12 January, 20.00h
Dutch Art Institute
Kortestraat 27, Arnhem
20hours

This evening will inaugurate the first of a series of workshops that will reflect on and ‘dig the grave’ for Noise & Capitalism (2009) a publication edited by Mattin and Anthony Iles. More than two years after it’s publication, what is the relevance for the book’s attempt to understand the practices of noise and improvisation in relation to capitalism? So many world-changing events have taken place in the intervening years, how has capitalism and the struggles within it changed and how does this reorient us critically to the object of this book? The editors propose an open process of reflection for the publication in joined effort to rework, rethink and identify its problems. This process will be guided by a performance that will introduce the book content and pave the way for ‘collective study’ between the authors and the audience; a proposed collaborative exercise against the grain of self promotion often found in the ‘book launch’ form. Furthermore, this evening aims to blur the boundaries between ‘author’ and ‘audience’, to block the valorisation of either authoritative or distinguished subjectivities, and to experiment and put into question how we may invalidate such subjects’ accumulated ‘capital’ by releasing unquantifiable and non-exchangeable ‘product’.

Noise & Capitalism’ is a collection of essays by various musicians, academics, activists which reflects on the artist-audience binary, specifically how “noise,” “improvised” or “free” music offers resistance and tensions that may, at worst, provide instruments for capitalism but also, at best, point to modes of ‘subjectlessness’.

Hector Crehuet tells us about his porojects as trade of Ruido y Capitalismo. Among us, Miniroc, the errant rave .
More info about his activities:
www.youtube.com/lacallehoy
www.elintruso.es

READING GROUP at Send and Receive Festival in Winnipeg, Canada

6 October 2011

Noise & Capitalism (anthology) with editor & contributor Mattin

Mondragon Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 91 Albert St. | 5:30 – 7:30
Contributors: Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, Mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson.

Noise not only designates the no-man’s-land between electro-acoustic investigation, free improvisation, avant-garde experiment, and sound art; more interestingly, it refers to anomalous zones of interference between genres: between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrète and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut. – Ray Brassier

Noise & Capitalism, is a tool for understanding the situation we are living through, the way our practices and 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.

**Noise & Capitalism is made available only on a trade basis, if you would like to get a copy of the book at this event, or during send + receive, please contact director crys cole at send.director@gmail.com to arrange a trade. A limited quantity will be available.

As very few copies of the book are on hand, we encourage you to download a free PDF version of the book directly through Arteleku’s website here.

Un año y medio mas tarde de la publicación del libro NOISE & CAPITALISM AUDIOLAB presenta la versión en español del mismo libro: RUIDO Y CAPITALISMO. Esta publicación nacida con la intención de analizar las intersecciones, fisuras y relaciones entre el ruido, la música, la economía, la política y la filosofía esta formada por sendos ensayos de varios escritores, periodistas, músicos y pensadores de varios paises, entre los que se encuentran: Csaba Toth, Eddie Prévost, Ray Brassier, Bruce Russell, Nina Power, Ben Watson, Matthew Hyland, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater y finalmente Anthony Iles y Mattin, que además de incluir textos propios han realizado las labores de editores.
Existen dos modos de conseguir el libro: El primero, directamente por descarga gratuita en internet (blogs.arteleku.net/audiolab/ruido_capitalismo.pdf) y el segundo en edición física de papel, realizando un pedido a Arteleku. Si prefieres esta edición, no tendrás que realizar ningún reembolso de dinero, ya que se distribuirá principalmente, tal y como ocurrió con la versión original, mediante intercambio. Por tanto, si quieres recibir una copia de libro, mándanos algo que represente tu actividad creativa (textos, libros, música…) para que quede en la colección pública de la mediateca de Arteleku o comprometete a escribir algún comentario del libro, y recibirás una copia en tu casa.

Ruido y Capitalismo
Taller/Presentacion de la version en castellano que se acaba de editar!!!!
Ruido y Capitalismo pdf castellano (link a PDF)
de Miércoles 16 a Viernes 18
11:00 – 14:00
Centro Cultural de España, Mexico DF

Como parte de:
el nicho Aural edición #1
Del 16 al 20 de Marzo 2011, Mexico DF

- Programa
Miércoles 16 a viernes 18 de marzo
11:00 – 14:00
viernes 17 de marzo: concierto de cierre del taller 17:00
Centro Cultural España, Guatemala 18, Centro Histórico

- condiciones de inscripción en el taller
Es obligatorio leer el libro ‘Ruido y Capitalismo’, particularmente los 4 textos de:
Ray Brassier
Matthieu Saladin
Howard Slater
Mattin sobre el anti-copyright

- INFO
Este es el estreno de la edición en español de ruido y capitalismo.

