No style of late twentieth-century music has provoked as much controversy as minimalism. To its supporters, its directness and accessibility restores the severed link between composer and audience. To its detractors, it is maddeningly simple-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. And to its creator, the term itself is burdened with pejorative connotations.

– K. Robert Schwarz (Minimalists)

Speak too loudly about minimalist music and you will risk becoming the object of derision. It does not matter that some of the genre’s key composers have achieved notoriety and a certain commercial success. Minimalism, as a musical genre, remains underappreciated and misunderstood.

Kyle Gann, in Audio Culture, proposes a framework with which to approach the genre by listing its dominant musical ideas, devices and techniques. His “family of character traits” includes static harmony, repetition, additive process, phase-shifting, permutational process, steady beat, static instrumentation, linear transformation, metamusic, pure tuning, non-Western influences and audible structure. Concerning the latter, Gann writes, “part of minimalism’s early mystique was to have no secrets, to hold the music’s structure right in the audience’s face, and have that be listened to.”

Minimalist music is indeed a brutally honest form of art. And there is probably no better definition of the genre than the one La Monte Young proposes: “That which is created with a minimum of means.”

Young is generally regarded as the first minimalist composer and his importance in late twentieth-century music is difficult to overstate. Much has been written about the American composer although most of it has only been published in the English language. This situation has now been remedied with the publication of Joseph Ghosn’s La Monte Young by Le mot et le reste.

Ghosn, a former Inrockuptibles, discovered Young after skimming the back of a Spacemen 3 album. The band had appropriated a short text from the composer and it is via their 1990 album that Ghosn first experienced the profound strangeness inherent to the name La Monte Young.

And thus begins the first chapter of Ghosn’s biography of the minimalist composer. This is a personal book borne out of a deep appreciation of minimalist music. In this book, Ghosn does not uncover new critical information, nor does he offer a radical reassessment of Young’s legacy on modern music. What he does offer is an accessible and informative survey of the composer’s key life experiences and pivotal relationships. The tone is friendly and generous and this makes La Monte Young an enjoyable read.

In this book, Ghosn adroitly discusses the ambivalent rapport Young has maintained with his former acolytes and collaborators. Sensitive questions concerning the ownership and authorship of early collaborative works (i.e. The Theatre of Eternal Music) are posed once again and Ghosn is insistent that answers should come from the creators of those recordings and performances.

Ghosn also pertinently allocates a considerable portion of the biography section of the book to discussing the symbiotic relationship that binds La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela together. “Dans l’art contemporain et la musique contemporaine, parmi cette avant-garde de la fin des années soixante, ils étaient indubitablement des mavericks, des outsiders, des punks avant l’heure. ” It is clear from these lines that this is a book that refuses to limit itself to Young.

And that is why this affordable Le mot et le reste publication should appeal to both francophones and Anglophones. Ghosn’s La Monte Young includes a commented discography of the composer’s solo and collaborative works. But it also includes a 33-page selected discography of minimalist and post-minimalist music. The works of Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Phillip Glass, John Cale and a few others are discussed in both the text and the selected discography section. The latter is further enriched by mentions of other composers and artists whose work has served to validate the importance of minimalism in the modern music landscape.

Ghosn’s radar covers an extensive territory that stretches across time and sub-genres – from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music to Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la mort or from Franco Battiato to Jim O’Rourke. Other artists mentioned include Charlemagne Palestine, Earth, Sunn O))), Keith Fullerton Whitman and Jeffrey Cantu-Ledesma of Root Strata to name but a few.

La Monte Young is, therefore, both a concise biography and a much welcomed guide to minimalist music. It is an opened door to a world that has only recently found its way to the surface thanks to the proliferation of online resources and the enthusiasm of audiophiles who have taken it upon themselves to reissue, or make available for the first time, recordings that appeared destined for obscurity.

Visit Le mot et le reste for more information.

Excerpt below :
La Monte Young – from Dream House 78′ 17″

In 1956, the NFB moved its offices to Montreal, thereby providing a safe haven for Quebec artists frustrated by the conservative and reactionary regime of the Duplessis government. The NFB served as a training school and a “point de ralliement” for Quebec filmmakers. The latter did face a number of challenges within the walls of the federal agency but there is no doubt that the NFB, in the late 1950s, provided an environment where Quebec filmmakers enjoyed relative autonomy to articulate their political views.

