conditions that constitute the improvised moment – structures that usually validate improvisation as an established genre.

These genre conventions he now views as normalising strategies to be overcome, with Brechtian alienation technique, Improv to Impro. In many ways this is a working through of many of the critiques contained in this book.xxv Even the cover – notes of a dialogue between Her Noise exhibitor Emma Hedditch and Mattin as to what the cover should be – is made to do work, extending the dialogic of Free Improv outwards to make the process and critical thinking involved in the graphic design for the book visible.xxvi

Similarly, Matthew Hyland investigates Derek Bailey’s formation as a jobbing musician in the provincial dancehalls before the need to sound like the records put him out of work.xxvii Matthew notes that for musicians, once we were waged labourers and now we’re our own mini-brand with a career development loan, and this is the change in capitalism as a whole and for all of us (at least in the West). It is far from ‘idealism’, as Andrew McGettigan’s review in Radical Philosophy maintains, to question the centrality of the recording at the moment that capitalism dissolves it as a commodity, nor at the moment when it was being installed.xxviii

Howard Slater’s is perhaps the article that approaches Sonic Warfare most closely; his ‘War of the Membrane’ is about affect, but he is willing to venture into a discussion of capitalism and politicality in a way that Goodman is not. McGettigan bemoans this saying ‘It must make life more exciting to think that one’s listening habits are per se engaged in a war over instincts and perception’, but music is more than our individual listening habit, a fact obscured by its omnipresence. To dismiss music’s collective political (or psychoanalytical) effects as ‘a fantasy’ is a denial of what music is capable of. If it is a fantasy, it is a planet wide one. The problem here is in how Slater ends music, in a comfortable therapeutic silence no longer fear-filled ‘one day there will be no music, just possibilities’, but this is a return to the Aion.^xxix

McGettigan recommends reading the essays by Prévost, Watson, Brassier and Saladin, and dismisses the rest. Prévost calls on us to resist scientism, authority and celebrity and to dive straight into the potent mix of self-assertion and collectivity that is Free Improv, one, he tells us, capitalism cannot acknowledge. Prévost is still fighting Stockhausen’s scientism, Cardew’s Maoism and Derek Bailey’s celebrity – faced with Messaien’s Aion he would twitch aside the curtain to reveal those musicians enslaved by the score. For Prévost, improvisation is an opportunity ‘to do rather than be done to’, a self-invention, something quintessentially human, about choice, and he has no time for its renunciation in Cage, Cardew or David Tudor’s preparation of an Aion-like mental state. But is there not something automatic and machinic in that moment of improvisation anyway, a randomness even of the notes that the tam-tam (Prévost’s instrument) produces when struck? Prévost looks to the work necessary to reincorporate this sound once made both musically (in the dialogue with other improvisers) and socially (in its relationship with the audience).

Ben Watson’s defence of the band Ascension against revisionist critical approval is in some ways a rerun of his Noise Violence Truth pamphlet – a defence of Noise. As a critic Watson has Adorno’s way with an aphorism (when not enjoined to Beckettian reticence by his negative dialectics), and yet when he soars with enthusiasm over the radical universal power of music he remains curiously unpunished by McGettigan.^xxx

Brassier’s investigation of accumulating genre conventions in Noise doesn’t really do it for me (form is sedimented content – genre conventions change and grow, there is Noise within genres over time as well as between them). McGettigan thinks the editor should have teased out the difference in the concept of experience between Brassier and Watson – but I think it’s minor. For Brassier, Noise is over, ‘fatally freighted with neo-romantic clichés about the transformative power of aesthetic experience’, when the commodification of experience is ‘a concrete neurophysiological reality’ that cannot be defeated by criticism. But Brassier is good on what genre frustrates, even when it is hard to believe his musical examples can actually overcome it.

Anthony Iles, it seems to me, has done sterling work in his introduction pulling together the common problematics from these essays. Resisting the siren song of totalising theory, Iles pulls the argument down to street level, to the gentrification of Hoxton. If Improv is a muddy ditch where things can grow then so was Shoreditch (or at least the Foundry). Ultimately the proper engagement with these problematics is to be found in Mattin’s new work, but the decision by Kritika to make it freely available or available for trade both as a download and a physical copy is exemplary and performative.

Sadly Nina Power and Csaba Toth’s articles are little more than well referenced reviews, but interesting nonetheless. Csaba dutifully references Attali, Barthes, Lacan (and the less-usual Guy Debord) in constructing his ‘Noise Theory’. He follows Barthes (via Jeremy Gilbert), finding the radical potential of Noise in jouissance which, like the improvisatory moment, is a moment that overcomes everything – it is a black hole, an aesthetic sovereignty in reduced circumstances, a fetish of the moment. Does Noise music really have that effect on people listening to it five times a week? There is no ‘going fragile’ here – no admission that music or noise or even theorising them can fail. As with Sonic Warfare, the maximalist claims for the direct effect of sound derive from the philosophical weakness of generalised claims of music.

Nina Power offers us machines dreaming of the deft hands of women workers, women building synthesizers, wartime women rebuilding Waterloo Bridge – taking as her cue a comment of Mattin’s that factory workers were among the earliest players of Noise. Countering her appreciation of musician and synthesizer maker, Jessica Rylan (surely just a peg for the article?), McGettigan lists radiophonic women but omits the mother of them all Daphne Oram. ‘The sirens of unpleasantness continue to seduce the male noise imaginary’, says Nina, hearing these as merely imitative rather than annunciatory, you’ve been in the house too long she says and shoos us out into the fresh air.

Soundclash – The Philosophy of Improvisation Or…

McGettigan’s review is also a double review and, if not that helpful for Noise and Capitalism, it did help me with the review for Sonic Warfare. It starts by reviewing Gary Peter’s The Philosophy of Improvisation, one improvised a half page at a time.^xxxi McGettigan seems resistant to philosophical improvisation – what about Alain’s Propos? -but what really gets his goat is the failure to cite musical examples (and the idea that a philosophy of improvisation has little to offer improvisers).^xxxii I have a similar problem with Sonic Warfare, the obverse of my usual problem that too much faith is placed in musical example; musical examples date fast (Goodman’s problem), and if I don’t like the music I’m less likely to be convinced by the argument. Even if I do, it may not be for the reasons given. The mutual excitation of text and music – the sonic f(r)iction – crashes on take-off.

McGettigan argues that, because Gary Peter’s book gives no concrete examples, no philosophy of the practice of improvisation can be generated, and a model of abstract aesthetic production is imported in its place. He then turns to Noise and Capitalism as a native informant to find accounts of practice that would enable him to generate such a philosophy, but finds people already busy theorising (and sometimes importing). McGettigan’s disappointment is palpable, and he focuses it on the lack of consistency between these accounts. This is right but not, as he seems to think, because more consistency would produce a truer argument but because it is this lack of consistency that interests – other reviewers also found the lack of agreement frustrating – but I find it heartening.^xxxiii

The conflation of the genres Noise and Improv by the book’s compilers and McGettigan is productive, but just because they can sound the same doesn’t mean they are. The conflation of their concepts, objects and eventual aims, hides more than it reveals. Similarly the conflation of the genres of Noise and Industrial hides their differences (the demolished factories, the changes in work).

