Noise music
Encyclopedia
Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde
music and sound art
that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality
, noise
, indeterminacy
, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals, and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static
, hiss and hum, feedback
, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent
instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic.
The Futurist
art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada
art movement (a prime example being the Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919 in Berlin), and later the Surrealist and Fluxus
art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones
, Yasunao Tone
, George Brecht
, Robert Watts
, Wolf Vostell
, Yoko Ono
, Walter De Maria
's Ocean Music, Milan Knížák
's Broken Music Composition, early LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi
.
Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion, particularly in the popular music
domain with examples such as Jimi Hendrix
's use of feedback
, Sonic Youth
and Lou Reed
's Metal Machine Music
. However, many noise musicians are keenly aware of dynamics
and build them into their pieces.
Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis
, Karlheinz Stockhausen
, Helmut Lachenmann
, Cornelius Cardew
, Theatre of Eternal Music
, Rhys Chatham
, Ryoji Ikeda
, Survival Research Laboratories
, Whitehouse
, Cabaret Voltaire
, Psychic TV
, Blackhouse
, Jean Tinguely
's recordings of his sound sculpture
(specifically Bascule VII), the music of Hermann Nitsch
's Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young
's bowed gong works from the late 1960s. Genres such as industrial
, industrial techno, lo-fi music
, black metal
and glitch
music employ noise-based materials.
, a futurist
artist of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first noise artist. His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises
, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra
to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto
.
Antonio Russolo
, another Italian
Futurist
composer and Luigi's brother, produced a recording of two works featuring the original Intonarumori. The 1921 made phonograph
with works entitled Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines and is the only surviving sound recording.
An early Dada
-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp
also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. His ready-made With Hidden Noise (A Bruit Secret) was a collaborative exercise that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg
. What rattles inside when With Hidden Noise is shaken remains a mystery.
, with design by Pablo Picasso
, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Eric Satie. The extra-musical materials used in the production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Coctueau and included a dynamo
, Morse code
machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters. Arseny Avraamov
's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku
in 1922. In 1923 Arthur Honegger
created Pacific 231
, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. Another example is Ottorino Respighi's
1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome, which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording. Also in 1924 George Antheil
created a work entitled Ballet Mécanique
with instrumentation that included 16 pianos
, 3 airplane propellers
, and 7 electric bell
s. The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada
film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy
and Fernand Léger
, but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece.
In 1930 Paul Hindemith
and Ernst Toch
recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese
experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds. Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called a "continuous flowing curve" of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931 Varese's Ionisation
for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lions's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise. In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage
stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises".
In an essay written in 1937, Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical materials and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Essentially, Cage made no distinction, in his view all sounds have the potential to be used creatively. His aim was to capture and control elements of the sonic environment and employ a method of sound organisation, a term borrowed from Varese, to bring meaning to the sound materials. Cage began in 1939 to create a series of works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1
for instruments including two variable speed turntables with frequency recordings.
In 1961 James Tenney
composed Analogue #1: Noise Study (for tape) using computer synthesized noise and Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (for tape) by sampling and manipulating a famous Elvis Presley
recording.
artists László Moholy-Nagy
, Oskar Fischinger
and Paul Arma
experiment with modifying the physical contents of record grooves.
Under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Lou Harrison
and John Cage
began composing music for junk (waste
) percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer
coined the term musique concrète
to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially. The first of Schaeffer's Cinq Études de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consisted of transformed locomotive sounds. Following this, both in Europe and America, other modernist and postmodernist art music
composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen
, Gottfried Michael Koenig
, Pierre Henry
, Iannis Xenakis
, La Monte Young
, and David Tudor
, composed significant electronic, vocal, and instrumental works. In late 1947 Antonin Artaud
recorded (To Have Done with the Judgment of god), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic
sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia
. In 1949, Nouveau Réalisme artist Yves Klein
wrote The Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–1948), a 40-minute orchestral piece that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord (followed by a 20-minute silence) – showing how the sound of one drone
could make music. Also in 1949, Pierre Boulez
befriended John Cage
, who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie
. John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry.
In 1951 Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4, a work for twelve radio receivers, was premiered in New York. Performance of the composition necessitated the use of a score that contained indications for various wavelengths, durations, and dynamic levels, all of which had been determined using chance operations
.
A year later in 1952, Cage applied his aleatoric methods to tape-based composition. Also in 1952, Karlheinz Stockhausen
completed a modest musique concrète
student piece entitled Etude. Cage's work resulted in his famous work Williams Mix, which was made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching
. Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art "happening
" at Black Mountain College
, and 4'33", the so-called controversial "silent piece". The premiere of 4'33" was performed by David Tudor
. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and close the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise is always happening that makes musical sound. In 1957 Edgard Varèse
created on tape an extended piece of electronic music using noises created by scraping, thumping and blowing entitled Poème électronique
.
In 1960, John Cage completed his noise composition Cartridge Music for phono cartridges with foreign objects replacing the 'stylus' and small sounds amplified contact microphones. Also in 1960, Nam June Paik
composed Fluxusobjekt for fixed tape and hand-controlled tape playback head. On May 8, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi
and Yasunao Tone
, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded. Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band
, the world's longest-running noise act, was formed in 1965 in London, Ontario and continues to perform and record to this day, having survived to work with many of the newer generation which they themselves had influenced, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth
and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan
. In 1967 Musica Elettronica Viva
, a live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome
, made a recording entitled SpaceCraft using contact microphones on such "non-musical" objects as panes of glass and motor oil cans that was recorded at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin
. At the end of the sixties, they took part in the collective noise action called Lo Zoo initiated by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto
.
Rosalind Krauss argued that by 1968 artists such as Robert Morris
, Robert Smithson
, and Richard Serra
had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." Sound art
found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution
. Antiform process art
became the terms used to describe this post-modern post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made. Serious art music
responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example the La Monte Young
Fluxus
composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore from Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and window panes and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor.