Resumen Si nuestros sentidos son apropiados por el capitalismo para ser puestos al servicio de una “economía de la atención”, comencemos a reapropiar nuestros sentidos, nuestra capacidad de sentir, nuestros poderes de percepción; ¡empecemos la guerra a la membrana!

El lenguaje alienizado es ruido, pero el ruido contiene posibilidades, que pueden, quién sabe, ser más afectivas que discursivas, más enigmáticas que dogmáticas.

El ruido y la improvisación son prácticas de riesgo, que se “vuelven frágil”. Aún así, estos riesgos suponen una responsabilidad social que puede llevarnos mas allá de una “falsa libertad” y en unas unidades de diferencia.

¿Es esto lo que debieramos de explorar en este experimento? ¿Prepararse para fracasar, fracasar para prepararse, fracasar dentro de la falsa seguridad; o compartir y deshacernos un poco nosotros mismos? Todo es posible. Pero por qué, ¿desde la cuna hasta el escenario, desde la clase al bar, a menudo tan sólo hacemos lo que se espera de nosotros? ¿Qué es lo que nos obliga, lo que nos presiona? ¿Cual podría ser nuestro campo de acción en cada momento específico? ¿Cómo podriamos cambiar nuestras relaciones sociales aquí y ahora o en otro momento específico? ¿Cómo se mueven nuestros cuerpos en el espacio? ¿Cómo informan nuestros sentidos nuestros pensamientos? ¿Cómo son nuestras resonancias y silencios musicales? ¿Qué significa esto para diferente gente? ¿Cómo determinan nuesta clase, género y sexualidad, lo que hacemos, que es lo que pensamos y la manera en que tocamos? ¿Podemos tocar sin instrumentos y sin identidades?

Si las condiciones en que producimos nuestra música afectan nuestra manera de tocar, tratemos de sentir a través de ellas, de entenderlas al máximo, y despues, cambiemos estas condiciones. No utilicemos métodos y formas ready-made, tratemos de encontrar nuestros propios métodos.

Celebrando la publicación del libro Ruido & Capitalismo compartiremos 3 días juntos en un experimento performativo, donde la teoría no este distanciada del espacio en el que nos encontramos. Hablaremos, leeremos, actuaremos y nos relacionaremos entre nosotros y con algunos de los textos publicados en el libro Ruido & Capitalismo. Pero estos textos no serán utilizados a modo de reflexión sino de manera práctica la hora de compartir tiempo y espacio juntos.

No queremos definir este experimento ni como taller ni como grupo de lectura sino como un deshacer, entender y compartir de tiempo juntos para explorar las posibilidades tanto políticas como creativas de la situación misma que se vaya generando. Todo el mundo es bienvenido a este experimento.

- Inscripción en el taller
Por favor mande un mail a aural@elnicho.org

Salong, Munich 18-22 January 2011

The extent to which individualism is praised in today’s society is a symptom of howcapitalism has conditioned our subjectivity: it produces more and more brutally precarious conditions while it provide us with the “freedom” to express our creativity in places like youtube, myspace, facebook…In this regard, the artist is a paradigmatic subject in the sense that s/he is willing to give everything (time, energy, money) for the production and promotion of their work. Like a Human Company selling their own integrity as a commodity in exchange of reputation. As we know, reputation is a very good currency nowadays.

Can we through a collective praxis of noise and improvisation understand better how we are conditioned by capitalism? Can we produce something together beyond the framework of intellectual property and without authorship? Can we evade this reputation economy?

During this week, we will discuss these issues while trying things out-whatever these things might be. Let’s disregard aesthetic values for a moment and move together towards politics,
while usurping the authority of those who feel entitled to in any given situation!

Reader

]]> http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?feed=rss2&p=403 0 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=399 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=399#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:02:24 +0000 mattin http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=399

Forms of Formless Knowledge

Noise & Capitalism

Tuesday, 21 December 2010. 19:30h

Bulegoa z/b Solokoetxe 8 bajo. 48006 – Bilbao

Noise & Capitalism is an ongoing collective research platform dedicated to reflect in the way that capitalism conditions our life in relation to the practices of noise and improvisation.