Musicologist Susan McClary once complained that to understand music we are told we must renounce our emotional reactions to it, refusing to do this she picked Attali over Adorno, and for the same reasons Ronald Bogue picked Deleuze. McClary also made her choice to route round what she took to be Adorno’s high culture bias – just as Goodman picked Erik Davis.^xxxiv The repetition of these gestures surely says something.

These two books do not allow us instantaneous access to the truth of all noise but to theoretical and practical conjunctures – problems of the relations between philosophy and practice. McGettigan may complain that the referencing is scholastic ‘if Adorno says it, it must be true’ to the point of denial of experience, but the same is true of Sonic Warfare. A whole cultural studies industry exists solely to publish ‘neat ideas’ shorn of their philosophical ‘procedures’ for use by undergraduates wanting to write about what excites them. Beyond this, the whole thrust of the work of Derrida, Deleuze and Rancière is to question what it is these procedures do – philosophy is not some neutral activity. It is not enough to reclaim praxis as a mere term or to police the borders of philosophy with a bigger dog. The problem of theorising why music matters so much to so many people, and of not having to renounce emotion to do it, remains philosophy’s problem, not music’s. Music continues to move the crowd.

Paul Helliwell <phelliwell2000 AT yahoo.co.uk> does not improvise but does record and would like to direct people to his blog on the myspace page of his ‘brother ass’ horsemouth: http://www.myspace.com/horsemouthfolk

Info

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, MIT, 2009

Mattin & Anthony Iles eds., Noise & Capitalism, Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series), 2009

i http://youtube.com/watch?v=LwRvWpsiM2w

ii See http://weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/04/review-3-sonic-ecologies/ for an attempt to set up a politics of noise/ politics of silence ‘quarrel of carnival with lent’ against which Goodman posits a sonic ecology.

iii Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, Editions de Minuit 1990, pp.50-1.

iv For a succinct discussion of the concept of the ‘war machine’ see:http://www.capitalismandschizophrenia.org/index.php?title=War_machine

v Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone Press, London 1992, p.299.

vi And a whole series of books proclaims that it is, not just John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections, MIT 2000.

vii The best criticism of this was probably made on 15 July 1917 by mutinous Italian squadies of the Cantanzaro Brigade who machine-gunned the inn where proto-futurist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was believed to be staying. John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio, OUP, p.306.

viii Deleuze and Guattari, Op. cit., plateau 12, 1227: ‘Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’, p.351- 423 and elsewhere.

ix Ian Buchanan, ‘Introduction’, in eds., Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swidoba, Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p.15.

x In Jean Godefroy Bidima, ‘Music and the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Series and Critique in Deleuze and O.Revault d’Allonnes’, in Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swidoba, Op. cit., p.192-3.

xi Erik Davis, Roots and Wires, http://.levity.com/figment/cyberconf.html But are jungle records (composed on computers, out of loops, programmed on a grid to a fixed tempo) really polyrhythmic in the sense of African drumming? Perhaps when danced to, perhaps when listened to, perhaps when mixed together, but not of themselves.

xii See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, Harvard University Press, 1995.

xiii Jeremy Gilbert notes ‘when writing about music they almost invariably write about composers‘ Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Becoming Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation’, in Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swidoba, Op. cit., p.121, and ‘from the vantage of the artist rather than the audience’ Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, Routledge, 2003, p.3. But is this true? – surely what Deleuze focuses on is the experience of music (its affect) rather than its production.

xiv In the ‘does-what -it says-on-the tin’ Quartet for the End of Time, a 17 beat musical phrase is repeated against a 29 beat chord pattern, the shifting relationship between the two refuses to settle down and as these are both prime numbers the earliest that the piece can begin to repeat itself is 17 times 29 beats later. At last music you can play at a rave and not be busted by the cops under the Criminal Justice Act. Ronald Bogue, ibid., p.14 onwards. Quartet for the End of Time is another technology produced by war having been written by Messiaen in a German prisoner of war camp.

xv In Deleuzian terms, pulsed, polyrhythm cannot produce the Aion, it produces a striated space rather than the smooth space of the nomad war machine. Lefebvre however notes another kind of time. People may be distressing themselves unnecessarily about repetition.

xvi Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, Continuum 2004, p.7.

xvii Translator’s forward; pleasures of philosophy, Brian Massumi, p.xiii, in A Thousand Plateaus, Op. cit., We might start from scratch and apply Deleuze’s 6 key concepts to music itself, applying them according to low music’s own immanent terms, or we might think about music in terms of Deleuze’s work on cinema, or we might think about music in Deleuze’s terms of royal and minority science (or minority languages), or we might (in an UN-Deleuzian fashion) attempt to dialectically wrangle music out of him with the aid of another philosopher. Arguments made by (in order) Ian Buchanan, ‘Introduction’ , Greg Hinge, Is Pop Music?, Drew Hemment, ‘Affect and Individuation in Popular Electronic Music’, Eugene Holland, ‘Studies in Applied Nomadology’, Nick Nesbitt, ‘Deleuze, Adorno and Musical Multiplicity’, Jean Godefroy Bidima calls for both of these last two in , Music and the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Series and Critique in Deleuze and O.Revault d’Allonnes. Bidim points out that Deleuze is, by his own philosophy, required to make those connections beyond himself but did not and compares Deleuze unfavourably with his college friend Revault d’Allonnnes who made studies of rebetiko and other minority musics. This should keep Matthew Hyland happy as he plays a variety of rebetiko with his band Philosophie Queen. All in eds. Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swidoba, Op. cit..

xviii Interestingly Steve Goodman’s Blog does all this much better, http://sonicwarfare.wordpress.com/

xix http://speechification.com/2010/03/17/robo-wars/ and http://speechification.com/2010/03/02/from-gameboy-to-armageddon/

xx http://sonicwarfare.wordpress.com/ 10^th January 2010.

xxi It follows a tendency begun in Deleuze and continued in More Brilliant than the Sun, where Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, a study of real transatlantic patterns of affiliation and connection in Black Culture, is sunk beneath the waves to become a Black Atlantis rendered myth.

xxii Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, ‘The Rhythmanalytical Project’ in Rhythmanalysis, translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, continuum 2004, p.73.

xxiiiThis would not be the first double review of the book see http://weirdvibrations.com/2010/02/04/review-3-sonic-ecologies/ for an attempt to set up a politics of noise/ politics of silence quarrel of carnival with lent against which Goodman posits a sonic ecology.

xxiv Improv is prefigured in Dadaist and Surrealist automatism. There was little to separate futurist and Dadaist performance as practice but a great deal separating them as ideology (War or anti-War) See Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance, Dutton, New York 1971 and Richard Huelsenbeck Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, University of California Press, Berkeley 1991.

xxv See his recent article http://metamute.org/en/content/against_representation_a_of_representation_in_front_you and Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Routledge, New York, 1992. While keen to avoid involving us in the unpaid labour that is relational aesthetics (so happy together) isn’t this production of a problematised situation (sociability as blockage) potentially similar to the work of Santiago Sierra.

xxvi http://hernoise.blogspot.com/ and http://e-flux.com/shows/view/3746

xxvii It was there Bailey acquired the muscle memory to ‘bodge’ songs he had not learnt previously nor had access to the sheet music for, which together with his studies of atonal musics were the underpinning of his ability to improvise.