By the early 1960s, the NFB had established itself as a leader in the production of animation films. The creation of animation studios, where small teams were free to experiment and create directly under the camera, resulted from the NFB’s policy of encouraging innovations and spontaneity in the creative process. Many Quebec filmmakers took advantage of the federal institution’s presence in Montreal, including Pierre Hébert whose work has been recognized and celebrated both here and abroad.

At the NFB, Hébert quickly became known for his favorite animation technique which consisted of scratching images directly on film stock. But by the mid-1960s, he turned to paper cut-outs and became increasingly concerned with political issues (visit his site for more recent works).

The 1968 film Population Explosion is a product of that period. The film offers a somewhat simplistic presentation of a complex problem although this is not unusual for pedagogical films produced at the NFB during the sixties. Population Explosion is not one of my favorites from Hébert but the film stands out because of its astounding soundtrack.

On August 2, 1966, Ornette Coleman arrived at the NFB’s Studio 2 accompanied by bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. The trio had just recorded the landmark album At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm and were now in Montreal to record material for Hébert’s animation film. The session lasted until August 5th and featured Coleman on the violin, trumpet and alto saxophone.

The entire session is now available in a box-set dedicated to the work of Hébert. The Science of Moving Images contains Coleman’s music as well as more than 20 films by one of the pillars of the NFB.

Robert Daudelin, the former director general of La Cinémathèque Québécoise, writes, “although it can be hard listening because of all the retakes, it is still a rare opportunity to hear Ornette Coleman at work, sculpting a theme and detailing his input. The violin is very present (Death, Famine, Epidemic, Birth Control) and the almost Davis-like trumpet appears frequently (The War, Famine), but it’s the fluid alto that dominates in the dancing themes that Ornette always favoured (Birth, Children, Nurses, Foreign Aid, Technical Assistance).”

“Film music, music in film – this Ornette Coleman-Pierre Hébert collaboration is a fine example of that natural and yet so rarely successful meeting of jazz and cinema,” Daudelin concludes.

Listen to a few excerpts from the soundtrack:
ORNETTE COLEMAN AT THE NFB

…and/or enjoy another short film by Hébert featuring the music of Robert Lepage and René Lussier.

Songs and Dances of the Inanimate World: The Subway
Pierre Hébert,1985, 14 min 23 s

In this animated film without words, filmmaker Pierre Hébert and musicians Robert Lepage and René Lussier worked together, and separately, in their respective media. This cinema/music performance recreates, impressionistically, the dehumanizing environment of the urban subway. Drawings etch the outlines of people hurtling through space in underground tunnels. The soundtrack, elemental and atonal, gives compelling expression to their alienation.

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a troubling tale of delusion and failure. The film tells the story of Spanish conquistadors traveling down the Amazon River in search of riches and power. Klaus Kinski offers a powerful performance as he embodies – and subjects himself to – the wrath of god (his megalomanic yet pathetic character acts as the driving force of an expedition that drifts away towards self-destruction).

I am inclined to argue that the end of Aguirre stands as one of the most stunning moments in film history. Central to the final scene is the music of Popul Vuh, which also opens the film. “Aguirre I” provides an eerie soundscape dominated by choir organs and analog synth textures. It sets the tone for the film and foretells the tragic destiny that awaits the members of the expedition.

AGUIRRE – I

Although Popol Vuh’s Aguirre is considered a soundtrack album, it only came out in 1975 and contains material that was recorded after the film’s initial release. The song “Vergegenwaertigung” does not appear in the film but it certainly has its place on this album.

“Vergegenwaertigung” appears on early vinyl versions and reveals more of Florian Fricke’s early electronic explorations (nearly seventeen minutes of oscillating frequencies, distant drones and occasional sound fragments).  On this solo piece, Fricke sets in motion a slow-moving vortex that constantly threatens to pull the listener inward toward an agonizing and impending end.

Go there.

VERGEGENWAERTIGUNG

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There is a considerable amount of confusion about this album. Some clarifications are available here and below.

