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.

[c5 / softsub]

Quite possibly the publication I most anticipated in 2007 was Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, a recent addition to the excellent Electronic Mediations Series published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book, edited by Victoria Vesna, is a compendium of essays and projects which engage the database as a critical and creative paradigm. Many of the projects and texts in Database Aesthetics were originally shown or published around 2000-2001 but the consolidation of this material into a single volume accentuates the importance of this body of work in the present day.

The text includes Lev Manovich's seminal essay "Database as Symbolic Form" from The Language of New Media. Norman M. Klein and Bill Seaman's contributions both contain engaging responses to Manovich's discussion about the future of narrative. Klein's essay "Waiting For the World To Explode" contains a particularly juicy passage which lays bare the shortcomings of the database as a tool for traditional storytelling:

Data are also filled with an unmistakable absence. Data cannot "conclude" a story; they cannot deliver a "suspense" ending, like a murder mystery - not in the traditional way (and I am not convinced that interactively choosing your own adventure solves this problem, even with high-resolution effects). Data are part of a process without an arc that requires a dramatic ending. Instead, they proceed by insinuation, by involution - towards a beginning, towards an aporia (the road without a name). That kind of journey can be extremely charming, like "a making-of" that is so massive that it does not even require a movie.

While the tone of Klein's observations is pessimistic, it does quite adequately describe the obsession with taxonomy evident in work such as George Legrady's Pocket Full of Memories, a key project mentioned numerous times throughout the text.

[george legrady / vital statistics - installed at the seattle central library]

In addition to several important reference texts which draw on literary, filmic and photographic schools of thought, Database Aesthetics also contains a few lucid survey texts which catalog impressive swaths of multidisiplinary work. These include Steve Dietz's "The Database Imaginary: Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0" (which is available on his website) and Christine Paul's "The Database As System and Cultural Form" which glides through a number of my favourite net art & visualization projects including 0100101110101101.org's Life_Sharing, Bradford Paley's TextArc and The Secret Life of Numbers (produced by Golan Levin, Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg, Shelly Wynecoop, David Elashoff and David Becker).

Database Aesthetics also reminded me about two projects that I have not thought about for several years, Nancy Paterson's Stock Market Skirt (pictured above) and John Klima's ecosystm. Given my continued interest in Meta-Markets, it is quite timely to revisit these early financial data driven projects which, respectively, automate skirt length in relation to the market index and animate simulated ecologies based off real-time stock information.

While I only really touched on about half of the excellent content within Database Aesthetics, I hope it is clear that the text has made quite an impression on me. It works as a (recent) historical text, archiving and contextualizing an impressive array of work but perhaps more importantly it serves as a definitive reference through which to interpret much of the visualization and software art being produced today.