Nearly two years ago Andrew taught me about noise music. I hadn’t really appreciated or enjoyed it until he began to describe its purpose to me. He illustrated his love for noise music with a story: he told me about seeing Merzbow live, and how, as he stood in the audience, sound overwhelmed and subsumed him. There was no place for thought or ego. It was the act of being absorbed that captured his attention and, soon after, mine.
If one thinks of music as a kind of architecture, then traditional music – all scale and form – builds over reality, the already existent. Noise music doesn’t build, it insinuates. It borrows from already present sound and reconfigures it. It rearranges available materials and reveals previously unknown (or unconsidered) meaning.
I probably should’ve realized that years ago when my friends used to go into dark tunnels with their recorders/keyboards just to get loops of the drips and echoes. At the time it was the experience of being in a dark tunnel that appealed to me: my ears become sensitive when my eyes are deprived. The involvement of sound was essential, but capturing it seemed like an aside.
It was only after my induction into noise music that I begin to hear it in unexpected places. In Scotland there was a woman selling small toys on the street. One of the toys repeated and action while emitting a recorded squeak and plastic clatter. A few feet away, another woman played her violin. The street was busy, and the noise of the crowd mingled with the sounds of the violin and the toy. The toy was rhythmic; the violin and mingled speech accompanied it. There was the sudden aural texture of someone blowing their nose, occasionally the white noise of rainfall.
I had a similar experience while walking home one night in San Francisco. There are power lines crisscrossing the sky on my block, and on nights when the mist and fog permeate the city, the power lines make a faint crackling noise. There’s something dangerous and lively about it all at once, not to mention something distinctly musical. It clears my head, and the visual becomes additional percussion, the muted streetlights turning the whole neighborhood an uncanny, cold orange. The sound seems to leak from the dark houses, out of some sort of emptiness. It’s distinctly uncanny.
That’s the value of much art, both heard and seen: it makes me pause, sets my nerve-ends tingling. It doesn’t stay contained to its own context but bleeds into the world around me.
Noise music is background made foreground, absence used to demonstrate presence. It locates what is already present and serves as a reminder: don’t just hear noise, listen to it.