, Borbetomagus
and Elliott Sharp
embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts. Around the same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appeared with Throbbing Gristle
, Cabaret Voltaire
, and NON (aka Boyd Rice
). These cassette culture
releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where they may degrade into harsh noise. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Current 93
, Hafler Trio
, Throbbing Gristle
, Coil
, Laibach
, Steven Stapleton
, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
, Smegma
, Nurse with Wound
, Einstürzende Neubauten
, The Haters
, and The New Blockaders performed industrial noise music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars, and unconventional "instruments" (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise production techniques. Interest in the use of shortwave radio also developed at this time, particularly evident in the recordings and live performances of John Duncan
. Other postmodern art movements influential to postindustrial noise art are Conceptual Art
and the Neo-Dada
use of techniques such as assemblage
, montage
, bricolage
, and appropriation
. Bands like Test Dept
, Clock DVA
, Factrix
, Autopsia
, Nocturnal Emissions
, Whitehouse
, Severed Heads
, Sutcliffe Jügend
, and SPK
soon followed.
The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording technology in the 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of punk rock
, established the no wave
aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.
The entry of recorded noise into popular rock music can be traced to Tomorrow Never Knows
, the final track of The Beatles
' 1966 studio album Revolver
. Credited as a Lennon/McCartney
song, it was written primarily by John Lennon
. The track included looped tape
effects. For the track Paul McCartney
supplied a bag of ¼-inch audio tape loops he had made at home after listening to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge
. By disabling the erase head
of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète
. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops. After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of "30 or so" tape loops to George Martin
, who selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was about six seconds long. The tape loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building and controlled by EMI
technicians in studio two at Abbey Road. Each machine was monitored by one technician, who had to keep a pencil within each loop to maintain tension. The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Geoff Emerick
watched the meters. Eight of the tapes were used at one time, changed halfway through the song. The tapes were made (like most of the other loops) by superimposition and acceleration (0:07). According to Martin, the finished mix of the tape loops cannot be repeated because of the complex and random way in which they were laid over the music.
Salient to this use of noise is Pet Sounds
, the eleventh studio album by the American rock
band The Beach Boys
, released in 1966 on Capitol Records
. In it Brian Wilson
wove together elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, coupled with sound effects and unconventional instruments such as bicycle bell
s, buzzing organs, Electro-Theremin
, dog whistles, trains, Coca-Cola cans and barking dogs, along with the more usual keyboard
s and guitar
s.
Most notable in this vein is Revolution 9
, a track produced in 1968 by The Beatles
for The White Album
. It made sole use of sound collage
, credited to Lennon/McCartney
, but created primarily by John Lennon
with assistance from George Harrison
and Yoko Ono
. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition is similar to the avant-garde
Fluxus
style of Ono as well as the musique concrète
works of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer
and Pierre Henry
.
Lennon followed up this experiment with even more explicit noise music recordings, the first being Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
, an avant-garde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of repeating tape loop
s as Lennon plays different instruments such as piano, organ, and drums with sound effects (including reverb, delay
and distortion
), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds. They followed this recording with another noise recording in 1969 entitled Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions
. Beatles member George Harrison
also made released a noise/musique concrète recording in 1969, entitled Electronic Sound
. Previously, Freak Out!
, the debut album by The Mothers of Invention
(released June 27, 1966 on Verve Records
) had also made use of avant-garde sound collages - as did their later 1970 Weasels Ripped My Flesh
title track - particularly the 1966 track The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet
. This track is said to resemble Carnival of Light
, an unreleased experimental piece by The Beatles, recorded on 5 January 1967 after the vocal overdubbing sessions for the song Penny Lane. Carnival of Light was created for The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, an art event held at the Roundhouse Theatre
on 28 January and 4 February 1967. Carnival of Light has not yet appeared on any official Beatles release.
Lou Reed
's double LP, Metal Machine Music
(1975) is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music critic Lester Bangs
has called the "greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum
". It has also been cited as one of the "worst albums of all time". Reed was well aware of the drone music
of La Monte Young
. Young's Theater of Eternal Music was a minimal music noise group in the mid-60s with John Cale
, Marian Zazeela
, Henry Flynt
, Angus Maclise
, Tony Conrad
, and others. The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale's subsequent contribution to The Velvet Underground
in his use of both discordance and feedback. Cale and Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young).
The aptly named noise rock
fuses rock
to noise, usually with recognizable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality
, improvisation, and white noise
. One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth
who took inspiration from the No Wave
composers Glenn Branca
and Rhys Chatham
(himself a student of LaMonte Young). Marc Masters, in his book on the No Wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars
and DNA
drew on punk rock
, avant-garde minimalism
and performance art
. Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest
that was organized by Thurston Moore
of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns
in June 1981 followed by the Speed Trials noise rock
series organized by Live Skull
members in May 1983.
has produced a significant output of characteristically harsh bands, sometimes referred to under the portmanteau Japanoise
, with perhaps the most well known being Merzbow
(pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada
artist Kurt Schwitters
's Merz art project of psychological collage
). Another notable example is the electronic music
band Yellow Magic Orchestra
, whose member Ryuichi Sakamoto
stated that their "concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise." Other key Japanese noise artists include Hijokaidan
, Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants
, KK Null
, Yamazaki Maso
’s Masonna, Solmania
, K2
, The Gerogerigegege
and Hanatarash
. Nick Cain of The Wire
identifies the "primacy of Japanese Noise artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants" as one the of the major developments in noise music since 1990.
, microsound
, or glitch
-based work is often subtler to the ear. Kim Cascone
refers to this development as a postdigital
movement and describes it as an "aesthetic of failure." Some of this music has seen wide distribution thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing
services and netlabels offering free releases. Goodman characterizes this widespread outpouring of free noise based media as a "noise virus."
Post-industrial noise artists from the late 20th and early 21st centuries include Nicolas Collins
, William Basinski
's The Disintegration Loops
, Psyclones
, The Haters
, Boyd Rice
, Pole
, Stephen Vitiello
, If, Bwana
, PBK
, Howard Stelzer
, Chris Douglas
a.k.a. O.S.T., Aube
, Andrew Deutsch
, Leif Elggren
, Robin Rimbaud
, Alva Noto
, Oval, Boards of Canada
, DJ Spooky
, Florian Hecker, Farmers Manual
, Negativland
, Thanasis Kaproulias
, Fennesz, Pan Sonic
, Yasunao Tone
, Pavel Zhagun
, Arcane Device
, Francisco López
, Kommissar Hjuler
und Frau, Bryan Lewis Saunders
, and others. In 2009 noise was said to be trending heavily with "lo-fi" acts such as Wavves
and Times New Viking
.