The practices of noise and improvisation have historically claimed to be able to achieve some emancipation, agency and empowerment. We want to explore and question this potential.

Noise and improvisation are considered practices of certain risk in regards not to just to the music industry but also to the current spectacularisation of contemporary culture. This initiative takes these risks as a practice of social responsibility that in fact could take us beyond a phoney sense of freedom into possible unities of differing.

The project comprises different stages and approaches as the publication of a book, the organisation of seminars, presentations and conferences and other public presentation such as concerts and improvisational collective events. It was initiated through the publication of a book edited by mattin and Anthony Iles and has contributions by authors: Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson.

The publication was launched within the context of a seminar entitled Noise & Capitalism: Undoing, Understanding and Sharing time together held in Audiolab-Arteleku, Donostia-San Sebastián.

More recently the project has been presented at Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny in France under the title Noise & Capitalism Exhibition as Concert (August-October 2010). Taking as a starting point the book Noise & Capitalism the CAC exhibition context became an improvised concert lasting for two months. By collapsing the formats of exhibition and concert into each other, the potential of the different usages of the noun noise explores rather than simply perpetuated noise as a musical genre. The exhibition comprised works by mattin and Loïc Blairon, Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Esther Ferrer, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Anthony Iles, Matthieu Saladin and Howard Slater.

More information:

http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/

http://blogs.arteleku.net/audiolab/noise_capitalism.pdf

http://www.mattin.org

http://www.bulegoa.org/

http://www.bulegoa.org/contacto

]]> http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?feed=rss2&p=399 2 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=396 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=396#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:03:13 +0000 audiolab http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=396 John Collins McCormick sent us this track and text in exchange of Noise & capitalism book. Thanks!

That we cannot close our ears as we can our eyes is something of a testament to sound’s simultaneity. Simultaneity then affords a both multi-faceted and multi-dimensional experience that is ever present. Whereas an object can only occupy its own space in whatever form it takes at that moment, sound can mix and coalesce in and through objects and environments.  That noise would be seen as a deterrent to a listening situation can only then be postulated by ones definition of noise.  That something like Noise music could have happened or continue to happen without something like capitalism is unlikely in that the machination of many things was an impetus to create music from/of societal detritus. Although noise needn’t come from society much of Noise music will directly relate to societal aspects beyond formal modes of communication. Then, that machines relate to capitalism is relatively direct, machines make things to be bought and sold. Just as machines (audio effects processors, mixers, computers etc.) are implemented to make Noise music, much of that music and gear is bought and sold. 
That working with sound or noise is to the artist pleasurable also relates to capitalist society in that trade and industry are privatized. The privatization of markets leads to a for profit situation, which in itself includes pleasure.
That there would be some sort of deft skill and imagination used to create this music is what exists in opposition to capitalism. That a new aesthetic and appreciation for the irregular, the tedious, the silent or cacophonous must be developed in a personal manner sets the performers of Noise away from say, a Banker.
That even the most counter-cultural or sub-cultural mode of creation will still likely result in a product that could be commoditized is somewhat of non-importance. Here the importance is placed on virtuosity and creativity, which although are often lent towards selling, they will carry ulterior agendas.
That Noise, or sound would prompt a lavish vacation, or the purchase of a car is unlikely. That Noise, or sound would prompt a psychological investigation of the self is more likely, and presents itself beyond ownership and distribution.  It is a slippery slope for any artist to try to create in direct opposition to capitalism, should there be any type of product as the result of his or her creative activity. A painting is made just as a record or a photograph: for consumptive purposes – whether capital gain is a motive at onset is of no importance. The artist generally does not give the work monetary value, but instead markets decide what the work is worth and who would pay for it. There is an option that an artist could create something so awful, no one in his or her right mind would pay for it let alone look or listen to it. Yet this direct anti-capitalist/anti-hero agenda would more than likely appeal to those disaffected by general modes of consumption so as to want nothing but that seemingly which is anti-capitalist. This effectually lands us on the other end of a circular spectrum:  the mimicry of capitalism is itself rather one and the same.

“… 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?

