From: CTHEORY EDITORSTo: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 08/11/01 20:44
Subject: Article 47-Japanese Noise Music
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 3
http://www.ctheory.net
Article 97 11/08/01 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music
================================================
~Paul Hegarty~
1. Scratching the Surface
-------------------------
"Full with Noise,..." is about noise music, specifically the version
that has come to be called Japanese Noise -- itself composed of many
different strands. The first half deals with the question of noise.
What is it, whose is it, and how can we think about it. Also, how
does noise inflect our thinking, rather than being an object; at what
point does noise lose its noiseness and become meaning, music,
signification? Or -- is there even a point where noise can subsist?
Mostly, the text below takes the view that noise is a function of
not-noise, itself a function of not being noise. Noise is no more
original than music or meaning, and yet its position is to indicate
the banished, overcome primordiality, ~and cannot lose this
'meaning'~. Noise, then, is neither the outside of language nor
music, nor is it simply categorisable, at some point or other, as
belonging exclusively to the world of meaning, understanding, truth
and knowledge. Instead, noise operates as a function of ~differance~.
If this term is what indicates and is subsequently elided, in/as the
play of inside and outside (of meaning, truth, language,
culture....), then we can form another binary with identity on one
side and ~differance~ on the other, but with this difference - that
differance is both one term in the binary, and that which is the
operation of the binary. This is what noise is/does/is not. For James
Kahn, noise drifts across the binary empirical/abstract, such that
"when noise itself is being communicated, [...] it no longer remains
inextricably locked into empiricism but it transformed into an
abstraction of another noise" [1]. In other words, noise is (taken
to be) empirical, belonging to the world that is there in itself, a
world of sounds without conscious sources. When such a view is
mobilised, by the dadas, the futurists and so on, then noise becomes
second order: a demonstration of the noise that subsists beyond.
As Kahn rightly notes, there is no noise without the thought of
noise, and ideas about sound can therefore "make an audible event
called noise louder than it might already be" [2] - noises come from
specific places and specific conceptualisations. At some level, the
use of noise is a bid (however unwitting) to master it (at least in
Western modernism), and reduce its quality as noise: "avant-garde
noise, in other words, both marshals and mutes the noise of the
other: power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and
society itself is both attacked and reinforced" [3]. This of course
includes the "actual" others of the Western male - woman and the
foreign other particularly significant here. For the purposes of this
essay, it is the use of the exotic other that might be at stake. Kahn
observes that the early modernists" love of "the primitive" led them
to (in)appropriate so-called primitive musics, and "thus, the
grinding sound of power relations are heard here in the way noises
~contain~ the other, in both senses of the word" [4].
Perhaps this is what is going on in trying to theorise Japanese noise
music, even when rendering this a theoretical agent. Maybe crucial
cultural elements are missing, leading to presumptions about what is
being produced, based on underinformed hearing. This may be so. But
what needs to be added is that if noise is to be noise, then an
authentic reading (of true meaning) cannot be, cannot take place.
More importantly, Japanese noise has its roots as much in free jazz,
experimental rock music and contemporary classical music, as in
traditional or classical Japanese musics. Part of the "noise" that
unites highly disparate musics under the banner of noise music is
precisely a disruption of Western music and its genres.
Japanese Noise music has existed since the early 1970s, and since the
late 1980s has been increasingly influential. This essay concentrates
on the figure seen to epitomise Japanese noise: Merzbow, essentially
the work of Masami Akita, and even then, only a tiny fraction of his
output. The second half of the essay, including the conclusion, is an
attempt to create a Merzbow/theory object -- failing.
II. Scraped Subjectivity
------------------------
A recent exploratory political document states that "noise is sound
which has a negative effect on people (unwanted sound)."[5] According
to C.S. Kerse, noise is "sound which is undesired by the recipient",
"a sound without musical quality or an unwanted or undesired sound"
(_The Law Relating to Noise_, 8). Noise, then is subjective, and
this is what vexes the Law, which exists, according to Jacques
Attali, as result of the transformation of noise into music, into a
regulated system, which heralds all regulated systems, all that comes
from the buried sacrifice at the origin of society.
Attali: "Primordially the production of music has as its function the
creation, legitimation and maintenance of order. Its primary function
is not to be sought in aesthetics, which is a modern invention, but
in the effectiveness of its participation in social regulation. Music
- pleasure in the spectacle of murder, organizer of the simulacrum
masked beneath festival and transgression - creates order"[7].
Is noise subjective? Could we not instead say that noise has to do
with the subject: that which occurs as/at the limit of the subject;
that which signals an immanence outside of the subject/object divide,
however reclothed in phenomenology? It would not then be enough to
say "one person's noise is another's music" in some liberalist
fantasy - rather we would have to acknowledge the constructedness of
the "subjectivity of noise".
Technical books on acoustics often assert that noise is in some way
biologically coded - 'we' perceive certain sounds as noise because
the vibrations are too close to the frequencies, rhythms, wavelengths
of bodily functions. Others are noise because they are too alien.
This is not totally false, but what is really at stake here are
discourses which presume that there is an absolute, shared biology,
layered with personal freedoms of judgement, feeling and so on. Such
a stratification is also not false, but that does not make it
natural, nor the specific layering a given: it makes an apparent
end-result (or beginning-result), where there could simply be process
[8].
