“… 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_Izaguirre.pdf

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).

Ingeleseraz:

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

Italieraz:

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]