(…) Aguirre (1975) featured some of the music from Werner Herzog’s film of the same name. Herzog and Fricke were long term friends from Fricke’s days as a film reviewer. This was a strange release, as it compiled recent alternative studio takes with the original music for the film. The long piece “Vergegenwaertigung” was a solo Fricke electronic number, a throw-back to the first two Popol Vuh albums, probably recorded in late 1972. Also “Aguirre I” was recorded before Fricke discarded the moogs and mellotrons. This was a majestic and floating large scale track. “Morgengruss II”, “Agnus Dei” and the guitar part of “Aguirre II” were probably recorded in May 1974 at the sessions for the forthcoming album Einsjäger & Siebenjäger and were fine examples of Fichelscher’s brilliant guitar work. The album was originally only released in France and Italy. To add even more to the confusion, the German re-release on Pop-Import 1982 had three later Popol Vuh tracks (…) replacing “Vergegenwaertigung”. This is not mentioned on the cover nor the label. Either it was a mistake or an illegal replacement due to the loss of master tapes. (…) – Dag Erik Asbjornsen’s Cosmic Dreams At Play

Personnel:
Florian Fricke – piano, spinett, mellotron (or choir organ)
Daniel Fichelscher – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, percussions
Djong Yun – vocals

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Anyone familiar with CAN would be terribly upset to put on Monster Movie and not hear a nervous hi-hat and the rhythmic throbbing associated with the opening segment of “Father Cannot Yell”. Stereo 8 enthusiasts, however, have learned that CAN’s debut album is nothing but a collection of mind-blowing compositions and improvisations. The song sequence, in this specific case, perhaps does not matter all that much.

CAN formed in 1968 and it is somehow pertinent to mention that some of the band members spent time studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen before they discovered the potency of rock ‘n’ roll music. Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt joined Michael Karoli, David Johnson and free jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit in the summer of 1968 with the hope of making music that would be both singular and forward-looking. They succeeded – but not before they lost Johnson and found vocalist Malcolm Mooney, an African-American visual-arts artist who helped CAN reach the apex of krautrock excellence.

“Unlike the Kosmische music of most of the other great German bands, Can had stylised themselves from the beginning as raw and expressionist, with clearly defined boundaries,” Julian Cope notes in Krautrocksampler.

Monster Movie is the band’s first full-length effort and the only legitimate album featuring Mooney on vocals (if we exclude compilations and the reunion album). CAN’s 1969 release is an exercise in control and restraint – four songs borne out of a desire to maintain simple, yet highly-dynamic, linear sound sculptures. Monster Movie is insistent rock ‘n’ roll music that would have been impossible without the combined efforts of the band’s four instrumentalists. Yet Cope and Eric Deshayes are both correct to insist that, in the late 1960s, CAN came together thanks to Mooney’s driving energy and personality.

The Stereo 8 version of Monster Movie begins with “Yoo Doo Right” instead of “Father Cannot Yell”. The decision to alter the song sequence makes some chronological sense since the twenty-minute “Yoo Doo Right”. was recorded before the band entered the studio to lay down tracks for the album. The song also positions Mooney at the very center of the band’s improvisation.

“Avec les vingt minutes de ‘Yoo Doo Right’ la synthèse est faite,” says Deshayes. The author of Au-Delà du Rock pertinently argues that the song represents a pivotal moment in the band’s early history. It allowed the band to gel together and provided clear indications that CAN were destined to pioneer new paths in the realms of what would later be called post-rock and post-jazz.

The 8 track cartridge is not the most adaptable format. Dividing an album in four equal programs is not always possible (“Yoo Doo Right” is split between programs 1 and 2). It is also not unusual to end up with more tape than necessary which means that a song needs to be repeated if a long silence is to be avoided.

In this specific case, Liberty Records had the great idea to add an extra song (“Soul Desert”) in order to use up the excess tape. Audiophiles who purchased Monster Movie on 8-track were, therefore, rewarded with bonus material.

“Soul Desert” was written by CAN for the film Mädchen… nur mit Gewalt. The song also appears on the 1970 Soundtracks album.

Listen to Program 4:

PROGRAM 4 – FATHER CANNOT YELL / SOUL DESERT

Stereo 8 (Liberty 8 9148) – Track Listing:
Program 1: You Doo Right (part 1)
Program 2: You Doo Right (part 2)
Program 3: Mary, Mary, So Contrary / Outside My Door
Program 4: Father Cannot Yell / Soul Desert

LP – Track Listing:
Side A: Father Cannot Yell / Mary, Mary, So Contrary / Outside My Door
Side B: You Doo Right

- The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way at long intervals until 1906. Seven years later, at the age of 71 Amrbose Bierce left for Mexico “with a pretty definite purpose, which, however, is not a present disclosable.” He was never heard from again.