If we are to listen to noise as music, noise designed as music, noise
perhaps designed to stay noise, but to be heard in the conditions
music is listened to, then something must give. Two possible models:
firstly, learn to live with it - adopt an Adorno pattern (didactic)
over a Hegel pattern (post-Hegelian, (un)phenomological), unwittingly
championed by John Cage, and argue that we can, as result of
listening to noise, rather than hearing it involuntarily, relearn how
to approach the world and its cultural 'world' (of course, world and
'world' can be quickly reversed); second model - create a situation
which exposes the 'noise-afflicted subject' to remain so - through an
act of sovereignty (something in Bataille that seems to be mastery,
but undoes itself) consign the subject and its supposedly subordinate
vessel to chora-ness.
How to be a body without organs without being a fusion-loving hippie:
after the schizo, paranoid, hysteric bodies, comes the masochist
body: retrained and subjected as the last choice of the subject, the
masochist body is "further" than the schizo body, leaking its
internal organs, becoming pathway, becoming solid, becoming-becoming.
The masochist body has the option of losing itself as organism
through restraint, enclosure, containment (whilst also becoming
someone else's body without organs, becoming body of the other): "it
has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts
and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs
from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized,
smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight" [9]. As a result
we have a version of 'the' body without organs: it "is what remains
when everything is taken away. What you take away is, very
specifically, is the [masochist] phantasy, the whole made up of
significations and subjectifications" [10]. Except that not
everything has been taken away - the ears remain open.[11] Is this so
the masochist body can hear instructions? Is this because the body
without organs is really about listening?[12] It is perhaps that the
ears constitute 'an' organ that we cannot control, so to leave 'it'
open is to close the possibility of control through closing - if the
ears were closed, the masochist would again be in charge of the
soundworld. The ears become wound.
A suspicion remains that the unclosed ears maintain a link to the
world of sense - whilst the ears themselves might constitute a wound,
it is an enabling wound, one that (like the pain now disallowed as
warning signal) allows the possibility of processing the world into
meaning. To block the ears would also instigate a possibility of
self-awareness as organism, although a sense of panic, if it
occurred, would be the undoing of this. Even so, the end-result, once
we consider the ears as hearing device, whether open, closed,
blocked, unblocked, the body without organs but with ears is a
naturalised one, one that returns us to a primordial condition (even
if a primordiality that was not primordial, but becomes that which is
returned to as if it were primordial).
The body without organs whose ears are filled with noise, however, is
more (or, more accurately, less) of a body without organs: the
noise-filled ear is no longer capable of hearing the voice of reason,
the warnings of danger, the patterning of sound we somehow have
always come to believe constitute not-noise. The body without organs
does not hear or listen to noise, but is (in) the hearing of noise
that exceeds the body that first lost in the sound of its muffled
breath, the movement of liquids and gases, the slight panic
pulse.[13]
Deleuze and Guattari are right to note that the body without organs
is about the failure to become: "There is no attaining the Body
without Organs -- you cannot attain it, you never finish getting to
it -- it's a limit."[14] The body without organs cannot become
itself, or anything else, and the way in which this specifically
cannot happen is through the multiple failure of hearing/ears: its
mysterious amnesty in _A Thousand Plateaus_, its failure through
noise to process sense, the failure to stop processing, the failure
to return to the 'true' body, and the failure that is the return to
the "true" body (in, for example heightened awareness of the body's
function -- although even if this were possible, it would constitute
a forcible intervention in the functioning of the body). The body
without organs is the failure of completion, the failure of this
failure (organ resistance). The failure is the process of becoming,
and becoming-failed is the noise of the attempt to get to the body
without organs - the supplemental 'place' where it cannot be, where
only it 'is'.
Another story of the ear related by Kroker is one in which "the ear
finally comes into its own. But not the old ear attached to a living
head".[15] The ear moves into (non)being as a post-masochistic organ
without a body. But as we have seen, also an organ without a body
without organs.
Noise can be seen as structural: in the realm of law, of good
citizenship, it is "undesired", or "excessive" sound.[16] In the
realm of Law as that which operates rationality, noise is that which
has always to be excluded -- the exclusion having always already been
and (not) gone, in order that the Law exists. This seems to indicate
noise as a category, like the sublime, of domesticated exclusion. But
noise can be conceived of as process. For Russolo, "[the timbre of
noise] is no longer an ~effect~ bound to the causes that produce it
(motive energy, striking, friction through speed, bumping, and so on)
owing to and inherent in the purpose of the machine or thing that
makes the noise",[17] and if noise is process, is always a
becoming-noise -- or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as
noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone
when noise 'is', as noise is the coming-undone of noise/organised
sound. Most particularly when noise 'is' where it cannot be --
music.[18]
Noise also has to contain judgement: it is 'unwanted'. Can noise be
wanted - clearly that would then define the noise in question as
not-noise. If we are happy with tautology, we can stay there. Or -
let us presume that noise is always unwanted as a function of wanting
(desire, if you must) - it might even be "what you did not know you
wanted" -- as suggested by Attali, when he writes that new music
always emerges as noise in what is to become "the old order":
"despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it
carries new information";[19] as of course suggested by that prime
mover of de- and re- territorialisation, the 'capitalist machine'.
