serial consign

Late last year, Paul Hegarty released Noise/Music: A History, a writing project which traces the phenomena of noise across various genres and experimental practices throughout 20th century music. After hearing about the text on Networked Music Review, I was quite excited to finally get to spend some time with this work over the last few weeks. The text is constructed as a series of short, thematic essays with the expected readings of Futurist Italy and Thatcherist England, as well as more involved analysis of proto-krautrock, the contradictions of "free" jazz and the noteworthy and enduring noise scene in Japan (with a well-deserved chapter on the enterprise that is Merzbow).

Noise/Music is most easily appreciated as a "disturbingly succinct" history of 20th century music and perhaps the most appropriate text to compare the work to is Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. However, where Nyman's text is a comprehensive "academy friendly" catalog of sequential progressions and developments, Hegarty's text covers more ground and wanders into a more diverse and adventurous territory - one characterized by amplitude and excess. The brevity of Hegarty's text is quite remarkable, and each essay sketches out a unique noise-aesthetic pertaining to a specific time and place, movement or means of production. The following excerpt from the "Japan" chapter is perhaps the most universal definition of noise to be found anywhere in the entire text:

Music offers a world, and inhabitability. Noise offers something more like dark matter which may be what allows a structure for everything else to exist (i.e. music, meaning, language, and so on, emerge from and against noise), but also the living on of that other material that is excluded as, or, for being, noise, and, beyond that, the continual limit of expansion of matter (or meaning/music). Noise is like a turning away from the world into an imagined pre-linguistic self...

Readings such as the above emerge out of a provocative array of genres ranging from dub, jazz, hip-hop, industrial into more ambiguous realms such as sound art and the post-microsound contemporary electronic scene. The text features extended commentary on a number of artists including John Cage, Public Enemy, Throbbing Gristle, John Oswald, Jimi Hendrix, and the list goes on...

[autechre / live at the dour festival 2007]

Noise/Music ends rather abruptly in the present day with an indexing of contemporary production paradigms as rut, bit, interrupt and beat. Respectively, these address the materiality of vinyl, digital fidelity and fair use, glitch-culture and the error and new thinking regarding rhythm and percussion. One has to appreciate a text that draws direct connections between the sample-obsessed early work of Matmos and Matthew Herbert and Musique Concrète. Beyond identifying key aesthetic genealogies, Hegarty skillfully superimposes a broad range of critical theory over top of the work being examined. Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music is brought into play several times throughout the work and that book provides a compelling companion text to Hegarty's project.

As a whole, Noise/Music: A History is a dynamic reading of 20th century music and the text would sit nicely in any theory-friendly music library alongside titles like Kodwo Eshun's Brighter than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and the Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner edited Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music.