Richie Hawtin
, Jan Jelinek
, Ricardo Villalobos
, Decomposed Subsonic
, Trentemøller
, and other Minimal techno
and Microhouse
DJ
s have been using noise elements such as buzz, hum, and clicks as sonic flavor since the early 1990s.
, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven
’s Grosse Fuge (1825) “sounded like noise” to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven’s publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately.
In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard
, Georges Bataille
and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's
composition 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie
to NON
to Glenn Branca
.
Writer Douglas Kahn
, in his work Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud
, George Brecht
, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein
, Fluxus
, Allan Kaprow
, Michael McClure
, Yoko Ono
, Jackson Pollock
, Luigi Russolo
, and Dziga Vertov
.
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music
(1985), Jacques Attali
explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society. He indicates that noise in music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious
of society – validating and testing new social and political realities.
In music
, dissonance is the quality of sounds which seems "unstable", and has an aural "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" consonance. Despite the fact that words like "unpleasant" and "grating" are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music which is perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance.
In common use, the word noise
means unwanted sound or noise pollution
.
In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication.
White noise
is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light
which contains all frequencies.
In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art
, some contemporary digital art
noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge
, and vinyl records. Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++
software used in creating the viral symphOny
by Joseph Nechvatal
).
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
music and sound art
Sound art
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
, noise
Noise
In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...
, indeterminacy
Indeterminacy in music
Indeterminacy in music, which began early in the twentieth century in the music of Charles Ives, and was continued in the 1930s by Henry Cowell and carried on by his student, the experimental music composer John Cage beginning in 1951 , came to refer to the movement which grew up around Cage...
, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals, and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static
Noise (radio)
In radio reception, noise is the superposition of white noise and other disturbing influences on the signal, caused either by thermal noise and other electronic noise from receiver input circuits or by interference from radiated electromagnetic noise picked up by the receiver's antenna...
, hiss and hum, feedback
Audio feedback
Audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output...
, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent
Circuit bending
Circuit bending is the creative customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators....
instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic.
The Futurist
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
art movement (a prime example being the Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919 in Berlin), and later the Surrealist and Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones
Joe Jones (Fluxus artist)
-Formation:Joe Jones grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and received a classical musical education at Hartnett Music School in New York City. In the late 1950s he began a short career as a jazz drummer. In 1960 Jones began to study avant-garde experimental composition first briefly with John Cage and...
, Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist who has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and...
, George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, Robert Watts
Robert Watts (artist)
Robert Watts was an American artist best known for his work as a member of the international Avant-garde art movement Fluxus. Born in Burlington, Iowa June 14, 1923, he became Professor of Art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Jersey in 1953, a post he kept until 1984...
, Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
, Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
, Walter De Maria
Walter De Maria
-Early life and career:De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Although trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media...
's Ocean Music, Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák
Milan Knížák is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, musician, installation artist, dissident, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.-Childhood and early life in the Protectorate and in the former Sudetenland :...
's Broken Music Composition, early LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi
Takehisa Kosugi
is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement.Kosugi studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1962....
.
Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion, particularly in the popular music
Popular music
Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...
domain with examples such as Jimi Hendrix
Jimi Hendrix
James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...
's use of feedback
Audio feedback
Audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output...
, Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
and Lou Reed
Lou Reed
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades...
's Metal Machine Music
Metal Machine Music
Metal Machine Music, subtitled *The Amine β Ring, is the fifth solo album by Lou Reed. It was originally released as a double album by RCA Records in 1975...
. However, many noise musicians are keenly aware of dynamics
Dynamics
Dynamics may refer to:-Physics and engineering:* Dynamics , the time evolution of physical processes** Aerodynamics, the study of gases in motion...
and build them into their pieces.
Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, Helmut Lachenmann
Helmut Lachenmann
Helmut Lachenmann is a German composer associated with musique concrète instrumentale.-Life and works:...
, Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...
, Theatre of Eternal Music
Theatre of Eternal Music
The Theatre of Eternal Music, sometimes later known as The Dream Syndicate, was a mid 1960s musical group formed by La Monte Young, that focused on experimental drone music. It featured the performances of La Monte Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Billy...
, Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions...
, Ryoji Ikeda
Ryoji Ikeda
Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Paris. Ikeda's music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of "raw" states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing...
, Survival Research Laboratories
Survival Research Laboratories
Survival Research Laboratories is a machine performance art group credited for pioneering the genre of large-scale machine performance. After about 30 years in San Francisco, California, SRL spent most of 2008 moving to Petaluma, California....
, Whitehouse
Whitehouse (band)
Whitehouse are a pioneering English power electronics band formed in 1980, largely credited for the founding of the power electronics subgenre.-History and personnel:...
, Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire (band)
Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...
, Psychic TV
Psychic TV
Psychic TV or PTV, is a video art and music group that primarily performs psychedelic, punk, electronic and experimental music...
, Blackhouse
Blackhouse
Blackhouse is a Christian industrial band. Blackhouse plays what has been cited as "primo industrial rock", contrasting with post-industrial styles promulgated by artists such as NIN, Klank, or Circle of Dust...
, Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics...
's recordings of his sound sculpture
Sound sculpture
Sound sculpture is an intermedia and time based art form in which sculpture or any kind of art object produces sound, or the reverse...
(specifically Bascule VII), the music of Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch is an Austrian artist who works in experimental and multimedia modes.Born in Vienna, Nitsch received training in painting during the time he studied at the Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchanstalt. He is called an "actionist" or a performance artist...
's Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
's bowed gong works from the late 1960s. Genres such as industrial
Industrial music
Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...
