“Linnut” por Diana Combo aka EOSIN, como respuesta al intercambio del libro Noise&Capitalism. Obrigado Diana!

EOSIN: Linnut

Interesante artículo envíado por Elena Tiis a modo de intercambio por el libro Noise & Capitalism.

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). Read the rest of this entry »

por Alexandre Losada

Noise, Affect, Politics Conference

“Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures”: Noise, Affect, Politics

University of Salford, July 1-3 2010

Organising Committee: Dr Michael Goddard, Dr Benjamin Halligan and Professor David Sanjek

“If there are people that are dumb enough to use Metallica to interrogate prisoners, you’re forgetting about all the music that’s to the left of us. I can name 30 Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon and Garfunkel.” – Lars Ulrich

“… this music can put a human being in a trance like state and deprive it of the sneaking feeling of existing, ’cos music is bigger than words and wider than pictures… if the stars had a sound it would sound like this.” – Mogwai, “Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home”

Noise Annoys. Is it not a banal fact of modern, urban existence that one person’s preferred sonic environment is another’s irritating, unwelcome noise – whether in the high-rise apartment, on public transport or the street, or almost anywhere else? The contingent soundscape of jack-hammers and pneumatic drills, mobile phone chatter, car sirens and alarms, sound leakage from nightclubs and bars and – moving into the suburbs – lawn-mowers and amateur renovation projects, neighbouring kids and dogs, represents a near-constant aural assault. As a pollutant, noise can legally attain noxious levels; it is both potentially biologically harmful and psychologically detrimental.

But what exactly is noise and what conditions these relative thresholds in which sound crosses over into noise? Or are these more organised and polite sonic phenomena merely varieties of noise that have been tamed and civilised, and yet still contain kernels of the chaotic, anomalous disturbance of primordial noise? As a radical free agent, how is noise channelled, neutralised or enhanced in emergent cityscapes? As a consumable, how is noise – or lack of noise – commodified?

Such questions are particularly applicable to contemporary forms of music which, based as they are on a variety of noise-making technical machines, necessarily exist in the interface between chaotic, unpredictable noise and the organised and blended sounds of music and speech. Does modern noise seek to lead us to new, post-secular inscapes (as with psychedelia and shoegazer), or defy the lulling noisescapes of processed background muzak with punitive blasts of disorientating, disorderly noise? And why the cult of noise – in term of both volume and dissonance – in which low cultural practices (metal, moshing) meet those of the avant-garde (atonalism, transcendentalism)?

This conference seeks to address the contemporary phenomenon of noise in all its dimensions: cultural, political, territorial, philosophical, physiological, subversive and military, and as anomalous to sound, speech, musicality and information. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Psychedelic and Neo-Psychedelic Musics
Punk and Post-Punk Musics
Experimental Musics from Avant-Classical to Digital Noise / Raw Data
Industrial Musics and Cultures
Krautrock and German Noise
Shoegazer, Nu-Gaze and Post-Rock
Noise as Cultural Anomaly
Noise, Chaos and Order
Noise and architectural planning
Noise and digital compression
Noise Scenes from No Wave to Japan-Noise Noise and electronic music pioneers (Delia Derbyshire, Varèse, Stockhausen)
Noise and Territory
Sonic Warfare
Noise and Urban Environments / “Noise pollution”
Noise and Subjectivation
Sonic Ecologies
“White Noise”
Noise and Political Subversion
Noise and hearing impairment / deafness
Psychic / silent noise
Noise and mixing, particularly in nightclub environments
Noise in Cinema, Video and Sound Art Noise,
Appropriation and Recombination
Noise and Affect

Confirmed speakers include Sheila Whiteley, author of ‘The Space Between the Notes’, Paul Hegarty, author of the recent ‘Noise/Music’, Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire and Mattin (talking in relation to some aspects addressed in the book Noise & Capitalism).

Registration Form

Draft Programme

Paper Abstracts

Suggested Accommodation

How to Find Us

Crítica de Noise & Capitalism en la revista Volume!
por Aitor Izaguirre (en francés)

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

Disculpa, pero esta entrada está disponible sólo en English.