In this book, Blache accords considerable importance to the symbiosis between chaos and order but only as a means to shed light on the sound sculptures Bianchi and other contemporary Italian artists defiantly insist on erecting. Blache’s preoccupations extend beyond music and into the realm of philosophy.

But The Art of Duration and Resonance is not about Deleuze and Guattari’s “chaosmos” or post-structural metaphysics. The strength of this book is in the author’s uncompromising desire to document the rich contributions of five musicians – Maurizio Bianchi, Guiseppe Verticchio, Luca Bergero, Matteo Uggeri, and Andrea Marutti.

Maurizio Bianchi (M.B)
Bianchi, the author tells us, has resolved “the conflict between concrete/abstract, consonance/dissonance, [and] acoustic/electronic facets of musical experimentalism.” It is tempting to challenge that assertion although there is no doubt that Bianchi, qualitatively and quantitatively, stands as one of the pillars of noise and drone music. Is he a post-modern or post-industrial artist? “I’m a pre-modern non artist with some pre-industrial attitudes,” says Bianchi. And his music is a form of “radiotherapeutic apocalypse.”

Maurizio Bianchi – emmhna
Maurizio Bianchi – niddah
Follow this link for more information.

Giuseppe Verticchio (NIMH)
The Art of Duration and Resonance then offers a succinct, yet insightful, introduction to the “dark visceral environmental electronic” sound of Verticchio (NIMH). Blache notes that NIMH “offers new challenges that mediate the mind and the body in a unique sensorial [and] metaphysical experience.” This is a music that effectively combines field research and ethnographic-like approaches with sound synthesis and manipulations.

NIMH – the unkept secret
Follow this link for more information.

Luca Bergero (FHIEVEL)
Luca Bergero (FHIEVEL), in an interview with Blache, insists on the importance to “consider common objects like potential music instruments. New possibilities are in this way available and in some cases the results are very important, from an aesthetic point of view or for a relational side in the music-therapy field.” Unfortunately, Blache does not further explore the music-therapy angle with FHIEVEL. But he succeeds nonetheless at introducing the reader to an artist whose contributions are both poetically cerebral and dense with sculptural qualities.

FHIEVEL – pipe
Follow this link for more information.

Matteo Uggeri (HUE / SPARKLE IN GREY)
The second to last chapter of the book deals with the work of Matteo Uggeri (HUE). The latter has released numerous recordings under different names and via multiple collaborations but Blache skillfully disentangles all of this. Uggeri’s music holds therapeutic qualities that are worth considering. Blache notes that listening to Uggeri’s works allows one to decode “what is veiled, muted and profoundly hidden in some parts of human existence.” See for yourself.

Alessandro Calbucci & Matteo Uggeri – there
Follow this link for more information.

Andrea Marutti (AMON / NEVER KNOWN)
Blache’s book on Italian industrial drone music closes with a discussion of Andrea Marutti’s work. Marutti, aside from releasing albums under the AMON and NEVER KNOWN pseudonyms, is also known as the founder of the Milan-based label AFE Records. His music his dense yet sufficiently open to allow one to drift through the soundscapes he carves out of stretched-out drones and mutable sound textures.

Andrea Marutti – the pulsating silence
Follow this link for more information.

The Art of Duration and Resonance is composed of five chapters that serve to introduce and celebrate an equal number of independent artists. Like most of the music it describes, Blache’s book is the product of do-it-yourself practices. This is a self-published work made available through print-on-demand services. This, unfortunately, hurts the book at times. Yet Blache’s efforts to bypass mainstream publishing channels are deserving of support.

Most importantly, Blache’s enthusiasm for Italian industrial drone music is truly contagious and this should suffice to convince you to dig further and step into the “chaosmos.”

Cette voix parle de façon continue, mais, bien que la musique ait cessé tout à fait, on ne comprend pas encore les paroles (ou on les comprends en tout cas très mal) à cause d’une forte réverbération ou quelque effet du même genre (deux bandes sonores identiques décalées se rejoignant progressivement jusqu’à devenir une voix normale).  – Alain Robbe-Grillet dans L’année dernière à Marienbad (ciné-roman)

Last Year in Marienbad is a masterpiece born out of the inevitable encounter between French cinema and le nouveau roman. The film was released in 1961 and soon found its way into the pantheon of modern classics. Not surprisingly, much has been written about the Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet collaboration but very little has been said concerning the soundtrack to the film.

