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

English:

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

Italian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]