ANTI-SELF: EXPERIENCE-LESS NOISE

[undo]

ok, one more time -- what essay is actually in the continuum book?

[negative potential]

(i mean, i had a feeling, since you are the last man on earth to care about 'metal machine music' in 2011...)

What's up with the hipster distancing from MMM? I don't care that it's the first point of reference when rock journalists think "noise" record. It's still really beautiful. This would definitely be in my top ten of "records I love to fall asleep to". I don't get all the one-upmanship about how non-innovative or unserious this record is supposed to be.

I mean, seriously, what a record-nerd way to end a sentence: "in 2011".

Yeah bro, I also listen to Gang of Four's Entertainment (1979) in 2011, read Karl Marx's Capital (1867) in 2011, dig Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich in 2011, watch Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 2011, and marvel at Velasquez's Las Meninas (1656) in 2011.

For all the canonization neurosis on this discussion forum, it's weird to see that sort of "merit by virtue of contemporaneousness" stuff.

Don't make me bust loose with a Hipster Frodo meme...

[jkudler]

I think that was a reference to mattin's essay positing Lou Reed as still somehow transgressive.

[undo]

oh, you!

(for negative potential, who just h-bombed me. he's cute!)

[negative potential]

oh, you!

(for negative potential, who just h-bombed me. he's cute!)

I'm allowed to H-bomb, I live in Berlin. It's a right stipulated in our rental contracts.

[undo]

anyway, we're pretty deep into this thing and not a soul has come out to defend that catastrophe of an essay as such. not even the guy who posted it from his IP address. or didn't. who knows, man, who knows... there's been a little discussion about whether it's ok to publish a dumb thing, but that's about it.

i mean, i can't get anyone to answer my question about what essay actually appears in the book.

i like the anonymous collective thing, except when i think it's partly a ploy to prevent anyone from criticizing a piece. i mean, miguel can get back on as gegensichkollektiv if it makes him feel better. just answer a question or two.

[RFKorp]

Joe, it might have been a little buried. but according to the page on the actual continuum website that Miguel linked, it's the one in the OP, not Mattin's of ususually similar title.

edit, for convenience/clarity/blah blah blah:
THIS LINK CLICK ME

[mudd]

yes the post was made from an IP address miguel has used in the past. that doesn't mean he wrote it, or even that he posted it. there is a nebulous connection between miguel and the poster, that's all the IP address indicates.

the piece is over my head, though, so i have criticism to offer. it would be nice if we could talk about the arguments therein some more, but i understand it can be a little difficult to put a finger on what they are. any help?

m

[GegenSichKollektiv]

only one thing to say, the post of this essay is not written by Miguel.

[leroysghost]

this is all pretty "gegen sich" as it is. i'll just say that i still care about MMM and would like to fully censure the opinion that Mattin is the only guy who cares about it in 2011. Mattin can do a lot of annoying things, but getting to be sole caretaker of my favorite records is not one of them. fuck this Mattin hierarchy, MMM belongs to the people.

[leroysghost]

also,

GegenSichKollektiv = the most obvious placeholder genre title for the area of music under discussion. EAI is now GSK.

[William Hutson]

to be honest, i would only be a little bit surprised if continuum printed this nonsense— they've been getting worse and worse. they seem willing to release every precocious twenty six year old's dissertation, including typos and layout errors. (and who the hell can stand to read an entire book set in helvetica? that's not what that font is for!!). academic presses not actually associated with a university often have this problem— routledge isn't all that much better.

[MRS]

I'd be willing to wager that there is a vibraphone in the ocean.

[rainey]

the piece is over my head, though, so i have criticism to offer. it would be nice if we could talk about the arguments therein some more, but i understand it can be a little difficult to put a finger on what they are. any help?

I'll give it a shot...

1. Capitalism has provided mechanisms for individual empowerment (or a sense of meaning or an idea of one's place in the world...) that simultaneously reinforce capitalist ideological structures, apparently on a neurophysiological level (this last part seems like a specious claim or at least one that involves a highly creative interpretation of data). So, capitalism kind of tricks you into surrendering to it by making you think that you're actually winning (gaining confidence, attention, etc.) when, in fact, you are falling right into its trap (of being powerless and totally uncreative). Capitalism's close relationship with technology has only made this worse, since technology takes care of a lot of smart stuff (i.e., analyzing huge amounts of data and picking the right stock to buy) and strong stuff (i.e., turning a bunch of metal into a car), leaving us with more and more frivolous endeavors to generate our individual illusions of power. Artists, who are always one step away from being clowns, have been particularly susceptible to this frivolity and have taken to trading any kind of actual position of power in society (usually gained by making a lot of money) for things like high download stats and a handful of good reviews on blogs.

2. Our perception is a filter of reality, and our consciousness is a story generated from filtered perceptions. Therefor, we don't really know reality, which is probably way more hostile than we like to think. Some areas of philosophy and science converge on this topic.

3. Since it would probably be cool to get out of the trap described in #1 and also to know reality better, we might take recourse in noise, which allows us to step outside the current horizon of meaning (so that we might encounter an unexpected new meaning, which we will then have to noise-ify to transgress further?). To really do this, we have to eradicate, as best we can, our sense of (enduring) self, which, being an illusion of wholeness, is kind of the opposite of noise.

4. Silence is kind of like noise. Also, the fact that durations of silence are actually owned by people (like Cage) shows how totally nuts capitalism can be.

5. Noise as a genre has aestheticized noise. Onkyo, reductionist (I thought we got past that word?) improvisation, and Wandelweiser have aestheticized silence. This aestheticizing has taken the revolutionary force out of these things and reinforced an artist/audience power differential (in favor of the artist). This is bad.