Resnais and Robbe-Grillet were both deeply interested in music and sound-image relationships. Together, they had agreed to change the working title of the film from Last Year to Last Year in Marienbad (L’Année dernière to L’Année dernière à Marienbad). They felt that the latter had more rhythm and, therefore, greater musical qualities. But Marienbad was also the site where the two fantastic minds disagreed about music.

The process of giving cinematic form to Robbe-Grillet’s script had been a fairly smooth one and the renowned writer recognized that, in the end, the score was the only place where Resnais really departed from what was envisioned. Robbe-Grillet had hoped for a “musique concrète” approach but Resnais opted instead for an organ-based series of disquieting sonic vignettes.

Robbe-Grillet had planned a “partition sonore” based on the sounds one usually heard in ancient hotels and mansions (“les bruits qu’on entend dans les vieux hôtels démodés, comme le pas des domestiques qui sonnent dans les couloirs, les portes d’ascenseurs métalliques à coulisse accordéon à la sonorité extraordinaire, qui peut être très belle”).

“I am very much aware of the fact that the score I envisioned would have been so irritating that people would have had to leave the room,” Robbe-Grillet remarked in a series of interviews with France Culture in 2003.

And so Resnais called upon Delphine Seyrig’s brother for the soundtrack to Last Year in Marienbad. Francis Seyrig’s career as a composer seems to have been short-lived. Not much information is available concerning his musical output but he was mostly active as a soundtrack composer during the sixties. During the first half of that decade, Seyrig composed music for Last Year in Marienbad (his sister plays one of the two main protagonists), Le procès de Jeanne D’Arc (a 1962 film by Bresson), as well as Marie Soleil (a film directed by Antoine Bourseiller, who also acted in Varda’s Cleo de 5 à 7 and Resnais’ La Guerre est Finie).

I first saw Last Year in Marienbad at the Montreal Cinémathèque nearly ten years ago. I remember listening submissively to the rhythm with which the music and dialogues alternated and combined to further disorient and engage those of us sitting in front of the screen. Robbe-Grillet might have felt like Resnais was trying to please audiences, but there were still people at the turn of the millennium willing to complain about the unsettling sound of Seyrig’s “pseudo-dodécaphonique” organ sound.

The material below was released on 7” vinyl by Philips in the early 1960s. Aside from “La valse de Marienbad” which is now available on Alain Resnais: Portrait musical, the soundtrack for Last Year in Marienbad has been unavailable for more than four decades.

Enjoy.

THÉ DANSANT

PROMENADE

SOLITUDE

LA VALSE DE MARIENBAD – FINAL

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La musique de L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD est bien entendu fonctionelle (ce qui n’exclue pas le lyrisme). Sa fonction est de renforcer le perpétuel balancement entre le réel et l’imaginaire qui caractérise cette histoire d’amour.

Cette musique veut donc se confondre au décor, retrouver l’ambiguïté des sentiments des personnages, accentuer les doutes que l’on peut éprouver sur la réalité du déroulement de l’action.

C’est pourquoi elle utilise des formes musicales tantôt archaïques tantôt contemporaines et que telle séquence qui commence dans un style finit volontairement dans un autre.  – Alain Resnais (extrait du verso de pochette de la bande originale du film)

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My week beats your year. – Lou Reed

Metal Machine Music is certainly an unusual musical statement for an established rock artist – even for someone like Lou Reed with credentials in the avant-garde and the deep underground of New York’s art scene. Was Reed fulfilling contractual obligations? Was the album meant as an art manifesto? Was it an attempt to reconnect with the drone-based sound of John Cale and The Dream Syndicate? Or maybe Metal Machine Music is both a giant fuck you to the industry and a testament to Reed’s sophisticated and refined “pince-sans-rire” humor.

In 1975, Lester Bangs proposed six theories concerning Metal Machine Music. The list appeared in the September issue of Creem Magazine under the title “Monolith or Monotone?”