xxviii Andrew McGettigan, Begin the Beguine, in Radical Philosophy, Issue 160, March/April 2010, p.46-49.

xxix And curiously similar to the self-communication of Attali’s idea of ‘composition’.

xxx Like Nick Nesbitt in Deleuze and Music he wants to convince us that Adorno would have dug John Coltrane but I don’t see any evidence for that. Noise Violence Truth text available online at http://andyw.com/publications/music_violence_truth/

xxxi In McGettigan’s account this is a pseudo-(Derridean) philosophy because it has not taken account of Derrida’s hostility to using ‘origin’ to determine the ‘proper’ (I may be misunderstanding something here).

xxxii http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Chartier

xxxiii http://arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/ has the reviews plus some of the work traded for copies of the book.

xxxiv Ronald Bogue, ‘Rhizomusicosmology’, Substance 66, University of Wisconsin, 1991, p65-101. http://www.scribd.com/doc/23289005/Rhizomusicosmology-Author-s-Ronald-Bogue-Source-SubStance-Vol-20-No-3

Nirvana in Negative
Noise & Capitalism and the aesthetics of academia

In 2007 I was invited to the 40th anniversary party of CTV, Canada’s dominant media organization, by mistake. Sitting there with my date, drinking quietly in a corner while MPs and anchorpersons from across the country mingled and unembarrassedly commented on us (“You guys look so stylish! You must be from Montreal”), I suddenly spotted a well-dressed but bleary and lost-looking old feller. No sooner had I realized that eye contact might be a mistake, then he’d locked his sights on us and orbit became entry. He eventually introduced himself as the President of CTV Newsmedia, to which I was tempted to reply “yeah, and I’m Donald Duck” but I kept it in check and exchanged pleasantries until he was quickly bored of us.

When I learned this was in fact Bob Hurst, president of CTV Newsmedia, I did what enterprising young folks are supposed to do and tried to get a meeting with him so I could ask for a job. It was a disaster; he was much sharper then, and between eating a sandwich and checking email, in his office of ten thousand television sets, he withdrew my life history from me. The peak of the discussion came when I got to describing my undergraduate thesis, which I very generously described as a study of “the aesthetic differences between works of composition and works of improvisation”. He pretty much froze. Now I had gone and done it. “Really?…. what did you come up with?” The incoherent babbling episode that followed, with references to Jackson Pollock, the Rolling Stones, and “spirit” went longer than I’d care to remember before he finally showed mercy and cut me off by telling me in a cool low voice that if I hoped to be a journalist I had better learn how to explain something.

The thesis was really just a recording of my composition process and the research accompanying it, and it was that process that was a study in the differences between improvisation and composition. I never sent it to get bound, as it is meant to be, because when I finished the essay I decided the purpose of this essay was probably to show me what would become one of the fundamental questions with which I would fill my earth-bound days, so why not spend a lifetime on it instead.

In Noise and Capitalism, a new book of essays published by Arteleku, improvisation acts as a stand-in for the scene called noise or noise music in many of the pieces, and several tease out thoughts on the nature of spontaneity in a material and capital culture, and its political ramifications for those who engage in such activity, for their audience, and society at large.

The main promoter of the book, and contributor of its first and last essay, is enthusiastic, no-irony performer and all around good person Mattin, a performance artist who I much admire. He’s the pitchman for this assembly of musings on noise and capitalism from a dozen or so chatter-borgs who have produced enough prog-talk to thoroughly stone anyone. It comes in the form of an academic journal, with an overload of footnotes, references to theorists of varying popularity, and large words and larger concepts are hoisted around like so many steel storage containers at port, threatening to crush the reader in their brutish lack of clarity and coherence.

Initially I found myself uncomfortable with the discussion of music being so academic, and some authors lose a lot in the translation when they shift from a discussion of theory to application in the practice of making music. For those who define noise as improvisation, they universally gloss over the hard facts of the history of improvisation in music, for instance, and many discuss it as if it 
were unquestionably an instrument of political contrarianism, which I’d say would not ring true to many of the wizards of the craft who came to it before say 1950, or after.

Whether it was ignorance of Bach’s pagan Christian occult numerologist improvising, or the French school of organ improvisers who make tremendous rivals for any improvisatory form since, all under the holy guidance of the church; most of the writers in it completely disregard my essay’s question. If improvisation is to define the style being discussed, it seems pertinent to consider that the artist might have aesthetic motives in choosing to improvise, and it might have aesthetic consequences that may or may not have some pertinence to capitalism; but in this book, too often real musical motives aren’t considered the prime movers, which strikes me as completely insane.

So many of these authors see what they want in the practice of noise music, like one who sees a fuller in a blade as a method of drawing blood, rather than it’s true benign purpose which was cheapness. In my own experience, the techniques, styles, forms and instruments of noise were a more efficient way of achieving my musical objectives, not choices designed to improve a weapon of political solidarity or social/political/dialectical blood-drawing. They make the bland assumption that all people in the noise scene, whatever it is, are politically leftist, whatever that even means. I personally take the Andrew Coyne view that left and right are tribes of self-quarantine. I think most noise musicians are more Carlo Marx than Karl Marx. I heartily encourage the more combative forms of motivation for art, and will defend them forever, although from what I can see they are so often the tools of those with a weaker grasp of the art of magic-catching.

This vision of noise and the people who make it will come as no surprise to most who care about the scene discussed here. Marxist or otherwise left or oppositional or anti-fiduciary scholars should naturally be attracted to noise, not least because so much of it embodies the aesthetics of capitalism’s biggest enemies, that of apathy and skulls and death and so on. Plus this is the new music scene that most heartily embraces improvisation at this time, and improvised music is probably more resistant than most forms of music to the processes of description and classification required for the capitalization of it.

There is a lot of negativity in this book; disgust, contempt, futility, cynicism. Like a tab of acid but without the laughs, the book’s tone felt mind-scrambling and dreary, and I felt it wasn’t becoming of a book about an emerging field of music which has given a lot of musicians a feeling of harnessing the potential to completely recalibrate the matrix of popular and underground music categorization. Although some come close, no one in the book makes full contact with the blasting open of genre, form, intent, and sound that noise represents as a cultural attitude; the noise musician’s radio show playlists are often dizzyingly expansive, and actively and deftly demonstrate to what degree it is all the same practice. The consolidation of the art of music, a century after it first discovered a new canvas in recording, is really picking up its pace and this book wastes no time on any part of the picture it deems tainted somehow by brushes with capitalism however slight, and however meaningful the omitted continents might be. Whether it’s a longing for a world where we needn’t be imposed upon by awful tasteless popular music forms, or just a nobly consuming interest in Marx, DeBord et al., the spirit of music suffers in this book, drearily dragged through theories and suppositions and speculation, and at the end I could remember only two or three brief expressions of joy or 
even much interest beyond the potential uses for this music in opposing capitalism.

The spirit of Marx may suffer in my review of course. But it’s a weird time for Marx. China is capitalist and large parts of the Western world are seeing the percentage of their GDP which is controlled by the government reaching and exceeding those present in the Eastern Bloc.

