Noise ‘Music’ as Critique in an Age of Domination

Dixon states, “given that technology always fails eventually, it is probably fair to say that in contrast to critical theories, both utopian and dystopian, that rely on the social fact – or prospect – of a properly working and productive technology, malfunction is somewhat under-theorised” (par. 3). Similarly, within consumer culture, malfunction is something to be fixed or repressed. However, within the channels of contemporary music is a genre of noise music, propagated by artists such as Merzbow and Masonna, that amplifies such an aspect of malfunction through a hyperbolic, excessive and utterly destructive sound. In this essay, I shall discuss how such an extreme form of music is understood and articulated within consumer culture. In reference to Adorno and Horkheimer’s totalising view that “under monopoly all mass culture is identical”, I shall argue for the presence of differentiated practices through an aesthetic of malfunction within noise music (32). However, it is my aim to explore the limits of such differentiation as homogenising forces within both the production and consumption redefine and contain the disorder it signifies. Firstly, I shall discuss the effectiveness of noise as cultural critique as it is fed through the channels of consumer culture in commodity form. Secondly, I will consider the viability of conceptualising noise within subcultural frameworks. It is my aim to illustrate how the effectiveness of noise music in disrupting the hegemony of rigid cultural systems is undermined through reterritorialisations that diffuse its threat towards a standardisation of consumption. As such, noise illustrates the process of domination within consumer culture.

Noise is an inherent aspect within the ambience of everyday life. However, within the production of music, an emphasis on melody and tone attains hegemony over the presence of noise. As Attali states, while music is  “the organization of noise” signifying towards a wholesome structure, noise itself is a disconnective and subversive force (4, 26). The presence and experience of noise signifies towards heterogeneity in relation to the homogenous structure of music. There are many genres of contemporary music that utilise noise to some degree. Distortion and loudness are the criterions for heavy metal, punk, hardcore and any other hard-hitting genre that fills the pages of magazines such as Kerrang. However, such instances of noise still fall within Attali’s conception of music, as it still exists within the framework of melody. For example in Boris’ album Feedbacker, long overlays of guitar feedback are utilised in the build-up of fuzzy yet melodic phases. It still makes sense in relation to the particular styles and connotations of such genres.

There exist within contemporary culture, a particular genre of music that artists and journalists refer to as simply noise music. Noise ‘music’ takes noise itself as the crucial aspect of their ‘music’ in demonstrating a blatant disregard for melody and structure. In sketching the history of noise music, Sangild points towards the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo as the first composer who consciously utilised noise within the framework of music through the construction and demonstration of “so-called ‘intonarumori’ (noise intonators)” which are primitive instruments that give off particular machinic sounds (par. 12). In John Cage’s 4:33, a composition of silence, the audience is subjected “to unintended internal bodily sound and external environmental sound based on a system of chance and indeterminacy” (Cullen 12). In the most current incarnation of noise music, the disruptive noise that is present in Cage’s silence is amplified and multiplied into a harsh collage of extremity much like Russolo’s machines in overdrive. For example, Merzbow’s sound is primarily mixer feedback fed through multiple distortion and effects units, a torrent of sound with shifting microscopic details that signifies towards a negation of musical structure. Weinstein refers to a narcissistic and productive function of heavy metal when she argues that its “loudness is not deafening, irritating, or painful…but empowering” (23). If heavy metal is associated with the ego, then noise music is located within the more instinctual and chaotic Id.

Cobussen states, “noise is not a new system, not a new category, but that which affects and infects any system, any order” (30). Thus, the subversive potential of noise does not present itself as a sublime thing-in-itself that enables the consumer to stand out of domination. Rather, in existing within the systematic commoditisation of music, the critique posed of noise is conceptualised in relation standardising aspects of consumer culture, in which the production and consumption of music equates to the pacification of consumer agency. Storey refers to consumer culture’s “displacement strategy” as the promise that the consumption of commodities achieves the effect of giving the consumer a sense of wholeness (115). For this effect to work, commodities are presented and sold in a conceivable manner that fulfils its purpose rationally in terms of material and symbolic utility. However, this sense of wholeness is constantly in threat of breaking down as such a strategy is based on the premise that consumers have a fundamental lack that has to be filled through consumption. This lack is a void much like the silence theorised by Cage. It is populated by various elements of heterogeneity that randomly disrupt the illusion of a homogenous form of consumption and the illusion of a complete self.

