Noise and Independence
No. 14, March 2004
At the end of the 20th century, the prosperous billion population of the Earth became oversaturated with music – the most diverse music, from easily accessible, sounding everywhere from televisions, radios, and computers, to experimental, interesting to very few. Sound became increasingly sophisticated – thus covering the largest number of consumers. The stage of overproduction of music – in its traditional understanding – came. However, over the last twenty years, a very special genre has actively developed – a conceptual opposition to all kinds of technical improvements used in creating relatively structured musical works. We are talking about noise, noise music.
Music that can shock an unprepared listener culturally, noise (from English – noise) is one of the genres of industrial, a direction focused on using electronic instruments and provocative punk tools. Noise, however, offered its own, very special musical aesthetics, largely different from industrial.
In noise, it is impossible to distinguish notes, scales, and chords – it is really just noise. Noise resembling that made by machines, wind, broken radio equipment, simply noise of uncertain origin. Sometimes noise may include a certain rhythm, other musical structural elements, but such examples are decorative exceptions; the basis of noise is the energy of sound. Both creators and admirers of noise insist that noise is music.
John Cage’s idea that anything can be music, even silence, received absolute confirmation in the work of noise producers. However, they preferred something more radical than silence – wild noise, often becoming a test for eardrums. Listening to noise is recommended, of course, at full volume; otherwise, all the pleasure will be lost.
By analogy with the non-figurative direction in painting, noise offers many possibilities for theoretical interpretations. And by the same analogy, noise musicians are often compared to abstract artists: supposedly no education or skill is required to create something like this. This opinion is wrong. Indeed, amateur artists and amateur musicians can create something abstract, but the result will be much less impressive compared to the work of professionals. Many noise musicians have classical musical education, and those who do not have it develop their own original system, largely resonating with the traditional one.
Noise is often compared to ambient – both genres have abandoned conventional melodiousness and focus on a minimum of sounds. However, noise is ambient with a minus sign: if ambient music is originally background, something the listener should not pay attention to, then noise, no matter how hard you try, cannot be unheard, it is too aggressive for such ignoring.
Noise is the idea of industrial brought to its logical limit. The listener faces only aggressive noise and a minimum of expressive means. But there is much less punk here – noise performance basically does not imply expressive behavior on stage. On the contrary, musicians phlegmatically work with their strange analog instruments and the already traditional laptops for electronic music concerts. However, this does not diminish their provocativeness – it fully moves into the audible realm.
Each noise musician has their own approach to creating this product: the Japanese Masonna, for example, uses human screams along with noises, turning already not-so-harmless music into a real test for the listener’s nerves. In general, when creating noise, demagnetized audio cassettes, fragments of other sound works, recordings of city noises, anything goes – as long as it is effective and convincing from the noise creator’s point of view.
Paradoxically, people who enjoy listening to noise are very familiar with 20th-century pop music culture, not outcasts aggressively opposing this culture. Even opera classical music lovers. Often these listeners look for the slightest shades of sound or barely distinguishable references to other works in noise.
Another paradox: offering the listener extremely reduced music, noise nevertheless does not reduce in the listener’s consciousness the personality of the author creating this music. On the contrary, often the personality becomes attractive to noise fans. This thesis fully applies to the two flagships of noise music – the Japanese producer Merzbow and the Finnish project Pan Sonic.
Stars
Perhaps Merzbow did not invent noise, but he did everything possible to be associated with noise like no other artist in the world. Merzbow is a true cult. The Japanese Akita Masami, who chose as his pseudonym the name of an installation by the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, has been actively creative in the field of sound since the late 1970s. During this time, he has created and released so many recordings that it is simply impossible to count them all – the musician is enviably hardworking. But for a listener who is not a passionate fan of noise and Merzbow personally, the musician’s discography may seem like a real mockery – almost all albums of the Japanese producer sound very similar.
It would be more correct to say that they are created according to one scheme, using the same devices, programs, and technical devices. However, the same can be said about the records of most pop groups – indeed, they are produced in the same computer programs, using a standard set of instruments. But if these instruments produce sounds to which the human ear, at least sometimes listening to modern music, has long been accustomed, Merzbow’s devices emit such screeching, rumbling, and whistling that few want to follow their development.
Merzbow calls his music not improvisational but, on the contrary, automatic, comparing it to the automatic writing of surrealists, and the aggressive noise of his instruments to their libido. In general, Masami’s theoretical base is quite impressive – in his interviews, he appears as an impressively educated and erudite person, expressing rather unexpected and interesting thoughts about music. Regarding noise, he often talks about the art of surrealists and dadaists, as well as bondage (the practice of tying a partner for sexual purposes) – Masami explores sadomasochism and wrote music for several films on this topic.
Merzbow tours a lot, mostly outside Japan. Masami often performs at contemporary art exhibitions, presenting his own sound installations. Performances within contemporary art projects, by the way, are quite common practice for noise musicians – refined intellectuals from the art world consider experimental music as relevant a part of culture as contemporary art. Needless to say, no pop star can expect such an attitude.