, industrial techno, lo-fi music
Lo-fi music
Lo-fi is lower quality of sound recordings than the usual standard for music. The qualities of lo-fi are usually achieved by either degrading the quality of the recorded audio, or using certain equipment. Recent uses of the phrase have led to it becoming a genre, although it still remains as an...
, black metal
Black metal
Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include fast tempos, shrieked vocals, highly distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, blast beat drumming, raw recording, and unconventional song structure....
and glitch
Glitch (music)
Glitch is a term used to describe a genre of electronic music that emerged in the mid to late 1990s. The glitch aesthetic is characterized by a deliberate use of glitch based sonic artifacts that would normally be viewed as unwanted disturbances reducing the overall sound quality and are thus...
music employ noise-based materials.
The Art of Noises
Luigi RussoloLuigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
, a futurist
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
artist of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first noise artist. His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises
The Art of Noises
The Art of Noises is a Futurist manifesto, written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella...
, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra
Orchestra
An orchestra is a sizable instrumental ensemble that contains sections of string, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. The term orchestra derives from the Greek ορχήστρα, the name for the area in front of an ancient Greek stage reserved for the Greek chorus...
to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto
Manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...
.
Antonio Russolo
Antonio Russolo
Antonio Russolo was an Italian Futurist composer, brother of the more famous Futurist composer and theorist Luigi Russolo. The 78 rpm record made by him in 1921 is the only surviving sound recording that features the original intonarumori...
, another Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Futurist
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
composer and Luigi's brother, produced a recording of two works featuring the original Intonarumori. The 1921 made phonograph
Phonograph
The phonograph record player, or gramophone is a device introduced in 1877 that has had continued common use for reproducing sound recordings, although when first developed, the phonograph was used to both record and reproduce sounds...
with works entitled Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines and is the only surviving sound recording.
An early Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. His ready-made With Hidden Noise (A Bruit Secret) was a collaborative exercise that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg
Walter Arensberg
Walter Conrad Arensberg was an American art collector, critic and poet. His father was part owner and president of a crucible steel company. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University...
. What rattles inside when With Hidden Noise is shaken remains a mystery.
Found sound
In the same period the utilisation of found sound as a musical resource was starting to be explored. An early example is Parade, a performance produced at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917, that was conceived by Jean CocteauJean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
, with design by Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Eric Satie. The extra-musical materials used in the production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Coctueau and included a dynamo
Dynamo
- Engineering :* Dynamo, a magnetic device originally used as an electric generator* Dynamo theory, a theory relating to magnetic fields of celestial bodies* Solar dynamo, the physical process that generates the Sun's magnetic field- Software :...
, Morse code
Morse code
Morse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...
machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters. Arseny Avraamov
Arseny Avraamov
Arseny Mikhailovich Avraamov , was an avant-garde Russian composer and theorist. He studied at the music school of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, with private composition lessons from Sergey Taneyev. He refused to fight in World War I, and fled the country to work, among other things, as a...
's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku
Baku
Baku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...
in 1922. In 1923 Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.-Biography:Born...
created Pacific 231
Pacific 231
Pacific 231 is an orchestral work by Arthur Honegger, written in 1923. It is one of his most frequently performed works today.The popular interpretation of the piece is that it depicts a steam locomotive, an interpretation that is supported by the title of the piece. Honegger, however, insisted...
, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive. Another example is Ottorino Respighi's
Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor. He is best known for his orchestral "Roman trilogy": Fountains of Rome ; Pines of Rome ; and Roman Festivals...
1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome, which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording. Also in 1924 George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
created a work entitled Ballet Mécanique
Ballet mécanique
Ballet Mécanique was a project by the American composer George Antheil and the filmmaker/artists Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. Although the film was intended to use Antheil's score as a soundtrack, the two parts were not brought together until the 1990s. As a composition, Ballet Mécanique is...
with instrumentation that included 16 pianos
Player piano
A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...
, 3 airplane propellers
Propeller
A propeller is a type of fan that transmits power by converting rotational motion into thrust. A pressure difference is produced between the forward and rear surfaces of the airfoil-shaped blade, and a fluid is accelerated behind the blade. Propeller dynamics can be modeled by both Bernoulli's...
, and 7 electric bell
Electric bell
An electric bell is a mechanical bell that functions by means of an electromagnet. When an electric current is applied, it produces a repetitive buzzing or clanging sound...
s. The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy
Dudley Murphy was an American film director. Murphy was born on July 10, 1897 in Winchester, Massachusetts...
and Fernand Léger
Fernand Léger
Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
, but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece.
In 1930 Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...
and Ernst Toch
Ernst Toch
Ernst Toch was a composer of classical music and film scores.- Biography :Toch, born in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, into the family of a humble Jewish leather dealer when the city was at its 19th-century cultural zenith, sought throughout his life to introduce new approaches to music...
recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds. Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called a "continuous flowing curve" of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931 Varese's Ionisation
Ionisation (Varèse)
Ionisation is a musical composition by Edgard Varèse written for thirteen percussionists, the first concert hall composition for percussion ensemble alone. The premiere was at Steinway Hall, on March 6, 1933, conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky, to whom the piece was later dedicated...
for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lions's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise. In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises".
In an essay written in 1937, Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical materials and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Essentially, Cage made no distinction, in his view all sounds have the potential to be used creatively. His aim was to capture and control elements of the sonic environment and employ a method of sound organisation, a term borrowed from Varese, to bring meaning to the sound materials. Cage began in 1939 to create a series of works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1
Imaginary Landscape
Imaginary Landscape is the title of several pieces by American composer John Cage. The series comprises the following works:* Imaginary Landscape No. 1 **for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, muted piano, and cymbal...
for instruments including two variable speed turntables with frequency recordings.
In 1961 James Tenney
James Tenney
James Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...
composed Analogue #1: Noise Study (for tape) using computer synthesized noise and Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (for tape) by sampling and manipulating a famous Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
recording.
Experimental music
In 1932 BauhausBauhaus
', commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term stood for "School of Building".The Bauhaus school was founded by...
artists László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:...
, Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 , which is now listed on the...
and Paul Arma
Paul Arma
Paul Arma was a Hungarian-French pianist, composer, and ethnomusicologist....
experiment with modifying the physical contents of record grooves.