30 mai 2010 – Centre Mercoeur, Paris

Exhibition as Concert

September 1 – October 31 / 2010

CAC Brétigny

Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny
Espace Jules Verne, Rue Henri Douard
91220 Brétigny s/Orge
France
tel (33) 01 60 85 20 76
fax (33) 01 60 85 20 90
info@cacbretigny.com
35min. From Paris by RER Train

Mattin in collaboration with Loïc Blairon, Ray Brassier,
Emma Hedditch, Esther Ferrer, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Anthony
Iles, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater…

Taking as a starting point the book Noise & Capitalism and the desire to explore noise and improvisation in social and political terms, the CAC exhibition context will become an improvised concert lasting for two months. Going through different degrees of intensity, nothing will remain static; the production and reception will take place simultaneously. By collapsing the formats of exhibition and concert into each other, the potential of the different usages of the noun noise will be explored rather than simply perpetuating noise as a musical genre. Playing with different levels of visibility and invisibility, some activities will be more formal than others. Interventions by different people will take different forms, such as an improvised zine, a continuously generated performance program, an open invitation to improvise with the material conditions of the exhibition… .

Historically, noise – in its many forms – has disrupted established codes, orders, discourses, habits and expectations, aesthetics and moralities. Noise has the potential to exceed the logic of framing, by either being too much, too complex, too dense and difficult to decode or too chaotic to be measured. At first encounter noise has the power to suspend values of judgement such as good or bad or right or wrong. To think of it in moral or ethical terms seems ridiculous. Noise, with its epistemic violence, brings into crisis the division between activity and passivity, and between knowing and feeling. By making us aware of our incapacity to decipher it, noise can expose to us our alienated condition, making us question our own subject position.

Can the practice of noise and improvisation help us in any way to understand or even counter the level of commodification that our lives have reached under the capitalist mode of production? Can we use noise as a form of praxis going beyond established audience/performer relationships? Can we push self-reflexivity to the point of positive feedback?

Noise & Capitalism

Exhibition as Concert

Agenda

19 September, Sunday at 2pm (shuttle from Paris)

Ray Brassier, Jean-Luc Guionnet & Mattin

Idioms & Idiots

25 September Saturday at 11am (shuttle from Paris)

Esther Ferrer

Zaj concert

2 October Saturday at 2pm (shuttle from Paris)

Loïc Blairon

Barred Speach

From 4^th October 2pm until 10^th October 6pm:

Open invitation to improvise with the exhibition as concert. The material conditions (times, budget, space…) are our instruments, from there anything can happen.
Everybody is welcome.

21 October Thursday at 8pm (shuttle from Paris)

Matthieu Saladin & Mattin

Brutalised Aesthetics

26 October at 8pm (shuttle from Paris)

Mattin

Object of Thought

Shuttle time location and reservation: info@cacbretigny.com

For more interventions please check:

http://www.cacbretigny.com/

http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/

CAC Bretigny in collaboration with Taumaturgia (A Coruña) will publish the book Unconsituted Praxis, collecting most of Mattin’s writing.

]]> http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?feed=rss2&p=377 0 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=368 http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=368#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 09:28:47 +0000 audiolab http://blogs.arteleku.net/noise_capitalism/?p=368 “Linnut” by Diana Combo aka EOSIN, as response to Noise&Capitalism trading. Obrigado Diana!

EOSIN: Linnut

Of Musics and Bodies: Embodying the Brazilian Favela Funk

Elena Tiis. Urban Studies MSc. Universiteit van Amsterdam.

‘Moral panics depend on the generation of diffuse normative concerns, while the successful creation of folk devils rests on their stereotypical portrayal as atypical actors against a background that is overtypical.’ (Cohen 1980: 61)

‘All across the favelas, few people listened to the music that outsiders think of as Brazilian. Everyone knows the samba, bossa nova, and Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) hits. They’re the soundtrack of the telenovelas […]. But the mass of favela dwellers have embraced hard core rap and funk […] as their emblematic sound.’ (Neuwirth 2005: 39)