Perhaps it is due to the fame of Merzbow and some other Japanese producers that noise is often spoken of exclusively as a Japanese phenomenon. However, this theory is a myth. Noise is now created and listened to almost everywhere, even in peripheral regions of the global music market.
Pan Sonic is a project of Finns Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen, who in the 1990s proposed a new aesthetics of noise. In accordance with the trends of the time, the musicians develop minimalism; often Pan Sonic tracks consist of one sound (an impulse, a monotonous rhythm) dissected in the strangest way. The Finns use both very low and very high frequencies in their music, which burn concert equipment and collapse halls where they perform. The Pan Sonic sound has become so recognizable that it is time to talk about a pop-level mechanism when some new, just appeared project is compared to an existing one – once a rare phenomenon for experimental music.
Public relations with noise musicians are built almost the same way as with pop culture businessmen – this connection is quite obvious. For example, the names of their projects were chosen by Akita Masami (Merzbow) and Akifumi Nakajima (Aube) roughly the same way as Japanese visual kei groups (local extreme glam rock) – using abstract words from European languages.
As for scandalous stories – a traditional tool of show business – it turned out that experimental musicians need only a small scandal (or even just its possibility) to gain cult status. In the case of experimental musicians, it often concerns a clash with the bourgeois world, conservatism, and so on. When the project Panasonic faced the predictable threat of legal proceedings with the Japanese corporation of the same name, the musicians, without much thought, removed the second letter “a” from their name. Later, they named one of their records after this letter. Compared to the newspaper fuss around the personal life of a pop star, this story is worth nothing, but considering the scale of Pan Sonic’s audience, it became a real sensation.
Noises of Ukraine
Only small indie labels still dare to release noise. At the same time, very few dare to release exclusively noise: almost all publishers focused on noise operate in Japan, where this music has become almost a separate industry of the music business.
In Ukraine, the number of independent labels, i.e., small companies releasing records of artists who are hard to see on TV and hear on the radio due to their music that can scare, offend, or at least leave the average listener deeply puzzled, is extremely small. None of them specialize in releasing noise. The owner of the Kyiv label “Quasi Pop Records,” Edward Es, believes that the very idea of focusing attention on noise is somewhat archaic. “Now noise itself is absolutely uninteresting. The concepts of Merzbow or Whitehouse, developed over decades, seem to me outdated. As a musical genre, noise has already passed the moment when quantity began to prevail over quality. However, many musicians use elements of noise. Young artists cooperating with Quasi Pop, who have no idea about Merzbow, for example, make very strange music in which noise is heard. This is simply their way of thinking, not the result of mastering someone else’s material.”
Noise can be heard in large volumes on the records of the Kharkiv label “Nexsound.” In particular, on the discs of the musician Kotra (living and working in Kyiv) – one of the most prominent figures on today’s Ukrainian experimental scene. Kotra also considers noise not so much a relevant genre as an approach to creating music. And more than suitable for exploitation: “If IDM as a genre is already dead, then noise, which appeared much earlier, has transformed and lives. A specific and attractive feature of noise is that the path from a musical idea to its realization for a noise producer is very short. I don’t think noise tracks will ever be promoted like pop songs. But as a sound design tool, noise will definitely be used by widely known artists. This is already happening – Björk used noise in the arrangements of her songs.”
Indeed, representatives of pop culture have long used the techniques of noise producers – this happened with rock groups My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, and others. However, noise is most often used by them cautiously, as if not to the full extent – pop music continues to exploit long-tested schemes. However, Kotra is quite loyal to the overproduction of music: “I like it; everyone can choose what they like. And even if there is stagnation in music for twenty years, it is worth enduring it to wait for something new and powerful to appear. It is quite likely that in 2010 we will see the emergence of some Breton of music.” Like many Western noise musicians, Kotra has experience working in the field of contemporary art – he collaborated with the group Akuvido, with the Kyiv Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA, founded by George Soros, and wrote music for video. The Ukrainian musician Kotra participates in large international experimental music events – in particular, at the German Club Transmediale, where he performed on the same stage with Pan Sonic.
The interest of young Ukrainian musicians in noise is evidenced by the multimedia magazines “Reyvakh,” which collect tracks of musical groups related to the festival of the same name. The project Zsuf, for example, uses noise in its tracks, which can be attributed rather to the genre of dark ambient. But, of course, it is too early to talk about a widespread fascination of the new generation of Ukrainian artists with noise.
As revolutionary as Stravinsky or jazz sounded at the beginning of the 20th century, noise sounded in the last years of the past century. However, the acquaintance of the mass listener with noise is still ahead, and whether noise becomes a mass phenomenon depends only on whether this music is perceived not only as something radical and shocking but also as beautiful and mesmerizing.Link