Under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco in the late 1940s, Lou Harrison
Lou Harrison
Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...
and John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
began composing music for junk (waste
Waste
Waste is unwanted or useless materials. In biology, waste is any of the many unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from living organisms, metabolic waste; such as urea, sweat or feces. Litter is waste which has been disposed of improperly...
) percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
coined the term musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially. The first of Schaeffer's Cinq Études de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consisted of transformed locomotive sounds. Following this, both in Europe and America, other modernist and postmodernist art music
Art music
Art music is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition...
composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, Gottfried Michael Koenig
Gottfried Michael Koenig
Gottfried Michael Koenig is a contemporary German-Dutch composer.-Biography:Koenig studied church music in Braunschweig, composition, piano, analysis and acoustics in Detmold, music representation techniques in Cologne and computer technique in Bonn. He attended and later lectured at the...
, Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.-Biography:...
, Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, and David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
, composed significant electronic, vocal, and instrumental works. In late 1947 Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
recorded (To Have Done with the Judgment of god), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic
Xylophone
The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets...
sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia
Glossolalia
Glossolalia or speaking in tongues is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables, often as part of religious practice. The significance of glossolalia has varied with time and place, with some considering it a part of a sacred language...
. In 1949, Nouveau Réalisme artist Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
wrote The Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–1948), a 40-minute orchestral piece that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord (followed by a 20-minute silence) – showing how the sound of one drone
Drone (music)
In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most or all of a piece. The word drone is also used to refer to any part of a musical instrument that is just used to produce such an effect.-A musical effect:A drone...
could make music. Also in 1949, Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
befriended John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
. John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry.
In 1951 Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4, a work for twelve radio receivers, was premiered in New York. Performance of the composition necessitated the use of a score that contained indications for various wavelengths, durations, and dynamic levels, all of which had been determined using chance operations
Aleatoric music
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
.
A year later in 1952, Cage applied his aleatoric methods to tape-based composition. Also in 1952, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
completed a modest musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
student piece entitled Etude. Cage's work resulted in his famous work Williams Mix, which was made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching
I Ching
The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...
. Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art "happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
" at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...
, and 4'33", the so-called controversial "silent piece". The premiere of 4'33" was performed by David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and close the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise is always happening that makes musical sound. In 1957 Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
created on tape an extended piece of electronic music using noises created by scraping, thumping and blowing entitled Poème électronique
Poème électronique
Poème électronique is a piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse, written for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The Philips corporation commissioned Le Corbusier to design the pavilion, which was intended as a showcase of their engineering progress...
.
In 1960, John Cage completed his noise composition Cartridge Music for phono cartridges with foreign objects replacing the 'stylus' and small sounds amplified contact microphones. Also in 1960, Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
composed Fluxusobjekt for fixed tape and hand-controlled tape playback head. On May 8, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi
Takehisa Kosugi
is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement.Kosugi studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1962....
and Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist who has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and...
, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded. Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band
Nihilist Spasm Band
The Nihilist Spasm Band is a London, Ontario-based noise band. The band was formed in 1965 by Hugh McIntyre, John Clement, John Boyle, Bill Exley, Murray Favro, Archie Leitch, Art Pratten, and Greg Curnoe. Leitch has since retired, Curnoe was killed in a bicycle accident in 1992, and McIntyre...
, the world's longest-running noise act, was formed in 1965 in London, Ontario and continues to perform and record to this day, having survived to work with many of the newer generation which they themselves had influenced, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan
Hijokaidan
Hijokaidan is a Japanese noise and free improvisation group with a revolving lineup that has ranged from two members to as many as fourteen in its early days. The group is the project of guitarist Yoshiyuki "Jojo" Hiroshige its one constant member, who is head & owner of the Osaka-based Alchemy...
. In 1967 Musica Elettronica Viva
Musica Elettronica Viva
Musica Elettronica Viva is a live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome, Italy, in 1966. Over the years, its members have included Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski, Allan Bryant, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, Steve Lacy, and Jon Phetteplace.They were early...
, a live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, made a recording entitled SpaceCraft using contact microphones on such "non-musical" objects as panes of glass and motor oil cans that was recorded at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. At the end of the sixties, they took part in the collective noise action called Lo Zoo initiated by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera...
.
Postmodern developments
The art criticArt critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
Rosalind Krauss argued that by 1968 artists such as Robert Morris
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
, Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
, and Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." Sound art
Sound art
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists....
found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution
Distribution (business)
Product distribution is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user.The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing,...
. Antiform process art
Process art
Process art is an artistic movement as well as a creative sentiment and world view where the end product of art and craft, the objet d’art, is not the principal focus. The 'process' in process art refers to the process of the formation of art: the gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and...
became the terms used to describe this post-modern post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made. Serious art music
Art music
Art music is an umbrella term used to refer to musical traditions implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations and a written musical tradition...
responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example the La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore from Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and window panes and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor.
Industrial music
In the 1970s, the concept of art itself expanded and groups like Survival Research LaboratoriesSurvival Research Laboratories
Survival Research Laboratories is a machine performance art group credited for pioneering the genre of large-scale machine performance. After about 30 years in San Francisco, California, SRL spent most of 2008 moving to Petaluma, California....
, Borbetomagus
Borbetomagus
Borbetomagus are a free improvisation/noise music group. They are cited by critics as pioneers of aggressive improvised noise music.- Biography :...
and Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City since the late 1970s, Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from blues, jazz, and orchestral music to noise, no wave rock,...
embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts. Around the same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appeared with Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
, Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire (band)
Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...
, and NON (aka Boyd Rice
Boyd Rice
Boyd Blake Rice is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard...
). These cassette culture
Cassette culture
Cassette culture, or the cassette underground , refers to the practices surrounding amateur production and distribution of recorded music that emerged in the late 1970s via home-made audio cassettes...
releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where they may degrade into harsh noise. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Current 93
Current 93
Current 93 is an eclectic British experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet .-Background:Tibet has been the only constant in the group, though Steven Stapleton has appeared on...