The unwanted is not a function of some lack-oriented mysticism about
desire, but the actuality of wanting, once removed from
subject/object control. More simply, though, what if you actually do
want to hear something that is noise - in the shape of unorganised,
unpredictable, violent (sometimes in terms of volume) sound? Attali
makes the case that 'music' is heading toward noise, in the form of
unavoidable background music[20] and in its increased
standardisation, where "it is trapped in identity and will dissolve
into noise".[21] The judgement 'I want to listen to noise' is a
deterritorialised one - it is occurring without the subject
intervening. Nonetheless, it might be the sign of the dying Subject
grasping for some form of Authentic Existence before disappearing
(accompanying the world of "performance art" into a world of
hyper-simulated sacrifice).[22]
Music, according to Attali, is "the organization of noise".[23] Noise
has an existence outside of our conscious control, which is partly
natural, partly social environmental: "life is full of noise and
[...] death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, noise of
beast".[24] Life, then, is rationalised, brought into line, and
rigorously limited. A general economy of sacrifice, murder, waste is
lost, in music, "originating in ritual murder of which it is the
simulacrum".[25] Attali, however, cannot go so far as to see that
noise cannot be natural -- that it is the equivalent of the Nature
left behind at the signing of the social contract -- only coming into
(not) being as retrospective, excluded and forbidden. He clearly
states that noise is that which is to be excluded, but not that the
endless and impossible exclusion is where noise 'is' -- crossing and
not crossing the line that is (not) there, as with Foucault's
transgression line. Why is death silent? At a literal level it is
noisy -- organs becoming extinct, collapsing, expanding, rotting --
an endless carnival even before the arrival of other creatures. Death
is silent in the sense of the subject not being there to hear it. Is
this what occurs in Cage's silences? Is the hearing subject absented,
rather than, as Cage wished, brought forcibly into the presence of
sounds usually unheard?[26] Silence, however, is structurally
speaking, death - the death of the system of organised sound,
priority of voice, meaning, music.[27] The death that is fully
recognised by the system that excludes it. Silence, unlike noise,
does structure, or let come into structure, systems of meaning. Noise
is too much, is excess as the working of excess (not just the
excessive product).
Noise is excluded for being too natural, but also for being
unnatural. Rupert Taylor, in a burst of retrospective utopianism,
asserts that "at the same time man was learning to create pleasurable
stimuli to his sense of hearing, in other words to create music, he
was beginning to pollute his surroundings and blunt his hearing by
making more and more loud and unpleasant crashes and bangs, grindings
and rumbles" (_The Law Relating to Noise_, 16). Much, maybe all
considerations in terms of noise as a social issue presume noise is
that which is to be reduced (not wrongly, but...) -- so that we can
return to what is best for us ("like water and air pollution, most
noise is the result of the decision for technological progress at the
expense of the human environment".[28, 29] The "human environment",
endlessly stabilised, is not nature, however, and is not to contain
silence. In fact, contain silence is precisely what it does, offering
endless background noise (sometimes in the form of music) in order to
actively silence, argues Attali.[30]
III. Endless Oscillation of the Material
----------------------------------------
Merzbow (aka Masami Akita) plays the double game of ambience Attali
identifies: omnipresent sound, becoming noise; noise becoming
background. Merzbow music consists of the debris of music, of sound:
pulses, feedback, hisses, whirs, blasts, distortions, pure tones,
shrieks, machine noise -- all played extremely loud.[31] But this
music is noise "all the way down" -- there is no space for
recognisably musical sounds to be overlaid with distortions (as in
1980s music in the wake of punk), just combinations of noises, that
do not settle into a mantric pulse, or continual explosion ("not
music at all, but rather the intensive expenditure of sound and
silence").[32] The listener struggles to find a way through, in or
above the noise music but gives up at a certain point: rhythms are to
be found, frequencies to be followed -- it is not just random, but -
eventually "the listener" is pulverised into believing there is a
link. Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or
when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in
a position to accept or deny. Perhaps the "experienced listener" can
manage whole albums, concerts -- Merzbow has the answer in the shape
of the 50CD ~Merzbox~. The possibility of mastery, of "learning to
hear anew" etc. -- ~held out as if possible~ -- endlessly broken (to
keep the possibility open as indefinite promise) by alteration, by
blurring of the strata of sound, is what feeds the continual excess
of noise music. Noise music is the endless sacrifice of art music
didacticism and of restricted economy "noise" (metal, hardcore of all
types).[33]
It seems like a claim could be made for Merzbow to be ~the~
avant-garde, perpetually renewing the art, moving the boundaries
etc., but actually noise music inhabits the failure of the
avant-garde to be, to come to be. Schwitters wanted his ~Merz~ to
redefine our relation to the material, to value, to what art could
be. This then is brought to the interior, and ~shores up the monument
of art~. Merzbow does not want to live in a house full of crap, or
outside it, neither does it want to live in a new crappy house: it
wants to knock down the house it lives in, to live in it. Even this
is too much, though: Merzbow actually wants to find a rundown house
made up of broken stuff, and break it. Over and over.