‘Parapapapapapapa/ Paparapapapapapa/ paraapapapapapa kla que bum/ parapapapapa’; the catchy, rhythmic refrain of ‘Rap das Armas’ (Rap of Weapons) song mimics the discharge of an automatic gun. The lyrics’ allusion to the everyday violence in the favelas (shantytowns/informal settlements) of Rio has given it the status of ‘proibidão’, or prohibited music, due to its alleged condoning of violence (see Yúdice). The debate whether this song condones violence or not (I believe it does not) is eclipsed by the more pertinent question of how and why it is possible for such a song to be written, performed and danced to at parties. The process by which drug violence and gun crime are prevalent enough phenomena to be sung about in the ‘public domain’ is an interesting and complex one.
Arguably, music is primarily a bodily relation. It is not merely the lyrics (if applicable) or the identity of the singer that is attractive in any given song but the things that the beat does to the human body which is a type of seduction. Hence, studying the dynamics and spatial politics of funk music in the favelas of Rio requires thinking in terms of bodies – to examine music as something which is predominately corporal and linked to bodily identity. This essay is only preliminary, little more than a few notes on the subject, and just a very small examination of the complex circumstances that intersect illegalities, criminalities as well as pleasures in the favelas. My aim is only to sketch an approach as concerns the expression of the everyday concerns of favela dwellers through music as well as acknowledge musical expressions as an important field of research.
Brazilian funk is often clearly marked a ‘lower’ status music, cheaply produced and enjoyed by predominately people from poorer, ‘blacker’ neighbourhoods (Caldeira 2000: 297; Yúdice 1994: 204). Funkeiros, or the people who enjoy this type of music, have been maligned in the popular press, especially during the early 90s (see Yúdice). My specifically body-relational reading will take on board the insights of Susan McClary who notes how the policing of music actually involves a polemic against the body which, in the case of favela funk, means that questions of racial identity in specifically Brazilian context come into play.
I will attempt analogical and relational ways of conceptualising the social dynamics of funk music, to which extent I will be using examples such as Teresa Caldeira’s book on policing and the contesting of access to city space in São Paulo and Patricia Marquez’s notions of the objectification of youth in the context of institutional responses to youth criminality in Caracas. These, as well as Tricia Rose’s highly contextualised consideration of the birth of hip hop in the context of the postindustrial city of New York, although far away geographically from my chosen context, offer some relevant theoretical import. Caldeira’s consideration of the privatisation and the shrinking of public space will be invested for the consideration of music as a type of public encounter, a type of resistance to privatising encroachments. In this context, Rose’s discussion of hip hop is interesting, because she considers that it replicates and reimagines experiences of urban life and thus symbolically appropriates urban space (1994: 71).

Of (certain) bodies

Spaces and places need to be traversed by bodies – which acquires a special frisson when these spaces and places are sonic because certain symbolic contestations of space acquire an audible ‘materiality’. McClary’s work in this area is of interest: she notes that denouncements of music involve a response for a twin imagined threat – the subversion of authority and (bodily) seduction – which has recurred as a constant throughout music history (1994: 30). In an important reflexive turn for ethnomusicology, she highlights how there is something of the suspicion of music also discernible in the attempt of many popular culture scholars to marginalise the music itself (i.e. to focus on lyrics, politics, reception or culture industry) (ibid.). To this extent there are at least two reasons why music itself and its imagery needs to be figured into the cultural studies project: there is a need to, first, find ways in which to understand socially grounded rhetorical devices by means of which music creates its intersubjective effects and second, to have a sense of the shifting musical strategies and priorities which is important for the consideration of power issues (1994: 32). She contends that it is more productive to focus on music’s correspondence with bodies, because these always arrive already marked with histories which are patterned by class, gender and ethnicity – in this sense music provides for a terrain where competing notions of the body as a symbolic package vie for attention and influence (1994: 33). Indeed, in Brazil class has always operated in relation to various other determinants such as race (the poorest Brazilians tend to be darker) or violence, which disproportionally affects the poorer, younger and darker complexioned Brazilians (Moehn 2007: 187).
The effects of globalisation and culture industry play into a crucible of local concerns marked by its own conceptions about bodily identities, as opposed to the other way around. Livio Sansone, for instance, disagrees with the common position that the massification and homogenization of cultural forms are processes that develop steadily and according to the same principles whatever the country (2001: 136). He cites two misconceptions – first, the notion that music styles spread from the centre to the periphery, which portrays the globalisation of Western culture rather than how local young people reinterpret the symbols associated with global youth styles and second, an ethnomusicological bias that relates social identity to behaviour type which means that each gang/style/subculture becomes linked to a specific use of a single type of music in a very static way (2001: 137). Rather, it is a question of fusion, quotation and reflection in which funk becomes a transponder (or receiver and amplifier) of the globalisation process (2001: 138).
Funk, in this context, is a 1990s term which is used to refer to a variety of electronic musics associated with contemporary U.S-based black musics by most Brazilians (Sansone 2001: 139). Its meaning varies within Brazil – in São Paulo and the south it is basically hip hop which can be either local or imported while in Rio it is used to denominate mainly Brazilian-produced variations usually predicated on a combination of ‘two young working-class voices and a simple rhythm extracted from a cheap, pre-programmed beat box’ (ibid.), for instance that of ‘Rap das Armas’. Funk music itself is simple in terms of rhythm and it is hence dismissed by most music critics as a poor lower-class urban version of U.S. imports, yet it still reflects and redefines the divisions with the lower-class communities and frontiers between the community and the system (Sansone 2001: 139).
As McClary notes, music can be subversive because it contests assumptions about the body (1994: 33). The musical power of the disenfranchised lies more often their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body; since the historicity of musical styles is construed as the historicity of the body, it becomes pertinent to consider how our experiences of our own bodies are themselves often constituted through musical imagery (1994: 35). In favelas, the presence of funk in the alley ways forms a main part of the self-built community and does not characterise a subgroup or a style as such (Sansone 2001: 140). Furthermore, funk does not form a stable subculture, rather its circumstantial use as a divider – sometimes along ethnic lines (2001: 149) inscribes it as such. I think this leaves room for the conception of music as a type of public encounter between various types of bodies which is not strictly equalising but with the ability to efface some of the boundaries with which these bodies are customarily invested. Funk parties provide at least the possibility for the a type of benign encounter between different human bodies.
Sansone’s findings run counter to the common study tendencies he is reviewing. It is not the intrinsic quality of the music/lyrics but the position and consumption within relations of power and pleasure that transform style into an instrument of blackness or something seductive for non-blacks (2001: 155). It is important to note the resilience of territorialised musical traditions and tastes, and how different structural contexts contribute to the persistence of localisms (2001: 156); black youth musics are not necessarily based on similar cultural and structural conditions (2001: 158) and hence should not be theorised as such.

