reviewed on red_robin :: tristan louth-robins’ blog
thanks.

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]