The reason Merzbow cannot be avant-garde (or is the avant-garde that
cannot be: i.e., the avant-garde) is that the breaking is static:
like Paul Virilio's *speed*, Merzbow's destruction of music attains a
point of stillness, one composed of total movement (and like
Nietzsche's "moment" of eternal return). The world of 'the now', this
now, always now, comes together as interface, as the non-place of
speed as non-movement.[34] This in turn signals the possibility of
"crash music",[35] emerging at a new stage of hearing (generally
neglected with the presumption that the digital world is one of
images alone), such that we can now take noise/"crash music" to be
"so seductive because of its fascinating logic of an always promised
imminent reversibility: pure ecstasy/pure catastrophe".[36] This
imminent reversibility, occurs ~as solid~, as immanence.
Merzbow eludes Adorno's critique of aleatory music (whilst wilfully
staying within its purview): "today's artists would rather do away
with unity altogether, producing open, unfinished works, or so they
think. The problem is that in planning openness they necessarily
impart another kind of unity unbeknown to themselves".[37] The
apparent aleatorics of noise signal an endless closing, a ceasing
filling, but always, at any one time, ceaseless. Noise music (which
is admittedly not the same as Adorno's actual target -- the music of
Cage or those who followed in the 1960s and 1970s, but bearing in
mind his even stronger 'critique' of jazz, I think we might be able
to infer a line of tech flight to noise music), seems to fall into
Adorno's trap: in terms of the title which takes on an increased
significance, as we search to impose some form of sense, even if we
do not necessarily seek to do this. Not having any titles would be
just as caught within the loop: the subject now the ineffable
abstraction of sound, noise, music etc., or as with some abstract
painting, the subject becomes the Subject, working itself through on
the canvas. The title (in Merzbow's music) sets up a process wherein
it cannot become the subject of the music: there is no metonymy,
mimesis, metaphor to be had - and yet, the title makes it ~as if~
such things were possible - as with the structure of the 'pieces'
(Akita: "When I use words, say album titles, they are not chosen to
convey any meanings. They are merely selected to mean nothing".[38]
With this in mind, Merzbow's ~Antimonument~ (1991) can be seen as a
mission statement -- both for and against Schwitters, Merzbow attacks
the solidity of Hegelianised Western culture, through five tracks of
seemingly arbitrary lengths, made up of arbitrarily selected sounds,
moving along but not. In fact, ~Antimonument~ is quite 'readable' -
centred on arrhythmic, treated percussion: the monument has yet to be
left behind -- but this is still music with the music taken out -
hardly any attack in the percussive sounds, distortion, and
unpredictable 'interruptions' by hisses, static and so on
constituting the material proper. Akita specifies that the reference
to the ~Merzbau~ is one of decreasing relevance: "the name is only
important to my early work, which I thought related to the concept of
~Merzbau~".[39, 40] ~Antimonument~ is Akita leaving the building. The
building, the monument that is progressively deserted in
~Antimonument~, as the tracks grow sparser, is a double one: it is
the leaving of a traditional Japanese music (that Merzbow never
completes -- "Japanese sounds and instruments are used but their
character is often purposely extinguished in the mix",[41]), and also
the leaving of the Western monument. Why should he even be near this,
except in a Western-centred model? Because philosophically,
musically, politically and economically, Japan has not stayed outside
the Western monument. This despite a certain exoticist attribution of
lack of meaning, of, therefore, an atheoretical purity -- "Japanese
artists use Noise simply as cathartic release without the
philosophical underpinnings" [42] -- emptying the space to fill it,
if not with Western meaning, then with Western emptiness. Masami
Akita is interested in philosophy: in Eastern: "Japanese Noise
relishes the ecstasy of sound itself and the concepts come from the
sound. It is a tradition of eastern philosophy to base theory on real
experience" [43], and in Western: in the form of explicit references
to contemporary theory (Derrida, Foucault, and Bataille, whose use is
contemporary), and implicit ones: "noise is the nomadic producer of
difference" [44].
In today's restricted (but generalised) music economy, we have had
the ludicrous 'world music', and also the real world music Attali
hints at: ambient pap. Alongside these particular versions, is
another (anti)global music: Japanese noise music: a refusal through
over-acceptance of Western genre, such that genre does not work:
hence Japanese noise music's different take on violence and sound,
away from heroic (tragic) mastery of or submission to "the horror,
pain etc., of the world" (this despite the importance of bondage as a
reference for Masami Akita). Against generic noise, but with the
noise of genre.
There is a sense of progression in Merzbow's oeuvre, as the materials
alter, and the recording capacities of CD technology allow a greater
range of frequencies to seep in. David Keenan argues that
~Noisembryo~ (1994) "is the quintessential Merzbow release"[45] due
to its power, volume, and force - this, then is what had been aimed
at all along, in the teleological version. Noise, however, does not
necessarily have anything to do with these factors, and their having
an apotheosis. The "sheer noise" of the mid 1990s releases could be
described as a different sort of zenith in terms of the fact that
there just is 'more'. Instead of a Hegelian progress, a Sadean,
additive process. This 'more' has to be more than more; otherwise we
are just in the realm of groups such as Whitehouse, whose purpose
often seems to be to ~attain~ a position of mastery over noise.[46]
This more than more is, perhaps inevitably, a less: Merzbow can never
get to the zenith, because Merzbow's music is doomed to fall: it is
always open to assimilation as music -- or, it is not assimilable,
and therefore it claims transcendence. Or, in some notional
noise/music dialectic, in being on the limit, it fails to resolve,
and fails to fail - because it is noise music, it cannot belong,
dwell. Instead it is dwelling, part of a plateau, rhizome etc., with
'the listener', noise as becoming-noise, as well as becoming-music.