So the basic ideology of the book confused me too. But it was more the total incoherence of some of the ideas in it when imagined in a tangible world. I asked my dear friend who is deep into this area, more than anyone I know, about it. She sorted me out this way; she said the point of doing this writing isn’t to try and crack the code, and find the solution to unraveling capitalism. It’s to light a little fire, a little idea, and it might just go out right away or it might burn down the city, but hopefully it will warm someone for some time, and perhaps someday one of these ideas will warm the world. Well ok she didn’t gush quite that hard, that last part is really mine.

And I was warmed; reading the book was strangely emotional, maybe due to the utter lack of feeling within it. It reflects Mattin’s oeuvre well in that way, as the lack of emotion in an expression wrought with equal parts brute force and aimlessness invites the audience to fill in the blank. It’s like being beat with the club of empty style, which is style at its best, a mechanism that gives class to its contents. There were ideas in the book with regards to the means of production and experience, which are endlessly thinkable questions when applied to a very personal and possibly spiritual practice like making art, whose morality is so underdefined. And some of the essays differed greatly from the norm, and managed to be a breath of fresh air in what otherwise felt like a mouthful of cotton. I believe the problems these writers want to solve can be real and very serious, even if I question their commitment to actually solving them, and their language in explaining it all makes it almost impossible to grasp.

When Mattin came to Montreal in December of 2008 for Cool Fest 8, I couldn’t tell if the prospector’s twinkle in his eye was in anticipation of entertaining the youth or inflicting a little bit of pain or discomfort on them. Out of everyone he was clearly the most jazzed about the whole thing. I loved him right away because he was what I love; a bit of beauty wrapped in a surprise. He and Marcia Bassett played the loudest and longest set of noise wall I had ever seen in my life. It was like driving in a car made of pop cans through a tunnel that is slightly smaller than the car, for 45 minutes. And he was all sweetness. Marcia too.

When he came back in the spring of 2009, and performed with Tim Goldie, they located, at the intersection of impressionism and expressionism, this place where despite the emasculated rock on the radio and the cream-puff muscleman noise machines, white men performing can still make a sound and be sexy, and have class. Gone was the pube/dick-cheese of Seedbed or Stelarc, what we got was a streamlined, aerodynamic performance art that is nothing less than groovy. Within the language of existentialism, banalities and non-emphasis, Mattin managed to extract an essence that’s in short supply but thirsted for at the moment; of what’s good in black metal aesthetics, the flavour that cruises through Steven Parrino’s artwork, that sensory experience that the eighties were, in my head, before I really got to know them. Like if Cold Metal was actually an amazing album. They transformed Harsh Noise Wall into High Net Worth.


His opening essay, ‘Going Fragile’ is a beautifully simple exploration of the concept of risk in performance and art-making. Reading this book is not nearly as pleasurable as watching Mattin perform, because sadly there is very little personality on display here. But his performances do a lot to improve the book.

As I was left wondering who we should think makes noise, and what it ought to mean, I was reminded of Donald Mitchell’s excellent description of the emergence of the 20th century’s artist myth, in The Language of Modern Music:

“But for the artist, neither the role of the esteemed rebel nor the role of scapegoat is a particularly fruitful one. In previous centuries one may be sure that the artist would not have welcomed having freedom, as it were, thrust upon him. On the contrary one might view him in earlier days as the purveyor of order in a free society (and who can deny the freedom that order bestows? Is it not a principle inherent in great art?). In our captive society, however, the situation of the artist is very different. Can it be seriously contested that in our own time, whether a ‘myth’ or not, the concept of the ‘free’ artist has substantially influenced artistic practice? At the very moment of writing, the prevalence of action-painting, of tachisme, would seem to confirm that the myth can exert a very real influence. (‘Current social values may, as Koestler has remarked, be extraneous to aesthetic merit, but they cannot be isolated from it’).

I might have said order in a chaotic or heartless society, but that’s all.

Koestler as an occult figure is difficult to beat, he is so many thousands of miles beyond what people think when you say ‘occult figure’. It’s widely thought that Forrest Gump is based on him (haven’t seen it). Besides miraculously surviving a stint in Franco’s prison, authoring a sex encyclopedia, and zillions of other dazzling exploits (Anne Appelbaum’s brief account of his life in her review of Skeptic is hilarious, astounding,  and barely scratches the surface), he was one of the first and only people to write an intelligent account of what it was like to take hallucinogenic drugs, in Return Trip to Nirvana. The letter he got from his psychiatrist friend at Harvard inviting him to try the stuff is worth quoting in this context:

Dear K …,
Things are happening here which I think will interest you. The big, new, hot issue these days in many American circles is DRUGS. Have you been tuned in on the noise?

‘Noise’ in its most simple definition, unwanted sound, has covered everything embraced by the noise scene, from imitating industrial sonic by-product to embracing bodily noises and recording defects traditionally scrubbed from recordings. Even a special fondness for sounds lost to society, be they faraway folk sounds, obnoxious oddities or long-forgotten vanity presses, is characteristic of the noise fan.

But Koestler introduces us to another meaning for noise: chatter, excitement, concern, controversy, spirit. I think it is accurate and progressive, this new definition, and the book sort of gets that, even if it is weak on aesthetics and too long on references. Unfortunately the dominant energy is directed towards what is unwanted, be it copyright, capital, critical approval, etc. and it consolidates these feelings into a new myth for the artist, not as a free one, but as a revolutionary struggling to change the world’s financial system, or people’s perceptions of reality, or the artist’s own, against an industrial/consciousness complex which does not want people’s perceptions to be changed.

Twig Harper, when I first met him, seemed to fit this artist myth. He was the first person I called after finishing the book. I chose to talk to Twig because I wondered if I was way off the mark in finding this book dreary, and I thought he was close to it, but I like him, so he’s the bridge. Some of his artistic practice could be described as self-sabotage, or there was a time when the present-tense reality of Twig did little to refute that you could say. I don’t think Twig dislikes me, but he shot me with a pellet gun during a performance of mine at his house. So you know it’s a stretch for me to put it this way, but the first time I heard Nautical Almanac I might have shit my pants, except I was in the bathroom at the time so we’ll never know. To this day that music they played is something so powerful, they brought the dreary world of radicalism, noise slovenliness, pouting instrument abuse to life and they made it dance and they made it sing. It’s one of the most important musical moments of my life.

Our conversation reached its peak when we were talking about what musicians do, and how this book kind of misses it. Twig said “It’s all very analytical intellectual rational writing, and I think this kind of music deals with paradoxes, holes in time, the immediacy of an experience being sort of magic… and once you intellectualize something it’s no longer an immediate experience, that’s the way we’re wired… it should unwire you, break old connections and make new connections, and I think the arts are the forefront of everything, the artists are the pioneers, they’re going out on the farthest reaches of inner/inter-social space. They’re going out there, into the void to gather information in space and bring it back, and recreate that experience from the other side and that’s the role that artists and musicians play in society… and that’s a great thing and the ones that focus on that, do that, and that’s what you do.”

I realize now that with this book, Mattin is actually doing what Twig describes. He has consolidated a world of ideas and grafted it onto a stylistic non-entity, and in doing so has acquired a scepter to lead the second act of his quest. The book is like a Manzoni-type prop, perfectly suited to his motorcycle schizoid black art psychodrama with no drama. An academic journal on a subject which is totally undefined. A world is being created here. In this way he is, I think, on the crest of a creative wave that has accepted that carefree folkie boho music making must merge somehow with academic musical practice.