, Hafler Trio
Hafler Trio
The Hafler Trio is a conceptual and sound art collaborative between Andrew M. McKenzie, the only permanent member, and guest musicians. The project has seen the release of numerous albums and CDs in experimental musical styles ranging from electronica, cut-up, ambient, environmental soundscape,...
, Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
, Coil
Coil (band)
Coil were an English cross-genre, experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance—later credited as "Jhonn Balance"—and his partner Peter Christopherson, aka "Sleazy". The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be...
, Laibach
Laibach (band)
Laibach is a Slovenian avant-garde music group associated with industrial, martial, and neo-classical musical styles. Laibach formed June 1, 1980 in Trbovlje, Slovenia . Laibach represents the music wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst art collective, of which it was a founding member in 1984...
, Steven Stapleton
Steven Stapleton
Steven Peter Stapleton is a British musician and the only constant member of experimental improv outfit Nurse with Wound...
, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth or TOPY was a fellowship founded in 1981 by members of Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93, and a number of other individuals...
, Smegma
Smegma (band)
Smegma is an American experimental noise group formed in Pasadena, California in 1973 and currently based in Portland, Oregon. Originally part of the Los Angeles Free Music Society movement of the 1970s, Smegma is one of the few music collectives of that era still active today. Author Richard...
, Nurse with Wound
Nurse with Wound
Nurse with Wound is the main recording name for British musician Steven Stapleton. Nurse with Wound was originally a band, formed in 1978 by Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak...
, Einstürzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten is a German post-industrial band, originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980. The group currently comprises Blixa Bargeld , Alexander Hacke , N.U...
, The Haters
The Haters
The Haters are a noise music and conceptual art troupe from the United States. Founded in 1979, they are one of the earliest and best-known acts in the modern noise scene...
, and The New Blockaders performed industrial noise music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars, and unconventional "instruments" (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise production techniques. Interest in the use of shortwave radio also developed at this time, particularly evident in the recordings and live performances of John Duncan
John Duncan (artist)
This page is about John Duncan the contemporary artist. For the Symbolist artist see John Duncan .John Duncan is an artist who has lived and worked in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Amsterdam, currently lives and works in Bologna...
. Other postmodern art movements influential to postindustrial noise art are Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and the Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
use of techniques such as assemblage
Assemblage (art)
Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects...
, montage
Photomontage
Photomontage is the process and result of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not...
, bricolage
Bricolage
Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process...
, and appropriation
Appropriation (art)
Appropriation is a fundamental aspect in the history of the arts . Appropriation can be understood as "the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work."...
. Bands like Test Dept
Test Dept
Test Dept were an industrial music group from London, one of the most important and influential early industrial music acts. Their approach was marked by a strong commitment to radical socialist politics.-History:...
, Clock DVA
Clock DVA
Clock DVA are an industrial music, post-punk and EBM group from Sheffield, England. The group was formed in 1978, with two members, Adolphus "Adi" Newton and Steven "Judd" Turner. Along with contemporaries Heaven 17, Clock DVA's name was inspired by the Russian-influenced Nadsat of Anthony Burgess'...
, Factrix
Factrix
Factrix was an American pioneering industrial group from San Francisco, formed in 1978 by Bond Bergland, Cole Palme, and Joseph T. Jacobs, and was praised by Carlo McCormick as "one of the great bands of their era, prescient and influential."...
, Autopsia
Autopsia
Autopsia is an art project dealing with music and visual production. Autopsia gathers authors of different professions in realization of multimedia projects. Its art practice began in London in the late 1970s, continued during the 80s in the art centers of former Yugoslavia. Since 1990, Autopsia...
, Nocturnal Emissions
Nocturnal Emissions
Nocturnal Emissions is a sound art project that has released numerous records and CDs in music styles ranging from electro-acoustic, musique concrète, hybridised beats, sound collage, post-industrial music, ambient and noise music....
, Whitehouse
Whitehouse (band)
Whitehouse are a pioneering English power electronics band formed in 1980, largely credited for the founding of the power electronics subgenre.-History and personnel:...
, Severed Heads
Severed Heads
Severed Heads is an Australian electronic music group based and founded in Sydney in 1979 as Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign. The original members were Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright, and were soon joined by Tom Ellard. Fielding and Wright eventually left the group, leaving Ellard as a singular...
, Sutcliffe Jügend
Sutcliffe Jügend
Sutcliffe Jügend is a power electronics band, which began in early 1982 as a sub-project of Kevin Tomkins' main band, Whitehouse, and instantly gained notoriety as one of the harshest groups of the original power electronics scene.-Biography:...
, and SPK
SPK (band)
SPK, formed in 1978 in Sydney, Australia, was a 1980s and early 1990s industrial music and noise music group. One member, Graeme Revell, would later go on to become a successful Hollywood movie composer.-History:...
soon followed.
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, established the no wave
No Wave
No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music, film, performance art, video, and contemporary art scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City. The term No Wave is in part satirical word play rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre...
aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.
Noise rock and No Wave music
Tomorrow Never Knows
"Tomorrow Never Knows" is the final track of The Beatles' 1966 studio album Revolver but the first to be recorded. Credited as a Lennon–McCartney song, it was written primarily by John Lennon...
, the final track of The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
' 1966 studio album Revolver
Revolver (album)
Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock group The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber...
. Credited as a Lennon/McCartney
Lennon/McCartney
The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is one of the best-known and most successful musical collaborations in history...
song, it was written primarily by John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
. The track included looped tape
Tape loop
In music, tape loops are loops of prerecorded magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound. Contemporary composers such as Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen used tape loops to create phase patterns and rhythms...
effects. For the track Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney
Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE, Hon RAM, FRCM is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings , McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100...
supplied a bag of ¼-inch audio tape loops he had made at home after listening to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge
Gesang der Jünglinge
Gesang der Jünglinge is a noted electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog of works...
. By disabling the erase head
Tape head
A tape head is a type of transducer used in tape recorders to convert electrical signals to magnetic fluctuations and vice versa.-Principles of operation:...
of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops. After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of "30 or so" tape loops to George Martin
George Martin
Sir George Henry Martin CBE is an English record producer, arranger, composer and musician. He is sometimes referred to as "the Fifth Beatle"— a title that he often describes as "nonsense," but the fact remains that he served as producer on all but one of The Beatles' original albums...