1. The new Lou Reed album is “some kind of ultimate antisocial act.”
2. It is the logical and inevitable culmination of aggressive tendencies that find their roots in early Velvet Underground albums and the Stooges’ Fun House.
3. It is the sound of anxiety. (“You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album.”)
4. Metal Machine Music is Reed’s circulatory system amplified.
5. The album is a corporate death wish in the form of a commercial suicide.
6. or “anybody who doesn’t jack off at least three times a day is a queer.”

A few months later, Bangs thought it necessary to add:

“When you wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of your life, Metal Machine Music is the best medicine. Because when you first arise you’re probably so fucked (i.e., still drunk) that is doesn’t even really hurt yet (not like it’s going to), so you should put this album on immediately, not only to clear all the crap out of your head, but to prepare you for what’s in store the rest of the day.”

Ultimately, both Reed and RCA Records thought the material was solid enough to release the album in multiple formats (double LP and 8-track). It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Bangs himself admitted to having acquired an additional copy of Metal Machine Music so he could listen to the album in his car.

The belief in the sonic possibilities of Reed’s 1975 effort was such that RCA records decided to make quadraphonic versions of Metal Machine Music available (it was either a bold move or an act of despair from company executives).

Quadraphonic audio formats were introduced early in 1970 and within a few years hundreds of releases became available in both stereo and four-channel surround sound. Unfortunately, Quad technology disappeared before the decade ended but not before Metal Machine Music, the holy grail of 8 track cartridges, hit the market.

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It would be futile to try to reproduce Quad audio here. You are instead getting an excerpt from the Quad-8 cartridge played through a stereo player.

Half of the music – and a new perspective on Metal Machine Music.
METAL MACHINE MUSIC – A1

Or you can listen to the complete stereo version.
METAL MACHINE MUSIC – PART 1

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Q8 Stereo 8 (RCA Records CPT2-1101) – Track Listing:
Programme A: Metal Machine Music A-1
Programme B: Metal Machine Music A-2
Programme C: Metal Machine Music A-3
Programme D: Metal Machine Music A-4

LP – Track Listing:
Side 1: Metal Machine Music Part 1
Side 2: Metal Machine Music Part 2
Side 3: Metal Machine Music Part 3
Side 4: Metal Machine Music Part 4

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There is not much information available about Pythagoron Inc. except for a long-expired P.O. Box address, which suggests that the music made available by the corporation originated from someplace in or around New York City – less than 100 miles south of Garnerville, NY, where USCO (a media art collective also known as The Company of Us) operated for most of the sixties and early seventies.

USCO belonged to a generation of eccentric psychic pioneers whose fascination with technology and mysticism resulted in the creation of mind-expanding art, infinity machines and environments. Pythagoron Inc. 1977 built on those previous efforts to rehabilitate consciousness – but this time using electronic modulations and pulsating rhythms.

Pythagoron Inc. 1977 is white noise and drum machines processed and echoplexed until any appearance of momentum is subdued and immersed in slow moving procession-like drone waves. It is 42 minutes of electronic sound synthesis that would have made an excellent soundtrack for Edmund Alleyn’s Introscaphe or Haus Ricker’s soft environments.

Pythagoron is sound-induced intoxication best experienced on your own.

PYTHAGORON PART 1

CD-R reissue available through Mimaroglu Music Sales.

Pythagoron:

“You are relaxed, lying down in a darkened room – eyes closed, your mind quiets and the sound begins – it pours through like an enveloping shower. The tones gradually become a familiar place where ethereal images and ideas flicker, then solidify. Trusting the experience you let go and the sound seems to dissolve. You couldn’t describe this space – yet it’s familiar, a personal awareness that always was slightly out of reach. Gradually it ends – an experience as varied as your consciousness.

‘Pythagoron brings you to a different place.’

Phytagoron is not just music – but sound controlled with electronic precision to alter your awareness, to get you high. Developed through years of research into the resonant interaction of sound and brainwave patterns, Pythagoron sound is unique in concept and production.”

The history of noise is like a history of the avant-garde – while we can identify what looks like a linear succession of avant-gardes, if we consider the idea of an avant-garde, or of noise, then we should recognize that at any one moment, however briefly, when something is avant-garde, it is specifically outside of linear progression, and is a question posed about progression. – Paul Hegarty

Noise is a potent force that is both threatening and prevalent. It occasionally “dissipates” and ceases to be noise but as a historical and cultural construct, it has no choice but to resurface and continue its course against its silencer. It is the resulting intersecting trajectories of noise and power in music that Paul Hegarty explores in Noise/Music: A History. In thirteen engaging chapters, the author discusses a century of experimentation, beginning with the Futurists and ending somewhere near the sonic excesses of Merzbow and the incessant plunders of John Oswald.