After reading Noise and Capitalism, I finally feel equipped to work on the imaginary thesis; in fact I’m dying to write it. I’d open with a quote about Beethoven, I think it was Copland or Bernstein, who said that what makes Beethoven so extraordinary is that while he wasn’t a master at anything (his melodies, harmony, rhythm, orchestration, all are good but not masterful), his music has that quality of sounding as if you might have heard it before, yet it doesn’t sound predictable, it sounds inevitable. The quote includes something about being it dictated to Beethoven by God; you get the idea.

And that’s what makes improvisation’s results different from composition; you get to short-circuit the effort it took Beethoven to achieve that quality. The goal of popular theatre productions, it is said, is that make the audience believe it’s happening for the first time. In a composition, it might take several listens to get how instinctive it is, how well that effect has been accomplished. With improv, it’s usually the real deal.

And the book feels as inevitable… as the death of capitalism. It comes off as a beautifully crafted scrying medium; it’s transparencies too many to mention. Within its pools the academic, the artist, the anti-academic, the mystic, will find 
what they seek. As a work of art (for the uninitiated with so much of the academic terminology like myself) it is a work of omission; I reacted mostly from those parts which seemed to miss the point completely, and it was a strong field in this book for me. I learned a lot about what I think.

In closing Return Trip to Nirvana, Koestler uses a parable to explain how he ultimately feels taking drugs is a cheap substitute for real mental magic. Relating his schoolboy climbs up 7,000 foot mountains in Austria, he says the view from the peak is the same for the climber as it is for the one who takes a cable-car, but having worked for it and experienced the journey stone in hand means that for the climber, “their vision is different”.

Reading Noise and Capitalism is like the mountain climb in negative; the vistas and appreciation happen inside the reader, reflecting on what’s missed, not in the book; it’s mostly treacherous and unpleasant, and what you get at the end might be less useful than a personal creative epiphany achieved by making music, listening to some, or just having a good old-fashioned think. It’s like a drug that actually takes work to slog through, but the result is a mental mash that you probably can’t conjure up yourself, and for some will introduce ideas and phenomena that, while strangely expressed and weird in attitude, nevertheless shine light somewhere. Those familiar with Mattin’s performances will also enjoy an aesthetic aftertaste unobtainable anywhere else, and its flavours, for the time being, are worth acquainting oneself with.

Review by Blake Hargreaves

As a supplement to the abstract theories of Peters, 
Noise & Capitalism devotes six of its eleven contribu
tions to concrete discussion of ‘free improvisation’ in
 music. It treats both the complex relation to jazz and 
its reaction to the dominant forms of musical space
 and experience. Peters is opposed to the valorization
 of jazz as an interstitial political practice dreaming
 of communion and empathy. However, by explicitly
 positioning free improvisation as a deliberate attempt
 to create an environment ‘free from the tradition of
 bandmasters, composers and notation as well as the
 emerging spectacular culture through which popular 
music was beginning to circulate’, this collection is
 better able to assess the stakes, successes and failures 
of that attempt and its continuation into the present
 day.
 Eddie Prévost summarizes well the position he
 has developed in other publications. He presents free 
improvisation as an alternative cultural form (marked
 by working relations between the musicians, which
‘counter the ethos’ characterizing capitalism). Two
key features of ‘normal music’ are emphasised, against
 which improvisation is distinguished: the score as the 
notation determining performance; composition and 
rehearsal as the point at which the technical problems
 of musical production are resolved in advance of
 performance. Improvisation eschews both, with the
 corollary that the hierarchical relations of produc
tion are displaced – performance is then a dialogical
 process of discovery for all participants. No longer
 hidebound to the creative genius of the composer,
‘we have to decide on the meaning of the practice’.
 In this way, its politics can be seen in its opposition 
to authority and celebrity: the marketing of named
 composers is resisted. In the ‘Social Ontology of
 Improvised Sound Work’, Bruce Russell produces a 
theoretical supplement to Prévost. He too rejects the 
figure of the composer, the place of the score, and the dominant modes of production and reproduction in
performance. Unlike Peters, he is keen to assert that a
coherent theoretical understanding of the activity can 
boost the practice; he mediates the claim through the
tradition of radical thought, so we have discussions of 
Lukács, Lefebvre and Debord rather than Heidegger.
 It is heartening here to see a considered reclamation 
of ‘praxis’ as the relevant term. 
The translation of Matthieu Saladin’s ‘Points of
 Resistance and Criticism in Free Improvisation’ opens
 a different perspective on the supposedly oppositional
 or resistant techniques of free improvisation. The
 article investigates how the contemporary, corporate 
desire for ‘hyper-flexibility’ combines with the new 
fondness for ‘horizonality’ in structures to mimic the 
practices of self-organization championed by Prévost
 and Russell. Indeed, the gathering of a changing bunch
 of musicians at Derek Bailey’s Company Week series 
looks to a certain perspective like the manner in
 which management consultancies rotate their staff on
‘projects’. Saladin underscores the point that the politi
cal positions or opinions of performers do not prevent 
their practices being the forerunners of contemporary
 capitalist practice: form abstracted from historical
 conditions is apolitical.
 David Toop has noted that it would be possible to
 listen to freely improvised performances and not hear 
it as music. In this way, improvisation is part of the 
confluence understood as ‘noise’. There is little head-
on consideration here of the other components: volume,
 cacophony or noisiness; resistance to signification; 
the incorporation of non-art materials into art; field
recordings; production of new compositional elements
 free from traditional instruments and their techniques; 
dissonance; splicing, sampling, and so on. What is
meant by ‘Noise’ varies across texts assembled without
 editorial oversight. The title is recognized to be an
 after thought and there is a general feel of opportunism
and pistonage. Several of the contributions are very
 slight: Mattin offers a loose anecdotal discussion of 
recording copyright and the commodification of improvised music; Matthew Hyland, in a recycled review of
 Watson’s Derek Bailey, expresses some surprise that
 Bailey ‘of all people’ was involved in founding a record
label, Incus. Both are idealists, failing to appreciate the
 centrality of the record as commodity to the history of
 improvisation in the twentieth century.
 Jessica Rylan, who builds her own commercially 
available synthesizers, is hardly the female pioneer 
Nina Power presents in her short essay – originally
 an interview. The history of electronic music includes 
figures such as ‘Bebe’ Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Eliane
Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Wendy Carlos. Rylan
 does not stand comparison with them; she records for
 Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label and I suspect 
she would count as one of the hipster, ‘noisemaker
muffins’ whom Ben Watson targets in his essay, ‘Noise 
as Permanent Revolution’. Roused into comment by an 
overblown article in The Wire about great gigs, Watson 
is acutely aware of the manner in which noise can
 come to operate as a fashionable, niche category to 
be sold to poseurs. He persists in disputing The Wire’s 
insistence on neutral description, so as not to upset
 advertisers and big names or alienate purchasers. For
 him, music’s value lies in its ‘refusal to play the subservient role of ornament or divertissement: authentic
 music’s relation to truth, its antagonism to a merely 
pleasant night out’. Much noise fails this test – Watson
 seeks criticism that explains why particular efforts can 
be held to be radical as a ‘reasoned response to an
 unreasonable situation’.
 Ray Brassier offers this form of sustained engage
ment with two case studies in his essay, ‘Genre is
 Obsolete’ (an earlier version appeared in Multitudes).
 He is also alert to the dangers: 
Like the ‘industrial’ subculture of the late 1970s 
which spawned it, the emergence of ‘noise’ as a
 recognisable genre during the 1980s entailed a rapid 
accumulation of stock gestures, slackening the criteria for discriminating between innovation and cliché
to the point where experiment threatened to become
 indistinguishable from platitude.
 He presents a brief, but illuminating discussion of
 Tom Smith’s activities such as To Live and Shave 
in LA and the performance actionism of Runzel-
stern & Gurgelstock, where the discrete sonic events
 ‘leaven the freakish with the cartoonish’. Although
 Brassier opposes ‘genre’, what is really at stake is the 
transformation noise effects on our understanding of 
music and its relation to other arts and media. Do
Runzelstern & Gurgelstock organize crazed Gesamt
kunstwerke? I expect such a question would produce
 a bristling response, but Brassier’s insistence on the
‘unprecedented’ density and complex structuring of
 Smith’s The Wigmaker in 18th Century Williamsburg 
prompts the further question as to whether this form
 of composition (and the manner in which it challenges
 modes of reflection) places it at the edge of a different
 trajectory, extending Mahler’s Romantic conception of
t he symphony as the musical form which endeavours
 to encompass everything. 
Philosophical terrain is opened up between Watson
 and Brassier through the concept of ‘experience’.
 Brassier rejects it as a commodified category which
is here disrupted; Watson, following Adorno, sees 
such ‘system-breakdowns’ as experience, ‘the concept-
busting crisis which allows idea to change and new
 concepts and production to flourish’. Good editors
 would have spied this fruitful conflict and asked for 
more, perhaps at the expense of Csaba Toth’s essay ,
which bombards the reader with citations and names, 
often without concern for syntax or structure. It would
 be nice if this had a performative dimension, but I fear 
it is just another manifestation of bad academicism.
 Brassier hesitates to connect to the titular theme of
 capitalism, since socio-economic factors ‘are easier to 
invoke than to understand’. Howard Slater’s ‘Prisoners
 of the Earth Come Out! Notes Towards “War at the
 Membrane”’ would have benefited from such reticence.
 He delights in the word ‘abreaction’, and at times 
seems to suggest that a daily, cathartic dose of noise
 boosts our modes of resistance towards ‘endocolonial
 capital’. It must make life more exciting to think one’s 
listening habits are per se engaged in a war over
instincts and perception:
 Our willingness to abreact en masse, to decathect
 the ‘bad objects’ of capital and sift through affect,
in order to take control of our own becomings as
 we counter the use of ourselves and our desires as 
bio-productive materials of an anthropomorphised
 capital, is the most pleasurable music there is.
 This is a fantasy.
 Noise & Capitalism is a little too improvised, in 
the slapdash sense, to come together as a coherent 
book. As a symptom of what is produced by the new
school ties of virtual circuits, one might worry that 
this is as good as it gets, intellectually. Though the
 articles by Brassier, Watson, Prévost and Saladin are 
worth reading, the remainder, often recycled without 
warrant or acknowledgement, is poor. It is available 
freely as a download so it cannot be judged too 
harshly, though Cox and Warner’s Audio Culture
 (which I reviewed in RP 133) is far superior. Regarding improvisation, Derek Bailey’s own book, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980), is 
still the vital reference.