Noise music aims to amplify this void, displacing the displacement of an anxiety-laden lack. It does so even by denying the coherency of music itself. As Smith states, “In order for music to be dissonant with contemporary consumer culture, it must risk its very identity as music” (44). Noise performed in a live setting demonstrates this risk in the most apparent and spectacular fashion. In Masonna’s live performance, which only lasts a few minutes, he releases an onslaught of microphone feedback and perverse delayed screams in volumes way over the spectator’s comfort zone. He thrusts around recklessly, damaging his gear and body in the process. The extremity in sound, volume and the sadomasochistic overtones of his performance dislocates musical pleasure and plunges into a realm of terror much like Adorno’s conception of ‘Shudder’ that produces “responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion” (“Aesthetic Theory” 26). As Smith states, by “disrupting our auditory habits, noise challenges our cognitive habits” rooted within the instrumentality and domination of commodification (50). Therefore, noise creates a juncture of dissonance within consumer culture through an aesthetical malfunction of the standardised music commodity.

However, the reterritorialisations inherent in the culture industry negate the critical potential of noise music. As a commodity, noise music is packaged into the recorded format such as audio compact discs, vinyl and mp3s. The excessive nature of noise is contained within the framework of a product that can be controlled by consumption practices. For example, while noise music recordings are generally mastered in higher volume, the impact of loudness can be neutralised by adjusting the volume during playback. As Bull states, “Situations of cognitive conflict are avoided through a process of compartmentalisation through which users focus upon the immediate task of control” (133). Such a practice signifies towards the agency of the consumer in managing music commodities towards the construction of a desired cognitive framework. However, the desired framework is a “withdraw[al] into a world small enough to exert total control over it” that corresponds to the ultimate aims of consumerism through the displacement of anxiety (Bull 133). Thus, the excess of heterogeneous energy within the noise commodity is easily neutralised by the consumer’s instrumental agency. The consumption of noise commodities enables the consumer to contain the shudder that is more critical in a live setting.

Adorno connects the reterritorialising mechanics of the culture industry to modernity’s instrumental rationality when he declares:

The abstraction implicit in the market system represents the domination of the general over the particular, of society over its captive membership. It is not at all a socially neutral phenomenon, as the logistics of reduction, of uniformity of work time, might suggest. Behind the reduction of men to bearers of exchange value lies the domination of men over men. . . . The form of the total system requires everyone to respect the law of exchange if he does not wish to be destroyed, irrespective of whether profit is his subjective motivation or not (“Society” 217)

In generating exchange value in the noise commodity, its excessive nature must be contextualised, compartmentalised and classified into a knowable product if it is to exist within the channels of consumerism. Thus, noise presents itself as paradoxical commodity that attempts to stand out of abstraction while remaining within the abstraction of commodity culture as a reference for critique. In the culture industry, the differentiating element of noise becomes the particular quality that it is classified under.  As Adorno  and Horkheimer state, “What is individual is no more than the generality’s power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such” (40). Noise becomes another form of music marketed within the label of extremity.

Bourdieu states that in the politics of distinction is a cycle of production in which new cultural products that are innovated within the subfield of production differentiates from older forms that have lost its distinctive currency through larger-scale production (qtd. in Gartman 259). Thus, in the battle for cultural capital through the choice of commodities, the dominant class must rejuvenate its taste once the current paradigm has been absorbed and imitated by the petty bourgeois. Similarly, within consumer culture is a cult of extremity that is enticed towards the next form of extreme music once the current paradigm becomes too familiar or popular. Russolo, the artist who created the Futurist noise machines mentioned earlier, declares, “Now we are satiated (to harmony) and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds” (70). Thus, this points towards a particular trajectory in musical consumption in which the difference of the alternative product is neutralised towards the emergence of even more alternative choices.  In this framework, the music extremist who is aware of what is in the forefront of extremity can be associated with the dominant class that holds greater cultural capital. In contrast are music genres such as metal that have been rendered less extreme due to its increased commodification. This cycle points towards the gradual reterritorialisation of noise music once a more extreme form appears within the music industry. Thus, its critical potential will not last. It also replaces the critical potential of noise with a situation in which its harshness is propagated as a symbolic strategy in gaining cultural capital, or in this case, coolness through extremity.

However, in the production practices of noise music is a form of self-reflexive irony and excess that intercepts the cycle pointed out by Bourdieu. Merzbow locates himself within the field of large-scale production in a spectacular fashion with the most prominent release in his discography, the 50 cd collection entitled the Merzbox. It is packaged in a black suitcase with other Merzbow related commodities such as a t-shirt and stickers. Furthermore, he has close to 400 proper releases to date. Thus, Merzbow complicates the cultural capital linked to the extremity of his music that is also associated with a negation of commodification by amplifying its status as a commodity. Another example is Masonna whose name derives playfully from pop cultural icon Madonna. As Gibbens says, kitsch is “cultural anathema” in relation to authentic art (57). Thus, Masonna’s association with the kitschiness of Madonna undermines the extremity of his music and disrupts the politics of distinction building.