Of (certain) contexts

More nuanced (academic) understandings of youth cultures have been present since the 80s and 90s. They stress the complex intersections of music and specific location (Shuker 2008: 195), emphasising the concept of a scene which is ‘a specific kind of urban cultural context and practice of spatial coding’ (Stahl in Shuker 2008: 199). The state has regulatory power which shapes local music scenes due to policy on the level of international community (market access and copyrights), nation state (e.g. broadcast rights, content quotas, censorship) as well as regional and local governmental levels (which affect venue access and the policing of public spaces) (2008: 205). More often than not, governmental attitudes tend to reflect conservative views of culture, justifying non-intervention in commercial sphere which exists in tension with the concern to regulate a medium when it is associated with a threat to social order (2008: 207).
George Yúdice offers a more militant reading of favela funk as a type of music which – although occupying the same physical space as samba – questions the fantasy of access to social space for the underprivileged (1994: 197) and the more convivial image that those in power wish to propagate of Brazil. To him, Brazilian funk is a challenge to the ownership of the city space by the middle classes, a claim to it that seeks to establish new forms of identity (ibid.). Ademir Lemos’s ‘Rap do Arrastão’, for instance, deals with everyday violence in the favelas – poor youth have little rights to speak of, and they are subject to police harassment and social and geographical segregation. The multiple spaces of new megacities are not traversable by everyone and the poor tend to be prisoners in their own neighbourhoods (Santos in Yúdice 1994: 204). Yúdice contends that ‘funkeiro culture’ has ‘resisted the terms of participation’ which grant cultural representation but no access to goods and services like in the case of other subaltern cultural forms, as such the political significance of funk must be construed otherwise (1994: 208). I think this point stands best if allied with and moderated by McClary’s notion that music itself, especially as it intersects with the body and destabilizes accepted norms of subjectivity is where musical politics resides which is why, even if yoked to an explicitly political agenda, music often proves anomalous (1994: 32-33). Cultural audibility does not automatically imply social power yet it can participate in an attempt to change social formations (1994: 34).
The very meaning of songs is imbricated in a certain type of reading, and these are nothing if not multiple. Meaning is ultimately dependent and produced due to the associations listeners attach to a work of art and the period in which these renditions are situated (Shuker 2008: 101). The same popular culture ‘texts’ can be heard in varying ways and for different purposes, and they can be misconstrued (104). As Stanley Cohen (who first coiled the term ‘moral panic’ in conjunction with studying media reports of disturbances relating to Mods and Rockers in England in the 1970s) notes, mass communication of stereotypes depends on the symbolic power of words and images by which neutral words can be made to symbolise complex ideas and emotions (1980: 40). This is why some songs enter lists of prohibited music. Most importantly, this is where music intersects most potently with the reality of bodies. How music and special types of lyrics intersect with human actors become a point of concern for many. As such it is surprising that the effects and the interpretations of this perplexing physicality of music are often elided in academic discussion and writing about music.
To this extent, I will backtrack a little, and bring writing on the contextualised dimension of music into play. Tricia Rose’s consideration of hip hop’s origins in the postindustrial conditions of New York City in the late 1970s is an important analogy for how music and its accompanying culture emerge from an intersection of lack and desire in the postindustrial city, managing the contradictions of social alienation and hope. Speaking of New York, she writes that since the 1970s global forces have had a direct and sustained impact on urban job opportunity structures and exacerbated racial and gendered forms of discrimination, aided by the diminishing funds allocated to social services (1994: 73-74). Shifts in economic conditions, access to housing, demographics and communication networks crucial to the formation of the conditions which nurtured the cultural hybrids and socio-political tenor of hip hop (1994: 73). Such a description offers a clear parallel to the situation in Rio although it acquires an unmistakeably local tenor; economic restructuring according to the neoliberal model since the late 1970s has further marginalised the marginalised in Brazil as well as the U.S. but the structure, extent and culture of the favelas forms its own special case. Rose notes that societal ‘transformation [is the] basis for digital imaginations all over the world’ (1994: 71) to which extent hip hop makes urban terrain work on behalf of the dispossessed (1994: 72). Funk acts in largely similar ways, offering a type of access to the city for people whom it is usually (more or less overtly) denied.