, who selected 16 for use on the song. Each loop was about six seconds long. The tape loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building and controlled by EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
technicians in studio two at Abbey Road. Each machine was monitored by one technician, who had to keep a pencil within each loop to maintain tension. The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Geoff Emerick
Geoff Emerick
Geoffrey Emerick is an English recording studio audio engineer, who is best known for his work with The Beatles' albums Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Abbey Road...
watched the meters. Eight of the tapes were used at one time, changed halfway through the song. The tapes were made (like most of the other loops) by superimposition and acceleration (0:07). According to Martin, the finished mix of the tape loops cannot be repeated because of the complex and random way in which they were laid over the music.
Salient to this use of noise is Pet Sounds
Pet Sounds
Pet Sounds is the eleventh studio album by the American rock band The Beach Boys, released May 16, 1966, on Capitol Records. It has since been recognized as one of the most influential records in the history of popular music and one of the best albums of the 1960s, including songs such as "Wouldn't...
, the eleventh studio album by the American rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
band The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group was initially composed of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, The Beach Boys signed to Capitol Records in 1962...
, released in 1966 on Capitol Records
Capitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
. In it Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson
Brian Douglas Wilson is an American musician, best known as the leader and chief songwriter of the group The Beach Boys. Within the band, Wilson played bass and keyboards, also providing part-time lead vocals and, more often, backing vocals, harmonizing in falsetto with the group...
wove together elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, coupled with sound effects and unconventional instruments such as bicycle bell
Bicycle bell
A bicycle bell is a bell mounted on a bicycle for warning pedestrians and other cyclists. They are a required piece of equipment is some jurisdictions. They usually mounted on the handlebars and thumb activated...
s, buzzing organs, Electro-Theremin
Electro-Theremin
The Electro-Theremin, often called the Tannerin, is an electronic musical instrument developed by trombonist Paul Tanner and amateur inventor Bob Whitsell in the late 1950s to produce a sound to mimic that of the theremin. The instrument features a tone and portamento similar to that of the...
, dog whistles, trains, Coca-Cola cans and barking dogs, along with the more usual keyboard
Keyboard instrument
A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument which is played using a musical keyboard. The most common of these is the piano. Other widely used keyboard instruments include organs of various types as well as other mechanical, electromechanical and electronic instruments...
s and guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
s.
Most notable in this vein is Revolution 9
Revolution 9
"Revolution 9" is a recorded composition that appeared on The Beatles' 1968 self-titled LP release . The sound collage, credited to Lennon–McCartney, was created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution...
, a track produced in 1968 by The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
for The White Album
The Beatles (album)
The Beatles is the ninth official album by the English rock group The Beatles, a double album released in 1968. It is also commonly known as "The White Album" as it has no graphics or text other than the band's name embossed on its plain white sleeve.The album was written and recorded during a...
. It made sole use of sound collage
Sound collage
In music, montage or sound collage is a technique where sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage, the use of portions of previous recordings or scores...
, credited to Lennon/McCartney
Lennon/McCartney
The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is one of the best-known and most successful musical collaborations in history...
, but created primarily by John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
with assistance from George Harrison
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
and Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. The composition is similar to the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
style of Ono as well as the musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
works of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
and Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.-Biography:...
.
Lennon followed up this experiment with even more explicit noise music recordings, the first being Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins
Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins is an album released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1968. The result of an all-night session of musical experimentation in Lennon's home studio at Kenwood, John and Yoko's debut album is known not only for its avant garde content, but also for its cover...
, an avant-garde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of repeating tape loop
Tape loop
In music, tape loops are loops of prerecorded magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound. Contemporary composers such as Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen used tape loops to create phase patterns and rhythms...
s as Lennon plays different instruments such as piano, organ, and drums with sound effects (including reverb, delay
Delay (audio effect)
Delay is an audio effect which records an input signal to an audio storage medium, and then plays it back after a period of time. The delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.-Early delay...
and distortion
Distortion
A distortion is the alteration of the original shape of an object, image, sound, waveform or other form of information or representation. Distortion is usually unwanted, and often many methods are employed to minimize it in practice...
), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds. They followed this recording with another noise recording in 1969 entitled Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions
Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions
Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions is an album of noise music released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969, and the successor to 1968's highly controversial Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins...
. Beatles member George Harrison
George Harrison
George Harrison, MBE was an English musician, guitarist, singer-songwriter, actor and film producer who achieved international fame as lead guitarist of The Beatles. Often referred to as "the quiet Beatle", Harrison became over time an admirer of Indian mysticism, and introduced it to the other...
also made released a noise/musique concrète recording in 1969, entitled Electronic Sound
Electronic Sound
Electronic Sound is George Harrison's second album. Released in May 1969, it was the second and final record released on the Beatles' short-lived Zapple Records label, a subsidiary of Apple Records. The album features two lengthy pieces performed on the Moog synthesizer...
. Previously, Freak Out!
Freak Out!
Freak Out! is the debut album by American band The Mothers of Invention, released June 27, 1966 on Verve Records. Often cited as one of rock music's first concept albums, the album is a satirical expression of frontman Frank Zappa's perception of American pop culture...
, the debut album by The Mothers of Invention
The Mothers of Invention
The Mothers of Invention were an American band active from 1964 to 1969, and again from 1970 to 1975.They mainly performed works by, and were the original recording group of, US composer and guitarist Frank Zappa , although other members have had the occasional writing credit...
(released June 27, 1966 on Verve Records
Verve Records
Verve Records is an American jazz record label now owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded by Norman Granz in 1956, absorbing the catalogues of his earlier labels, Clef Records and Norgran Records , and material which had been licensed to Mercury previously.-Jazz and folk origins:The Verve...
) had also made use of avant-garde sound collages - as did their later 1970 Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Weasels Ripped My Flesh
Weasels Ripped My Flesh is an album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, released in 1970.Given Zappa's already stated penchant for expressing his music in "phases"—We're Only in It for the Money was written up as "phase one of Lumpy Gravy"—conceptually, Zappa fans occasionally label this...
title track - particularly the 1966 track The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet
The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet
The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet is a Frank Zappa composition, performed by the Mothers of Invention, released on the Mothers' debut album, Freak Out!...