This book is an exception to the rule that a product can be judged from its price. It is free (either downloading it or trading a printed copy) and it sports professional editing, graphic design and production. But it seems just a direct consequence of the challenge to properly face such a topic. Noise in music has been usually treated for its specific and problematic way of approaching composition (except for the seminal book “noise” by Jaques Attali from which this text seem to stem and flourish), and its ability to reflect the very edge of our time. This work looks at the political role of noise in the market, reconstructing the genre through a series of essays describing different music dynamics, while representing a clear act of resistance. This kind of resistance involves not only “assuming risks” about musical stereotypes and the markets surrounding them, but also affects the act of performing, production and distribution. Produced by the Basque Arteleku institution and its active Audiolab, the book can ideally be accompanied by the CD, “Gezurrezko joera” by Jean-Luc Guionnet, a perfect complement to the theory, with another peculiarly split and non-harmonic classic organ performance by the artist. Finally, it would be useful to point out that the only way to get this book is a distribution by trading. Creative people can request a copy by sending a sample of their work (that will be hosted in the Arteleku library) or by writing a critical response to the book (after downloading the free pdf file).

English:

http://www.neural.it/art/2010/04/edited_by_mattin_anthony_iles.phtml

Italian:

http://www.neural.it/art_it/2010/04/edited_by_mattin_anthony_iles.phtml

This is fantastic stuff. Of course, there is a smallish swarm of intellectual activity surrounding the sort of issues discovered here, but  more often than not it centres on jazz and American practices.
Consequently, discussions tend to get sidelined into the race issue – an issue which is crucial for the development of that music, but which can impose a narrowing of focus when one considers that much noise and free improvisation is created by non-African Americans who are not living in the particular historical context of a racially-oppressive society (though of course one with its own deep networks of imperialism, alienation, &c.). Serious intellectual examination of music, as practiced by some of the journalists from Wire magazine, may also find itself restricted by the necessity of providing a review of a product (whether a live performance or an album) which evaluates that product on aesthetic grounds first and foremost – and whose audience may resist the presence of critical theory: too much politics for them to swallow, an ‘irrelevance’, intruding on their desire for a generalised ‘underground’ freedom to enjoy their niche of generalised musical resistance to the ‘mainstream’ (represented by such easy-target bogeymen as George Bush and…um, Britney Spears).

DOWNLOAD AND READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW (pdf)
DOWNLOAD AND READ EARTRIP#5 MAGAZINE (pdf)

There is always an irony about collections that assail capitalism for recycling popular culture for its own ends, when both radicals and academics do the same with ideas they respect (yes, more Derrida, Deleuze, Adorno? And hey, remember in May ’68 when…zzzzzz..?) However, as it becomes more apparent that late Capitalism has proven the adage that Pop Will Eat Itself with the squalid addendum that we are also fodder for that mash-up, new voices from the Left and Right are needed to even get the possibilities of alternatives out to the public. It may be a cul de sac to be rebuking a system that one benefits from, either from the tenure system, the internet, etc., but we are all users of what keeps us trapped, and maybe we can use it to shout out ideas rather than shout at each other with no point.

Noise & Capitalism is a thought provoking, blunt, often maddening collection of essays about the commodity of music, and whether or not Noise represents that which escapes being commodified, or is merely the next rebellion against Corporatism to wait in line to be turned into background music for tampon ads.

Edited by Mattin and Anthony Iles, Noise and Capitalism is a collection of essays by musicians, academics or activists. The essential readings here are those by Ben Watson, Edwin Prévost, Csaba Toth, Bruce Russell, and Matthieu Saladin, eleven contributors in all. While the bent in certain essays is Marxist, it should be noted that after all these years Marx’s critique of Capitalism is still one of the most spot-on, and one can be challenged by his ideas while still being mindful of the abuses to his theories that battled Capitalism for Best in Shame in the 20th century. The book is given away freely in Word and PDF (http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism and http://www.mattin.org ), though the editors encourage bartering or offering art in return for a copy. On the Arteleku site you can see some cool examples of DIY quid pro quo.