Of (certain types of) violence

For the purpose of examining the criminality and insecurity that the most explicit lyrics relate,
Caldeira’s studies are informative. She notes that official crime statistics overrepresent upper-class victims and underrepresent working class victims, which is why they reflect conditions other than crime (2000: 112). They are a good indication of the Brazilian conception of individual rights and an embedded disregard for them (2000: 115). This has the effect of making structural reasons opaque: wrongly individualising perpetrators and, then again, wrongly grouping people into manageable, homogenised units when this is for the purposes of construing this group negatively. Poverty and criminality correlate because they are a process of the reproduction of the victimization and criminalisation of the poor (2000: 137) – the correspondence is not essential in any way. Most importantly, Caldeira focuses on discourses of violence and notes that violent acts have their significatory as well as their symbolic dimension. The talk of crime organises the structure of meaning and counteracts the disruption caused by the experiences of violence (2000: 28), making them comprehensible. Violence, a part from being something physical perpetrated on the body of someone, is involved with ways of talking, thinking and feeling.
Furthermore, if the fear of crime and crime are supplying the language with which to talk and think about many destabilising processes, also a much more segregated city space is taking place (2000: 40) – with the retreat of the elites behind walls the spaces for public encounters between different social groups are shrinking (2000: 297). Different social groups experience transformed public spaces in contradictory ways: middle-class as well as working-class young people connect to the global youth through symbols and trends but they physically occupy different spaces in Brazil (ibid.). Working-class youth cannot avoid public spaces, as such their styles and experiences are structured differently – themes such as police abuse and disrespect are more alien to middle-class existence (ibid; Yúdice 1994: 204).
This circumscribed public encounter between people of different class and identity is well interrogated by Caldeira’s concept of ‘unbounded body’ (a body that is considered permeable, or open to intervention and manipulation by authority) (2000: 368). It draws attention to the ways in which institutional and repressive apparatuses of the state operate on bodies. Caldeira contends that the circumstantial creation of unbounded bodies derives from analogical ways and terms of thinking as when the issue is capital punishment and the beating/disciplining of children. Both are considered pedagogic, making an example and setting limits; pain is used as an instrument of authority that induces submission and compliance in the disciplining of ‘weak’ people (2000: 365-66). As a side note which however corroborates this effect, it seems beneficial to briefly detail Patricia Marquez’s study of street children who are in state care in Caracas, Venezuela. She notes how state institutions develop constructions of deviancy that are isolated from the reality of the environment (the life on the streets, abusive familial relations, material lack) the children are responding to (1999: 112) to which extent this, coupled with serious disinvestment into providing care for street children, results in the reification (or objectification) of children as a series of antisocial acts (1999: 138). The state assumes tutelage of young persons using negative constructions of crime/youth/mental/social health as a result of which the social, cultural, economic and political contexts of acts are ignored and the transgressors get labelled with psychosocial clichés (1999: 139-44).
The point of bringing such an example into play is how it highlights how institutional effects are actually power games on the bodies of the dominated which, in the Brazilian context, Caldeira contends are a facet of Brazilian ‘disjunctive democracy’ (a democracy which deligimates civil citizenship and civil rights in many respects) which is not the same cultural and political logic which creates bounded individuals in the tradition of citizenship (2000: 372) which means that egalitarian legal protection of citizens and the right to decent living conditions have actually become even less accessible for many citizens (Moehn 2007: 186). Music, in its innocuous way, is involved in a conflict of valuations taking place in public spheres, which couples with power structures and institutional forces as well as issues of class and racial stratification. Marquez’s study of the institutional responses to youth crime in Venezuela exposes how young people are reified as ‘minors’ (1999: 129) and dismantled as a series of antisocial acts in stead of being apprehended as beings acting in a social, cultural, economic and political contexts (1999: 138-139). This has the effect of wrongly individualising young people (young bodies) when they commit crimes and wrongly making them part of a group when one can be identified, e.g. ‘all funkeiros are the same’.