~Noisembryo~ opens with a blast of noise that endlessly mutates
across the album, interrupted by (the noise of?) silence three times.
Always differentiated, this is noise that does not settle, where even
the volume -- or mass of sound -- cannot be perceived as consistent
as the pitches of the specific strata are continually shifting,
whilst not at any one time covering the whole range. This album is
noise as the immanence beyond, beneath, above the noise/music divide:
noise as the emptying immanence.
It might seem that some form of communing, however perverse, might be
possible. If so, it is that community which is not realisable, the
one 'present' in Bataillean sacrifice -- Thacker notes that in Music
for Bondage Performance (1991) we see "the body of music filled with
excess and volume, presented as the tension-filled inability of
excess to fulfil itself",[47] and this "body of music "is" the body
of listener, the music as material, the hearing as solid, and the
un-communion of these, all at once. Thacker further claims that noise
is the accursed share of the sound worlds, and therefore itself in
the position of that which is to be sacrificed.[48]
But it is Bataille's conception of immanence that is of interest
here, as its dividing off of animal from human stands in parallel to
that of noise and music, with the former term the always (to be)
excluded that can return, but which 'we' cannot be. Bataille suggests
that the animal is like "water in water",[49] which seems to be what
is happening if immersed in noise, if liable to suggest some kind of
sacrificial wholeness, a form of rescue.[50] Japanese noise will not
get us there, any more than sacrifice. Immanence is not only what is
beyond (performative negativities like object, nature, the other) but
what is (not) beyond: that which is the beyond of the beyond, only
insofar as there is no such place to be.
Bataille: "I am able to say that the animal world is that of
immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is so
to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend
itself. [...] It is only within the limits of the human that the
transcendence of things in relation to consciousness (or of
consciousness in relation to things) is manifested."[51]
There is no place for the object or the subject's transcendence,
coming to be, getting beyond that coming to be in knowing about it,
or being known, when immanence is the field. The 'consciously'
constructed sound of ~Noisembryo~ moves into the smooth space of
immanence as it eludes the knowable world of other noise (of noise
'in the world'), which is held at a distance. This set of sounds
brings the distance near, and this just as much when blasts of
'different coloured' noises slide across each other, a third of the
way into "Part Two" as when 'the' noise falls away into a distorted
drone halfway into "Part Three". Noise as event, as excess of
eventness, because unlike late serialism, it does not leave gaps
peppered with inane atonalities. It is gap, non-tonality.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the non-place of the body without organs is
(in) immanence, and is itself (as immanence) the non-place of
desire.[52] However, they do not see any totally free music being the
way, as "a material that is too rich remains too
'territorialized'"[53] -- too diffuse, too noisy. Such emphasis on
getting outside music has held us back/in, as "people often have too
much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad,
noise".[54] We are back once more with Deleuze and Guattari's still
open ears: open but not too open (not open enough?). These are ears
that can learn, that can discern patterns, and the undoing of
patterns, not ears that might be held forcibly open.[55]
What happens when you hit something like ultimate noise (it cannot be
described as pure)? Where is there to go? In order for it to always
(fail to) be ultimate, it must go nowhere, but go it must,
dromological. Before the sovereignty of ~Merzbox~ (which is largely
older materials in any case), comes ~Pulse Demon~ (1995). The title
obliges an attribution of purpose: we know what Merzbow is up to,
maybe he is becoming increasingly Hegelian, and attempting to map all
noise, with this being his exploration of 'the pulse'. I suspect
there are no more or less pulse actions in this album than any other
mid 1990s Merzbow albums.[56] What is indicated is the arbitrariness
of signification, an arbitrariness which serves to highlight another
difference between Merzbow and Western 'avant-garde' music:
randomness, as Deleuze suspects, is not really very interesting, but
arbitrariness - chance as destiny, read as if there were variation
(or indeed as if there were not) - carries noise as process, as that
which intervenes 'between' noise and organised sound. ~Pulse Demon~
is undeniably 'organised sound' - it has differentiated tracks,
titles for these, and seemingly significant times: we might get the
impression that if all this noise has been split into 6.42
("Woodpecker no.1"), or 24.53 ("Worms Plastic Earthbound"), that the
duration might be significant. But many (possibly all) Merzbow
'pieces' of this period are cut, not ended. Their ~beginning~ is
often cut, so there will never be a sense of attack -- we are
immediately in the realm of distortion, hiss, pulse, squawks etc., --
of the effects of actions, not the direct products -- noise all the
way down. The organisational frame of the album undoes the
possibility of this being 'pure noise' or even an exploration of
duration (very few Merzbow albums consist only of one track). Instead
we are in the curious position of listening as if it were noise (i.e.
because framed as if it were music). Any settling into listening to
this 'stuff' as if it really were either noise or music is very much
the 'consolation' Nietzsche hints at in _The Birth of Tragedy_ as
being our way of minimising the otherness of sounds presented in a
musical frame.[57] Such a 'consolation' is not an individual failing,
but a systemic success of failure to fail.