Essentially, these writers ponder the ways in which the artist and listener can navigate, and hopefully arrive at, experience that is not only outside of capitalist influence, but untouchable by it. Is Noise the answer,
or someday will Merzbow replace Iggy Pop as the sonic shill for Carnival Cruise Lines? Tactics—and, to be honest, even a coherent baseline agreement on what Noise is—vary, the writing ranges from academic name-dropping amid salient points (Toth), polemical shtick within the best essay (Watson) to an attempt at direct action strategies (Russell and Mattin).

American University professor Csaba Toth’s “Noise Theory” is most influenced by French theorists, who are quoted from and mentioned in almost every paragraph. Still, interesting ideas are raised about how it is almost impossible to avoid being commodified, since most of our normal channels for rebellion are provided by the marketplace. The essay ultimately tires itself and the reader out with talk about noise as “anti-teleological jouissance,” a concept sure to wow ‘em at the University Club.

Ben Watson, former writer for The Wire and author of the definitive book on guitarist Derek Bailey, offers “Noise as Permanent Revolution or, Why Culture is a So Which Devours it Our Farrow,” in which Watson’s usual mix of Trotsky, brilliant insights and preemptive bullying of those who might disagree with this ideas. The main flaw in the essay is his trying too hard to shoehorn Japanese noise into the latest commodity for hip posers. For someone with a deep knowledge of underground and improvisational music, liking Masonna or name-dropping Keiji Haino might seem pretentious—I’ve already moved beyond them!—but they are still unknown quantities waiting to be discovered by the broader public. So his dismissal comes across as another position shaped just as much by access to and influence by a market as that of those on his skewer. Noise tends to alienate the posers quickly. Still, he is such a great writer that this is one of the essential pieces of the set, as he critiques the inability of musicians to control their “production” and thus noise (which Watson doesn’t seem to like anyway, seeing it as still another variation of ossified Rock tropes) will be commodified for Capital’s purposes eventually.

Russell’s “Towards a Social Ontology of Improvised Sound Work” and Mattin’s “Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property” attempt to offer ideas for application of theory and music, to, as the editors write in the preface, “reappropriate our senses, our capacity to feel, our receptive powers; let’s start the war at the membrane! Alienated language is noise, but noise contains possibilities that may, who knows, be more effective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.” Fine. The trick though, and it is a trick sometimes successfully managed in the book, is to use alienating language—academic, socialist polemic, ideas about Copyleft and Anti-copyright—to talk about how alienated sources can be agents for liberation. Like Religion, any discussion of music sooner or later faces the problem of putting into language that which, if done right, transcends words.

Still, Noise & Capitalism accomplishes its goal of starting a slew of intellectual fires, posing questions impossible to solve in one sitting. Any such undertaking, especially these days, is necessary. There are pockets of awake resistance to the Animal Farm, and this is the latest salvo. Even if some of the essays in the book don’t succeed in making their point, there are many pieces here that will keep you up pondering , and in that sense this is a necessary work.

Ruido y Capitalismo @ Ars Sonora 1
Ruido y Capitalismo @ Ars Sonora 2

NOISE & CAPITALISM by Dan Warburton
I was wrong when I described Guy Debord as a “much overrated Situationist maître penseur” in a recent Wire review, and reading Bruce Russell’s Towards a Social Ontology of Improvised Sound Work – probably the best written and certainly the most informative of the eleven essays (plus an introduction by editor Anthony Iles) gathered together in Noise & Capitalism – serves to remind me of the fact. Russell’s concise summary of the Situationist key concepts – spectacle, psychogeography and constructed situation – backed up with apposite quotations from Marx and Lukacs, is both clear and clearly relevant to his own practice as an improviser.

Eddie Prévost’s Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Celebrity, complete with de rigueur quotations from AMM playing partners Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury and sideswipes at poor old Stockhausen (once more the inevitable moans about the absurd excesses of the Helikopter-Streichquartett and the “composition” of Mikrophonie I) is a characteristically sober restatement of ideas previously elaborated at greater length in his books No Sound Is Innocent and Minute Particulars – if you haven’t read those this will do just fine as an introduction to his thought, but if you have you might have a distinct feeling of déjà lu.

Indeed, there seems to be a bit of recycling going on here (though I imagine maybe the editors would prefer to call it détournement): Ray Brassier’s Genre Is Obsolete originally appeared in Multitudes #28 in 2007, and Mattin’s liner notes to Going Fragile, his 2006 Formed album with that well-known Noise musician Radu Malfatti, are reprinted in their entirety, with one additional paragraph. No point in recycling my own review of that album, then, since I stand by what I wrote back in July 2006.

Standing by what you write is the springboard Ben Watson uses to dive into a typically vigorous exposé of his ideas in Noise as Permanent Revolution or, Why Culture is a Sow Which Devours its Own Farrow. Taking issue with The Wire‘s Sam Davies for trashing an Ascension gig in Bristol in 1994 only to remember it fondly 13 years later (being able to change your mind and admit that you’re wrong is obviously anathema to Ben’s militant aesthetix), he comes up with some splendidly quotable lines (how about “the courage of youth enables it to look directly in the face of things.. [i]ts folly is to imagine that no-one else has ever done so” and “people who talk about the problems of modern music without talking about capitalism and commodity fetishism are themselves one of modern music’s problems”?), though one wishes he’d spent more time explaining the subtleties of Giambattista Vico (see photo)’s Scienza Nuova – a work I’m not at all familiar with but for which this article has most definitely whet my appetite – than taking potshots, albeit amusing and well-aimed, at his former employers at Wire HQ. Watson writes well – he’s one of the few contributors to this book whose voice you can really hear from reading his prose – but quite why Jaworzyn’s Ascension is “THE answer to dilemmas facing anyone discontent with the musical ready-meals dished up by commercial interests” isn’t explained, and what Tony Oxley, Fernando Grillo, Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram are doing in a thesis ostensibly about Noise is anybody’s guess.

Matthew Hyland’s Company Work vs. Patrician Raiders can be boiled down to its penultimate paragraph: “Thanks to Ben Watson and the late Derek Bailey for producing (amongst other crucial things) the book digressed from here. BUY IT!” Watson’s Bailey biography has been discussed at great length in these pages already, and not surprisingly the best quotes in Hyland’s essay are extracted from it. “When someone says they’d rather work in a factory than play music they don’t like, it means they’ve never worked in a factory.” Well, quite. If that weren’t the case Mattin would still be making pies in Poole.

Howard Slater’s Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! makes some interesting points, ironically many of them about silence, but to find them you have to wade through a swamp of abreaction, endocolonialism, bios and libidinal skin over which quotation marks swarm like mosquitoes. Actual discussion of music is thin on the ground and the vocabulary is sloppy: Slater might know what abreaction means, but phrases like “the overlong intervals of a Morton Feldman piece” indicate he doesn’t understand what an interval is. And lumping together groups with very different histories and working methods – AMM, MEV and Morphogenesis – to make some point about the “real subsumption of labour” is as woolly as his prose style.