Conclusion
‘In the postindustrial urban context of dwindling low-income housing, a trickle of meaningless jobs for young people, mounting police brutality and increasingly demonic depictions of young inner-city residents, hip hop style is black urban renewal.’ (Rose 1994: 85)

During the course of this essay, I have tried to chart some of the ways in which bodies (as complex systems which unite symbolic meanings invested in race, culture, citizenship and authority structures) interact in city spaces through the medium of different types of musics. The deeply embodied dimension of music attains its most radical dimension in discourse. If theories position the physicality of music in opposition to political substance, they have the effect of reinscribing the polemics against the body that characterises attempts at policing music (McClary 1994: 33). To combat this, it is necessary to embody music, or to trace its effects on different kinds of bodies. Music is as well an issue of space. At issue is the contestation of cultural meaning and access to physical urban realm for which music often acts as proxy.
I have involved three different examinations of three different cities – Rose of New York, Caldeira’s of São Paulo, and Marquez of Caracas – in order to highlight some theoretically important analogies and aspects of studying contested musics. Although these examinations are based on different contexts, some of their notions are appropriate and illuminate my chosen context. Nevertheless, it is still important to keep in touch with the specific local flavour of funk, and its embeddedness in the local context of Rio for which many more on-the-ground studies should be conducted (e.g. Moehn 2007). Funk, exactly because it is not exactly artistically grand or in any way specifically inventive (it does not develop the impressive Brazilian tradition of percussion for instance) or even politically conscious, manages to create a ‘space’ for many underprivileged young people. In this way, funk music can be seen as a way of contesting and appropriating (symbolic) access to city space – even if it only offers access by proxy.

Bibliography:
Caldeira, T. R. R. (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles & London.
Cohen, S. (1980) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Martin Robertson: Oxford.
Marquez, P. (1999) ‘Guerra Contra el Hampa: Control through Media, Law and the State’. The Street is My Home: Youth and Violence in Caracas. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
McClary, S. (1994) ‘Same As It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music’. In Ross, A. & Rose, T., Microphone Fiends: youth music and youth culture. Routledge: London & New York.
Moehn, F. (2007) ‘Music, Citizenship, and Violence in Postdictatorship Brazil’. Latin American Music Review. Vol. 28, Number 2.
Neuwirth, R. (2005) Shadow Cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world. Routledge: London & New York.
Rose, T. (1994) ‘A Style Nobody Can Deal With: Politics, Style and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop’. In Ross, A. & Rose, T., Microphone Fiends: youth music and youth culture. Routledge: London & New York.
Sansone, L. (2001) ‘The Localization of Global Funk in Bahia and in Rio’. In (eds.) Perrone, C.A & Dunn, C., Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization. University Press of Florida: Gainesville.
Shuker, R. (2008) Understanding Popular Music Culture. Third ed. Routledge: London & New York.
Yúdice, G. (1994) ‘The Funkification of Rio’. In Ross, A. & Rose, T., Microphone Fiends: youth music and youth culture. Routledge: London & New York.

Sung by MCs Junior and Leonardo in the 1990s and publicised especially with the appearance of the MCs Cidinho and Doca version on the soundtrack of Tropa de Elite (2007) film.