FIRST
“Noise then is something we are forced to react to, and this reaction, certainly for humans, is a judgment, even if only physical,” writes Hegarty as he introduces the theoretical framework of the book. In this fist chapter, the author necessarily borrows from, but also engages with, Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music. He also relies on giants such as Kant, Hegel and Artaud as he situates noise within larger discourses of power. The order vs. disorder paradigm is a useful one here and Hegarty uses it effectively.

TECHNOLOGIES
Noise and technology have become nearly inseparable since the industrial revolution. Noise/Music thus focuses on developments in technology but without falling prey to technological determinism. Hegarty explores early landmark exchanges and approaches (Fluxus, musique brut and musique concrète) as he entrenches technology into human activities.

Noise may permeate all activities but this does not facilitate its acceptance (especially in music). Hegarty makes that clear when he notes that even Theodor Adorno was “caught in an incapacity to see new technologies, whether machinic, conceptual or performative, as ever being able to supersede the musical technology laid out in the form of orchestral music.”

FREE
Free jazz is neither orchestral music nor noise per se but it occupies a central place in Hegarty’s narrative. The author pertinently discusses the larger socio-political context within which free jazz exploded. He offers a balanced analysis, recognizing the paradoxes inherent in the process of delimiting music such as free jazz and improv into rigid genres. Fire music and other variants of free jazz represent “attacks on musical conventions” but also a forward surge toward Georges Bataille’s “miraculous realm of unknowing.” Noise is in the political but also in the “freeness” of the music, Hegarty tells us.

ELECTRIC / PROGRESS / INDUSTRY / INEPT
It is also present in rock, prog, industrial and punk music. “Freeness” and amplification create surplus sound and facilitate the expansion of conventional rock structures (i.e. Cream, The Grateful Dead and Hendrix). Noise is in the machinery rock and prog musicians use to indulge in excesses. It is in the transgressive potential of industrial music.

It is in punk music and efforts to destroy narratives of virtuosity. What Hegarty presents here, is “a repositioning of punk as a quantitative moment in noise, where the scale of ineptness made it audible noise.” Ineptness is presented not as criticism but as a means to reappropriate a term used to describe punk as a genre. Attali necessarily resurfaces in these pages since it is difficult to talk about power and control without considering the political economy of music.

JAPAN/MERZBOW
Noise/Music includes chapters that deal with various aspects of sound art, pluderphonics and listening. But clearly, the bulk of the book and culminating arguments reside in the chapters that deal with Japan and Merzbow. In those two chapters, Hegarty returns to the concept of excess which he sees as a predominant characteristic of Japanese noise music. He writes, “there is, if you like, more noise in Japanese noise music, whether in terms of volume, distortion, non-musicality, non-musical elements, music against music and meaning.” What Hegarty describes is a post-Japrock world where noise reigns supreme.

And then there is Merzbow. The latter, the author insists, best incarnates excess. “Merzbow music is all residue, all noise.”

Hegarty, therefore, makes a compelling argument when he writes that “noise music acquires a sense (whether wanted or not) in the wake of industrial music and Japanese noise music – i.e. from the late 1970s onwards.”

Noise/Music is dense with information and engaging insights. There is a chance that Hegarty’s insistence on saturating the pages of the book with uncertain, yet stimulating, connections (Bataille’s transgression & Throbbing Gristle / Gilles Deleuze’s repetition & Neu) will disorient readers unwilling to confront noise in the written form. They should know that Noise/Music is not a guide to modern music. It is not a history of noise music. But it is a great read if you don’t mind it when the meters are in the red.

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Paul Hegarty is Lecturer in Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork, Ireland, and he is author of books on Bataille and Baudrillard. He jointly runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic and occasionally performs in the noise band Safe.

Follow this link for a selection of talks and papers written by Paul Hegarty.

Excerpts from the Safe with Dennis Cooper release below:
SAFE WITH DENNIS COOPER – I

SAFE WITH DENNIS COOPER – III

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