One of the central problems of this book is that it doesn’t (can’t? won’t?) provide the reader with clear definitions of either Noise or Capitalism. The latter is tricky, for sure, but it seems clear that the word means something different now, in today’s Googling, Twittering short-memory-even-shorter-attention-span world from what it did barely a decade ago. And depending on which article you read, Noise can be anything from Throbbing Gristle to Lendormin, from Merzbow (mentioned once or twice, en passant) to Nobukazu Takemura (!).

Mathieu Saladin’s Points of Resistance and Criticism in Free Improvisation: Remarks on a Musical Practice and Some Economic Transformations is like his music: conceptually elegant but flat and dry. The quotations about music – Free Improvisation once more, not Noise – come mostly from Bailey (the inevitable “idiomatic” discussion from the indispensable Improvisation: its Nature and Practice in Music) and Cardew via Prévost, and are far less interesting than the extracts from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism, a book I expected to see quoted more often in these pages. Instead, throughout the book, we get the usual suspects – Debord, Deleuze, Lacan, Foucault (one intimidating footnote refers us to page 1431 (!) of his Dits et écrits II) and Attali (not as much as you might expect, which is just as well as his Noise is – and here I’ll stick to my guns – much overrated) – but, interestingly, no Lyotard (photo), one of the philosophers who actually talks some sense about music (check out Driftworks, Semiotext(e), 1984).

The worst offender when it comes to pretentious namechecking is Csaba Toth, whose Noise Theory contains several priceless passages like the following: “Noise, at the very least, disrupts both the performer and listener’s normal relations to the symbolic order by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order (symbolic relations are defined here as an aggregate of guilt, the law, achievement, authority figures). We can call this musical pleasure anti-teleological jouissance, achieved by self-negation, by a return to the pre-subjective (the stage that precedes ego differentiation) – which, in our context, is a sonorous space.” I seriously wonder how many people reading that can put hands on hearts and say they fully understand it. And that includes the author, especially when, two pages further on, you come across a gem like the following: “Noise music, in its many alterations, ruptures conventional generic boundaries: it is often not music at all, but noise” (you don’t say!) and meaningless drivel like this: “if one intrudes into the program itself as Ikue Mori does, one can get totally inside the electronics behind the sound and thereby overcome routinisation (hollowing out) of her intervention and continually shatter the listener’s expectations by not sounding one expects her to sound.” [sic] Seems to me there’s more missing in that last sentence than the word “like”.

This vague waffle would be bad enough in some teen fanzine, but coming from a Professor of History at an American university, it’s frankly inexcusable. Toth may be able to rap on in the college bar about jouissance, but he doesn’t seem to have a clue about what Noise is, or if he does he’s certainly unwilling to venture a definition. But in contemporary academe if you can’t get over the barbed wire fence of hard fact you can at least decorate it with exotic plants and flowers (rhizomes, dispositifs, performative teleologies..) and pretend it’s not there, by throwing in (out? up?) as many names as possible to blind the reader with science: Christian Marclay, DJ Spooky, Philip Samartzis join Lightning Bolt and Wolf Eyes and White Mice and Muslimgauze and Merzbow and Masonna and Einstürzende Neubaten and Throbbing Gristle and Z’Ev and.. you get the idea.

At least Ray Brassier, in his Genre is Obsolete, can cite specifics, though the two outfits he comes up with – Tom Smith’s To Live and Shave in L.A. and Rudolf Eb.er’s Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock (photo) – are hardly typical Noise acts, and both men, Brassier admits, “disavow the label ‘noise’ as a description of their work – explicitly in Smith’s case, implicitly in Eb.er’s. This is not coincidental: each recognises the debilitating stereotypy engendered by the failure to recognise the paradoxes attendant upon the existence of a genre predicated upon the negation of genre.”

Brassier’s text is a tough read, but a rewarding one: and he actually describes real albums and performances with enthusiasm and affection as well as extrapolating on their philosophical implications. But lines like “the lack of imagination that characterises much of noise music”, “the crowd-baiting outright aggression (however ironic) of most power electronics” and the “slap-dash, jumbled-together mix of a misplaced genius-complex and self-absorption that characterises much of the Noise scene” in Nina Powers’ Woman Machines: the Future of Female Noise make you wonder whether Ms Powers wants to write about the subject at all. Unlike Brassier, I doubt she’d find anything particularly jouissif about watching Randy Yau throw up into a contact-miked bucket, or Lucas Abela slice his lips to a bloody pulp on a pane of broken glass. Chucking in lines like “Jessica Rylan is the future of noise, in the way that men are the past of machines” would be fine if we were actually given some background information about who Jessica Rylan actually is (“tall, slender, politely dressed, bespectacled” doesn’t cut it, sorry) and how her work relates to the Noise scene. But no, we’re all supposed to know that already, in the same way that we’re all supposed to have well-thumbed copies of Grundrisse, La Société du Spectacle, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Le Séminaire and Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit lying around on our coffee tables.

It’s a welcome relief then to finish the book with some real discussion of the issues involved – including free software and the dubious small print of the MySpace contract – in Mattin’s Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property (I never thought I’d see George Bernard Shaw quoted in a Mattin text – a nice surprise), but one still closes the book with a feeling of frustration, not so much for what it says but for what it doesn’t. Instead of trotting out quotations from books we’ve all read (Bailey, Cardew, Prévost..) and many most of us are hardly likely to, I’d have preferred a probing interview with Carlos Giffoni on the politics and economics behind his No Fun festival, and a seriously critical discussion of how Noise is being quietly absorbed into the mainstream of trendy culture. Instead of waxing lyrical about squats, it might have been instructive for at least one of the writers to visit and report from one, explaining the day-to-day function of a viable alternative economic structure. And how about a detailed investigation of the technological détournement (sampling in Plunderphonics, the recycling of analogue instruments) and a serious analysis of the implications – moral, financial, aesthetic – of download culture? Above all, what’s lacking most in this book is a musicologically coherent definition of what Noise actually is.

I got hold of this interesting and exciting publication when The Wire posted a notification on their Facebook feed. Noise and Capitalism is a collection of essays examining aspects of improvisation, the obsolescence of genre, globalisation and anti-copyright in relation to noise and capitalism. I must admit I find it a bit difficult to read .pdfs off a computer screen (you won’t see me with a Kindle anytime soon), so I’ve only been able to skim over most of the chapters and digest Csaba Toth’s excellent essay ‘Noise Theory’. Paper is much kinder on the eyes.

The book is essentially ‘free’, with the proviso the publisher requests that you (as artist/musician/writer) send an example of your work in exchange for the .pdf.

I find this mode of distribution another interesting development in relation to Radiohead’s pay-what-you-like for In Rainbows (2007) and the culture surrounding Creative Commons, Copyleft and Anti-Copyright. The book, in terms of its content and distribution, also presents itself as a poignant political statement as the first decade of the 21st Century comes to a close, post-econonic meltdown. It’s also a worthy addition to recent books examining aspects of noise culture (such as Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music: A History) and of course Attali’s seminal Noise (1985).

The publishers Arteleku describe the book as follows:

This book, Noise & Capitalism, is a tool for understanding the situation we are living through, the way our practices and our subjectivities are determined by capitalism. It explores contemporary alienation in order to discover whether the practices of improvisation and noise contain or can produce emancipatory moments and how these practices point towards social relations which can extend these moments.[1]