Subcultural theory has concern itself with the structured resistances posed by youth movements such as punk. However, the cultural industry reterritorialises on its critical potential by media incorporation. As Hebdige states, “The cycle leading from opposition to defusion, from resistance to incorporation encloses each successive subculture” (100). If the consumers of noise music can be encapsulated within subcultural frameworks, then its critique can be solidified into a more definitive direction. But it will also threaten its resistance in the long run if its ‘otherly’ presence becomes accessible to mediatisation. While there is no definitive word of a noise subculture at the moment, particular movements within the production and reception of noise music does seem to illustrate that it is in the process of turning into one. I shall discuss the tension in the process of such assimilation.

Clark, et al. situates the “double articulation of youth subcultures—first to their ‘parent’ culture (e.g. working-class culture), second, to the dominant culture” as a crucial means to understand subculture (101). A subculture like punk is conceptualised within class structure as it shares similar problems, but within their own context, with its parent working class culture in resisting and winning space from the hegemony of the dominant upper-class structure. Issues of class do not exist in noise music. Yet, it performs a comparable ‘double articulation’. Its parent culture can be attributed as unconventional musical movements such as the Futurist’s noise experiments and free jazz. Its dominant culture is the standardisation of music commodities and in a more abstract sense, any system of one-dimensionality. Thus, noise differs from the classical class model of subculture by its purely musical references. Its can only exist within the field of aesthetics as it is too heterogeneous to be associated with particular class struggles.

Nevertheless, subcultural patterns emerge through its style. Hebdige states, “The communication of a significant difference, then (and the parallel communication of a group identity), is the ‘point’ behind the style of all spectacular subcultures” (102). The DIY ethos of noise music encourages consumers to start their own noise projects, but not without some emulation of the more prominent artists in the field. There are quite a handful of more recent noise artists that exist within the channels of mail-order distribution and Internet sites like MySpace.  Many of them share a particular style rooted in abject imagery and sadomasochistic themes as reflected in their names and artwork, much like those in Merzbow’ earlier works and more extreme forms of metal. Difference is articulated through extremity that aims to repel and disgust. For example, a Melbourne noise artist goes by the name ‘Fuck, the Retarded Girl’. The cover of a recent album features a cut out from a Hentai comic.

However, unlike subcultures such as punk, there is no definitive clothing style that communicates their identity. Over the past few years, there have been gatherings of noise artists and enthusiasts at the annual noise music festival, No Fun Fest, at New York City. Kral describes the crowd as an interesting mix that included “gutter punks, a Red Sox fan, a girl straight outta Bay Ridge circa Saturday Night Fever and lots of young boys” (par. 1). Such a phenomenon seems to correspond to Muggleton’s conception of the post-subculturalist whose looks are constructed by “free-floating signifiers” that point towards “the postmodern fragmentation of collective identities” (199). However, this cannot be applied to the No Fun Fest crowd, as this is an underground event that is hardly mediated by media channels. The diversity of the crowd represents a genuine disregard for a particular fashion style that might be attached to noise music. It draws a parallel to the nature of noise music, the diversity of sound that disrupts the symbolic articulation of style. In a utopian note, it could be said that noise consumers self-reflexively deny themselves the classification of a subculture, as they are aware of the delimiting connotations of subcultures in the current cultural landscape. Nevertheless, there is a sense of group identity established through the sound of noise music, noise events such as No Fun Fest, and the design aesthetic of more recent noise artists. At the moment, all that the noise music community of producers and consumers communicate is a tension in becoming a subculture.

In this essay, I have discussed the consumer processes that occur in the production and reception of noise music. The aesthetic of malfunction championed by noise is “a wordless state in which the very constitution of our selves is in jeopardy” (Reynolds 57). When it is fed through the channels of consumer culture, it loses its critical potential as it becomes classifiable. If consumerism is based on a displacement model, the very nature of consumption works towards the maintenance of a self. While noise might induce a critical shock value within the early stages of exposure, it can only remain critical if the consumer approaches it in a self-reflexive manner within the process of displacement. If not, consumer agency will be spent in displacing its heterogeneity through reterritorialisations. Therefore, in a general sense, noise music is doomed to fail through the process of commodification. Nevertheless, in contrast to familiar forms of alternative music, noise is still in the early stages of the culture industry’s reterritorialising mechanism. As of now, it still offers the possibility of critique. The consumption of noise music offers some form of group identity. But it resists assimilation into a subculture in an age in which subcultural resistance is rendered neutral by the culture industry. This points towards tactical manoeuvres that strive towards the persistence of noise music’s critique. It is impossible to think of any commodified art form that is not subjected to the domination of the cultural industry. In the case of noise music, domination is still in its early stages. In persisting in its sonic ramblings within consumer culture, noise presents itself as a Nietzschean ‘Yes-sayer’ that heroically continues its struggle despite an inescapable downfall.

 

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