IV. Is Nothing not Enough?
--------------------------
Once again, and still: what if we do not want the consolation
(consolation of noise being music really; of noise being natural; of
noise being an escape, a line of flight that might go somewhere; of
noise being a ruse of power)? Noise can perhaps never escape (it
might be the 'as if' escape were possible), as it comes in with
voice, language and meaning.[58] Derrida asks of philosophy (here, as
often, standing for sense, rationality, discourse, (search for)
truth, etc.) whether it can exceed itself: "can one violently
penetrate philosophy's field of listening without its immediately --
even pretending in advance, by hearing what is said of it, by
decoding the statement -- making the penetration resonate within
itself [...]?" ("Tympan", xii). Derrida's answer is, as always, that
the outside of philosophy (or of organised sound as philosophy) is to
be found at work in/on/as the inside of philosophy - with the inside
being the outside of the outside, and the process that (never fully)
establishes the divide. Zarathustra's hammer instead is the condition
of its other, and the othering between Same and Other (xii-xiii),
such that we should be interested in the limit itself, and not what
is beyond it, the marginality of the margin itself, and so on.
Japanese noise might be such a negotiation of the limit, but one that
only works as such because it declares itself outside, is the
declaration, the announcing of outside. The 'real' noise in noise
music is this (not) crossing of the line that is (not) there: noise
is not the other of the other that equals the same, but the other of
the other as non-line, as what cannot be the same and cannot inhabit
otherness. Where Derrida is outflanked by Merzbow is that Derrida
says you cannot get outside, you cannot consciously undo philosophy
with a hammer, therefore you should not do it -- instead you should
not attack directly (xv); should take an interest in "timbre, style,
and signature [as they] are the same obliterating division of the
proper" (xix). Why ~not~ do it? Why not do it, knowing it cannot be
done, that your noise is fatally compromised, part of failure?[59]
Merzbow is the getting outside that is not the completion of a new
"inside", but an endless outside, fated to be inside only to fail to
~ever be~ because of this arbitrary and perverse relation to the
inside (of organised sound). Where Derrida says "no", Merzbow is an
immanent "yes".
Notes
-----
[1] James Kahn, _Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts_
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 25.
[2] Ibid., p. 20.
[3] Ibid., p. 48.
[4] Ibid., p. 45.
[5] _European Commission Report: Position Paper on European Union
Noise Indicators_ (Luxembourg: European Communities, 2000), p. 71.
[6] C.S. Kerse, _The Law Relating to Noise_ (London: Oyez, 1975), p.
8. Rupert Taylor also describes noise as "unwanted sound" (_Noise_
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 22).
[7] Jacques Attali, _Noise: The Political Economy of Music_
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 30. Originally
written in 1977, this text remains vital in assessments of freedom,
control, subversion, radicality, recuperation etc. in terms of
human-produced sound. The argument here that "Japanese noise" is that
which specifically exceeds his argument should in no way be taken as
criticism of Attali. One criticism that could be made of Attali is
that he presumes that music has a single origin/reason/purpose. Music
could be said to be always already plural. Such would be the argument
of Philip V. Bohlman's "Ontologies of Music", in Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist (eds.), _Rethinking Music_ (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 17-34 -- even if this article provides
nothing in the way of ontology, as understood since phenomenology.
[8] Arthur Kroker: "Hearing has always been alchemical, a violent
zone where sound waves mutate into a sedimentary layer of cultural
meanings, where historical referents secrete into contemporary states
of subjectivity, and where there is no stability, only an aural logic
of imminent reversibility" (_Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music,
Electric Flesh_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). The alchemy is
one the body, the ears, the sound, noise, codings, listening
practices etc. and cannot be definitively described or known, except
as a statement about how a particular society, at a particular time,
seeks to encode, to end transformations.
[9] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 150.
[10] Ibid., p. 151 (translation modified).
[11] The body of organs, of identity (not forgetting that organs
without a body might be more dangerous still) has privileged the eye,
and in contemporary culture, makes this privileging a site of
control: "the eye is a masochistic orifice in the age of panoptic
power, capable of endless discipline and of being seduced beyond
bodily subjectivity into a floating free fall within the society of
the spectacle", leaving the ear repressed, except in terms of
receiving "spectacular" sound (muzak, MTV) (Kroker, Spasm, 49). The
body without organs, though, would not free us from this, but drive
us further in, playing masochism beyond jouissance. "Freeing" the ear
would not liberate us, either. Rather, the ear has to become
masochistic, in the Deleuzian sense (see "Coldness and Cruelty" in
_Masochism_ (New York: Zone, 1994), 9-138) instead of being forced to
submit. It must then renounce both control and contract. There is, of
course, another story of the eye -- Bataille's, followed up by
Foucault, in which the upturned eye, removed, trans(un)figured, is
the site of the loss of meaning. Eugene Thacker assimilates this
story with noise music: "the visuality of Bataille transgressing
itself is analogous to the music of noise" ("Bataille/Body/ Noise:
Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", (63), in Brett Woodward (ed.),
_Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise_ (Melbourne, Cologne: Extreme,
1999), 57-65). The comparison is perhaps too easy as the ear does not
have the status of the eye, nor is music of noise in itself capable
of the reversibility of the eye, which seeks to be both medium and
control of media.