[Assuming the above is true, does it follow that the revolutionary force has entirely left the music? This essay, despite the frustration of many readers, is comprehensible and situated within an established and easily recognizable style of writing. It is neither noisy, in any significant sense, nor silent, yet one assumes it intends to convey something revolutionary. Are noise and silence the only way out?]

[Also, isn't the outcome of the self-eradicating, noisy path laid out by the authors fairly predictable? Isn't it just an arms race of un-aesthetic acts that quickly become aesthetic and bring us back to Duchamp? Or is the challenge of avoiding this predictable outcome part of what makes it so seductive?]

6. Michael Pisaro did a piece meant to evoke the feeling of nice waves. He obviously doesn't get it.

I would be interested in a well-argued expansion of #5 (I think that many of us have intuited something problematic in the sheen of silence present in a lot of contemporary improvised and composed music), but that's not what we have here.

Oh, and there are two ways that people can share the same IP address: 1) They are posting from the same local network; i.e., a library or university or individual computer, or 2) One or both of them is deliberately faking their IP address. Either way, there is a relationship between the two posters, and the denial of this seems embarrassingly childish.

[Jesse]

“There are silences of peace, and then there are silences of complacency, stasis, regulation, piety, submissiveness, secrecy, ostracism, excommunication, the status quo, a deserted town centre after dark, gloomy Sunday, a gated community, suburbia, a cold church pew, people living quiet, respectable lives or suffocating under ennui, shame, embarrassment, inhibition, blankness, boredom.”

~ David Toop
Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener

with some reference to rainey's #5 above.

[mudd]

thanks bhob. i agree that point #5 is something worth thinking about. i'm gonna think about it some.

m

[Matt Wuethrich]

Putting aside any clear definition of noise, silence and experimental music (which the essay also does), the argument in this essay (and similar theory-saturated critiques which suggest so-called experimental music lacks a political dimension) seems to rest on the assumption that the musicians/artists always [/i ]intend for the music to be revolutionary and radical in a conventional political sense. Or at least that this revolutionary / capitalist critique should somehow be inherent in all experimental music.

To me this seems like a viewpoint that is a few decades old, almost like all "experimental" music should be protest music or something. Is it really so that silence and noise (or should I say Silence and Noise?) can only be used for this end?

I know that some musicians are reticent to speak about what they intend their music to mean or what effect they want it to have on an audience/listeners, but perhaps this is a good chance to open up a bit about it? At least to counter the somewhat simplifying claims of this essay (as Pisaro already did). Seeing as how so many "experimental musicians" post on this board, there's a lot of good input waiting to be heard. I, for one, would be all ears.

[ryansupak]

Occasionally I "pay a visit" to the world of "Noise". I don't spend most of my "music time" thinking about it, performing it, or listening to it, but I have a lot of familiarity with its forms and customs for a "lay person". Certain components of its mindset, and their potential to transform ideas about art, interest me greatly.

One thing that strikes me about Noise -- bearing in mind what the article says about its "original revolutionary purpose" -- is how codified many aspects of it are: the demographic of creators and listeners, the style of dress, the configurations of equipment used to make it, the rituals associated with its distribution, and finally the sonic result. I don't think this means the participants are bad people or dumb or "sheep" or anything like that; I think that this "congealment" is part of the nature of all social things.

On the other hand: the very aesthetic of Noise makes it more immune than almost any other music form to this "congealment", since most people don't enjoy listening to it or seeing it performed. Because there's less money/fame/popularity/romance/etc... to be gained from mastering Noise, the tendency is for many of the most skilled/dedicated artists to pursue other forms that are more "beautiful", more popular, more lucrative, and so on. (Sorry, I'm not overjoyed about it either.)

This "brain drain" is a factor that I think both helps and hurts Noise. I think that an artist who was able to make a good living from Noise -- who was able and willing to devote the same time and dedication to it that Ray Charles was to his piano, for instance -- might produce a work so powerful and compelling that it would stand a chance of being truly revolutionary, in that it would change the way non-eggheads approach the idea of music (and experience, and consumption, and so on). This gets back to the Catch-22: for the likelihood of this happening to increase, Noise would have to be popular and there would have to be substantial rewards for the person who could achieve this. But the lack of these rewards is almost inherent in the aesthetic of "pure" Noise.

rs

[FifePsy]

(i mean, i had a feeling, since you are the last man on earth to care about 'metal machine music' in 2011...)

What's up with the hipster distancing from MMM? I don't care that it's the first point of reference when rock journalists think "noise" record. It's still really beautiful. .

Totally agree. I've followed Lou's career through many years and MMM still stands the test of time for me. If anything, for such a supposedly 'extreme' record (for it's time) is how tame and 'tunefull ' it appears today. At the same time I'll be the first to admit that quality control is not a strong point for Lou post the Velvets. With all the hoopla about the Lulu, record which admittedly, from what I've heard is awfull, what seems to have bypassed the critical radar is Lou's Hudson River Wind Meditations which I think is a beautiful exercise in ambient minimalism and to a certain fraternity, if it had been badged as 'Kevin Drumm' would have had certain critics salivating.

[FifePsy]

bearing in mind what the article says about its "original revolutionary purpose"

rs

LOL. $90 for a compendium of essays to provoke us out of our capitalist alienation. Sign me up if I can afford it! (although would like to read the Bruce Russell piece. A practitioner who can actually write and marshall his theory).

Seriously, I didn't find the original piece too offensive. Something you might encourage in a Masters student to develop their writing technique for their PhD and read some Gramsci, Benjamin, Barthes...etc.