[12] Derrida seems to "prefigure" this in writing that "to forget it
[the role of the ear, and of listening] - and in so doing to take
shelter in the most familial of dwellings - is to cry out for end of
organs, of others" "Tympan", (_Margins of Philosophy_ (Brighton:
Harvester Press, 1982), ix-xxix), xvii. This occurs because the ear
allows hearing of one's own self and voice, leading to the
non-conception (as unproblematised) of self-presence or "absolute
properness" (ibid.). Derrida, however, in turn, has not questioned
whether an ear can be less than open or closed, and could in fact be
filled. See also Hegel, making essentially the same point: "hearing
[...], like sight, is one of the theoretical and not practical
senses, and it is still more ideal than sight", as it gets the
subject to "the first and more ideal breath of the soul"
(_Aesthetics_, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 890).
[13] C.S. Kerse, citing Samuel Rosen, notes that "at an unexpected or
unwanted noise, the pupils dilate, the skin pales, mucous membranes
dry; there are intestinal spasms and the adrenals explode secretions.
The biological organism, in a word, is disturbed" (_The Law Relating
to Noise_, 7)
[14] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 150.
[15] Kroker, op. cit., p. 47.
[16] Kerse, op. cit., p. 3.
[17] Luigi Russolo, _The Art of Noises_ (New York: Pendragon, 1986),
p. 87.
[18] Noise is not ~differance~ - it is an emptier of links,
relations, processes, not that which holds them mysteriously
together. It is Bataille's "NOTHING", not the nothing that is the
opposite of something, or the reason why there might be something
instead of nothing. It is the thing which stops there having been a
reason for something over nothing.
[19] Attali, op. cit., p. 33.
[20] Op. cit., pp. 111-12.
[21] Op. cit., p. 45.
[22] The dying subject is not one reaching out for the answer, but
reaching into its disappearance in noise. For Nietzsche, "the
Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced in pain, is the
common womb of music and the tragic myth" (_The Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music_ (London: Penguin, 1993), 115). In looking at
tragedy, he writes, we seek to go beyond its pain, and, similarly
"with reference to artistically applied dissonance [...] we want to
hear and long to go beyond hearing" (ibid.). Rather than take this as
the suggestion we might learn from what is difficult, painful, etc.,
we could take this as stating the case for not going beyond noise:
the act of listening to noise is one of supplementarity: the beyond
of noise (initially music)is the precondition for listening to noise,
so as to get to "the beyond of noise" (which now is that there is
only noise, and that the beyond of noise is what can never have been
attained). In listening to noise, though, the loss is played over
again always for the first time, as opposed to being the excluded
loss of foundation (the "birth of sense"...).
[23] Attali, op. cit., p. 4.
[24] Op. cit., p. 3.
[25] Op. cit., p. 4.
[26] Michael Nyman notes that Cage discovers the impossibility of
silence on a visit to Harvard's anechoic chamber, where he still
hears his own body (_Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond_, 2nd
edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25-6. Cage's
famous 4'33" "is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence"
p. 26.
[27] This has led many others, as well as Attali, to assert that
noise is life, or nearer to life's "real processes". Russolo states
that "noise [...] has the power of immediately recalling life itself"
(The Art of Noises, 27). This, coming as it does from the "pioneer"
of noise in/as music, could be taken not as a simple naturalism, but
as a parallel with "bare" or "mere" life (Benjamin, Agamben). Noise
for Russolo also signals the life that had already moved on from
nature, that is the excluding of nature - i.e. the city. Masami Akita
(Merzbow) concurs: "noise is one of the most primitive music forms in
the modern city" (in Woodward (ed.), _Merzbook_, 11). Is this to
naturalise noise? Only before we think about music: for noise to be
some sort of fundamental music demonstrates Akita's awareness that
the noise of the city comes as a result of organisation, of power
systems, of restricted economies of signification.
[28] Kearse, op. cit., p. 1.
[29] Adorno claims aeroplane noise ruins walks in the forest
(_Aesthetic Theory_ (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 311) --
noise is wrong because not part of true nature, but what Adorno is
also claiming ("despite himself") is that noise is also ruinous of
nature as acculturated Nature - as it is an uncontrolled incursion
into a humanised sphere, immanence in the subject/object field. Hegel
argues that to overcome this "problem", music must moderate "the
natural": "the notes [are] not to be a purely natural shriek of
feeling but the developed and artistic expression of it" (Aesthetics,
vol II, 910) - so music is neither too natural nor unnatural (it is
to express what is now left behind as natural).
[30] Attali, op. cit., p. 20 and passim.
[31] Amplification - the technological means for producing noise as
volume of sound, as well as feedback systems (if not the only means)
is an essential part of the development of noise music, which at the
risk of being slightly determinist, arises (in the Japan of the early
1970s) out of the combination of improvised music in the form of free
jazz, and the improvised rock of a similar period, which relies for
its effect, on the power of amplification, the distortions of
feedback. James Kahn, dealing with experiments with noise and sound,
signals the importance of technological developments in the
alterations in ways of thinking sound, noise, music (see _Noise Water
Meat_, 2-13 and passim).
[32] Thacker, op. cit., p. 63.
[33] Noise music is also the sacrifice of the "music business", the
rendering of it as general, rather than restricted economy, through
its disruptive methods of releasing recordings on many labels, in
limited and peculiar editions, direct sales. Woodward notes "the
creation and production of such items intentionally subverts late
capitalism's notions of the marketplace, the performer/audience
relationship and entertainment commodity production and distribution"
("A Machinic Scream" (33), in _Merzbook_, 33-6). Before we get
carried away with some postmodernistic praise for the artisanal
symbiosis between musician and listener, it is worth noting that
concerts are infrequent, and a literal distance maintained, a
distance allowed by the very processes of subverting "late
capitalism". This is a deterritorialisation that stays one -- i.e.
carries no autonomous radicality.
[34] See Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
[35] Kroker, op. cit., p. 54.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Adorno, op. cit., p. 204.
[38] Akita in _Merzbook_, p. 40.
[39] Akita cf. Edwin Pouncy, "Consumed by Noise", _The Wire_, vol.
198 (2000), p. 29.
[40] Op. cit., pp. 26-32. This interview and overview is a solid
introduction to Merzbow, whilst being caught up with the "musicality
of the noise". Pouncey stresses the learning experience, with
statements such as "when the listener has attuned his or her hearing
perspective" (26), "the fact is that to understand, enjoy and
eventually reach noise nirvana through Masami Akita's work, you have
to listen to a hell of a lot of it" (27). These sentiments are echoed
by David Keenan's top ten Merzbow albums (_The Wire_, vol 198, 32-3).
[41] Akita, in Woodward, op. cit., p. 11.
[42] Woodward, op. cit., pp. 14, 12-15.
[43] Akita, in _Merzbook_, op. cit., p. 23.
[44] Op. cit., p. 9 and elsewhere, as the contributors love repeating
it.
[45] _The Wire_, Vol. 198, p. 33.
[46] See for example Never Forget Death (1992), which warns that
"Torture Chamber" (a track of mounting "white noise") should not be
played excessively loud -- i.e. because it is inherently loud.
[47] "Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", op. cit.,
p. 58.
[48] Op. cit., p. 59.
[49] _Theory of Religion_, (New York: Zone, 1989), p. 23.
[50] Op. cit.
[51] Op. cit., pp. 23-24.
[52] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 154.
[53] Op. cit., p. 344.
[54] Ibid.
[55] To be fair to Deleuze and Guattari, Japanese noise was far from
a breakthrough in 1980, although nearly all of today's "recognised
practitioners" were active then. Their unfortunate espousal of the
"influential" Varese is just one example of why caution should be
taken with imagining Deleuze and Guattari as signposts for the
future. In one sense this lack of awareness of the contemporary is
itself contemporary -- not in terms of some sort of "dumbing down",
but just in terms of the retro-future we seem to inhabit in terms of
future music (for example in ~The Matrix~, whose future remains
1985).
[56] If this seems a very specific dating, it nonetheless applies to
perhaps 20 albums. Merzbow's output is immense: in addition to the 50
contained in ~Merzbox~, there are another 150+ recordings.
[57] Nietzsche suggests that if music can rediscover its links to the
emptiness that is "true reality, through an appreciation of every
"phenomenon", then we will experience some kind of catharsis (see 94,
in particular). In the light of the later preface, however, where
"perhaps as laughers you will consign all metaphysical consolations
to the devil -- and metaphysics in front of the rest!" (12), much of
the main text suggests a proto-Bataillean recognition of a fearful,
sacrificial, dangerous general economy of "ugly" sound, brought
inevitably into a restricted economy where we "get something from
it". See for example 83-4, where "consolation" with regard to the
ineffability of things is one of "three levels of illusion" (84), not
the hidden truth, or goal. The inevitability of the restricted
economy can be seen in the inevitable influence of Apollo
(rationality, wisdom, accumulation of knowledge): "the Apolline lifts
man out of his orgiastic self-destruction, and deceives him about the
universality of the Dionysiac event, deluding him into the idea that
he can see only a single image of the world" (102).
[58] This despite the ineffability claimed for noise (and claimed
throughout history for "that which goes beyond language" - music, the
image, the world, gods, etc). Woodward's version of this: "It's
almost the inability to definitively describe Merzbow's music with
the limitations of the written word that is the testament to its
thrill and power, intricacy and convolution" ("The Nomadic Producer
of Difference", in _Merzbook_, 9).
[59] We can compare Derrida's deconstructing binaries with those
Attali establishes through noise and music, as in the following:
"Music responds to the terror of noise, recreating differences
between sounds and repressing the tragic dimension of dissonance -
just as sacrifice responds to the terror of violence. Music has been,
from its origin, a simulacrum of the monopolization of the power to
kill, a simulacrum of ritual murder" (_Noise_, 28). Noise and music
blur when sacrifice is at issue, when music is excessive and
essentially ritual, such that "music functions like sacrifice;
listening to noise is a little like being killed" (ibid.).
_____________________________________________________________________
Paul Hegarty teaches at Trinity College, Dublin. He also Dj's
Japanese Noise Music.
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