. This track is said to resemble Carnival of Light
Carnival of Light
"Carnival of Light" is an unreleased experimental piece by The Beatles. It was recorded on 5 January 1967, after the vocal overdubbing sessions for the song "Penny Lane"...
, an unreleased experimental piece by The Beatles, recorded on 5 January 1967 after the vocal overdubbing sessions for the song Penny Lane. Carnival of Light was created for The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, an art event held at the Roundhouse Theatre
The Roundhouse
The Roundhouse is a Grade II* listed former railway engine shed in Chalk Farm, London, England, which has been converted into a performing arts and concert venue. It was originally built in 1847 as a roundhouse , a circular building containing a railway turntable, but was only used for railway...
on 28 January and 4 February 1967. Carnival of Light has not yet appeared on any official Beatles release.
Lou Reed
Lou Reed
Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed is an American rock musician, songwriter, and photographer. He is best known as guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground, and for his successful solo career, which has spanned several decades...
's double LP, Metal Machine Music
Metal Machine Music
Metal Machine Music, subtitled *The Amine β Ring, is the fifth solo album by Lou Reed. It was originally released as a double album by RCA Records in 1975...
(1975) is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music that the music critic Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs
Leslie Conway "Lester" Bangs was an American music journalist, author and musician. He wrote for Creem and Rolling Stone magazines, and was known for his leading influence in rock 'n' roll criticism....
has called the "greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum
Eardrum
The eardrum, or tympanic membrane, is a thin membrane that separates the external ear from the middle ear in humans and other tetrapods. Its function is to transmit sound from the air to the ossicles inside the middle ear. The malleus bone bridges the gap between the eardrum and the other ossicles...
". It has also been cited as one of the "worst albums of all time". Reed was well aware of the drone music
Drone music
Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics...
of La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
. Young's Theater of Eternal Music was a minimal music noise group in the mid-60s with John Cale
John Cale
John Davies Cale, OBE is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground....
, Marian Zazeela
Marian Zazeela
Marian Zazeela is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City.-Life and work:Born to Russian-Jewish parents and raised in the Bronx, Marian Zazeela was educated at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and at Bennington College where she...
, Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
, Angus Maclise
Angus MacLise
Angus MacLise was an American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher probably best known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground.-Biography:...
, Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad is an American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician/composer, sound artist, teacher and writer...
, and others. The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale's subsequent contribution to The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City. First active from 1964 to 1973, their best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists. Although experiencing little commercial success while together, the band is often cited...
in his use of both discordance and feedback. Cale and Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young).
The aptly named noise rock
Noise rock
Noise rock describes a style of post-punk rock music that became prominent in the 1980s. Noise rock makes use of the traditional instrumentation and iconography of rock, but incorporates atonality and especially dissonance, and also frequently discards usual songwriting conventions.-Style:Noise...
fuses rock
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
to noise, usually with recognizable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality
Atonality
Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
, improvisation, and white noise
White noise
White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency...
. One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...
who took inspiration from the No Wave
No Wave
No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music, film, performance art, video, and contemporary art scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City. The term No Wave is in part satirical word play rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre...
composers Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
and Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions...
(himself a student of LaMonte Young). Marc Masters, in his book on the No Wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars
Mars (band)
Mars was a New York City No Wave band formed by vocalist Sumner Crane in 1975. He was joined by China Burg , Mark Cunningham , and artist Nancy Arlen , and briefly by guitarist Rudolph Grey. The band played one live gig under the name China before changing it to Mars...
and DNA
DNA (band)
DNA was a No Wave band formed in 1978 by guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield. Rather than playing their instruments in a traditional manner, they instead focused on making unique and unusual sounds...
drew on punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, avant-garde minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
. Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest
Noise Fest
Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show...
that was organized by Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns
White Columns
White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit space and one of its most prestigious. White Columns is known as a show case for up and coming artists....
in June 1981 followed by the Speed Trials noise rock
Noise rock
Noise rock describes a style of post-punk rock music that became prominent in the 1980s. Noise rock makes use of the traditional instrumentation and iconography of rock, but incorporates atonality and especially dissonance, and also frequently discards usual songwriting conventions.-Style:Noise...
series organized by Live Skull
Live Skull
-Overview:Live Skull created abrasive no wave music not unlike their 1980s contemporaries Sonic Youth, Swans, Rat at Rat R, The Chameleons, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Band of Susans. Their music featured angular guitar parts interspersed with bleak, quieter passages, for a haunting...
members in May 1983.
Japanese noise music
Since the early 1980s, JapanJapan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
has produced a significant output of characteristically harsh bands, sometimes referred to under the portmanteau Japanoise
Japanoise
is a portmanteau of the words "Japanese" and "noise": a term applied to the diverse, prolific, and influential noise music scene of Japan. Primarily popular and active in the 1980s and 1990s but still alive today, the Japanoise scene is defined by a remarkable sense of musical freedom...
, with perhaps the most well known being Merzbow
Merzbow
is the main recording name of the Japanese noise musician , born in 1956. Since 1979 he has released in excess of 350 recordings.The name "Merzbow" comes from German artist Kurt Schwitters' artwork, "Merzbau”. This was chosen to reflect Akita's dada influence and junk art aesthetic...
(pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
artist Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...
's Merz art project of psychological collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
). Another notable example is the electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
band Yellow Magic Orchestra
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Sakamoto first worked with Hosono as a member of his live band in 1976, while Takahashi recruited Sakamoto to produce his debut solo recording in 1977 following the split of the Sadistic Mika Band...
, whose member Ryuichi Sakamoto
Ryuichi Sakamoto
After working as a session musician with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in 1977, the trio formed the internationally successful electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. Known for their seminal influence on electronic music, the group helped pioneer electronic genres such as...
stated that their "concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise." Other key Japanese noise artists include Hijokaidan
Hijokaidan
Hijokaidan is a Japanese noise and free improvisation group with a revolving lineup that has ranged from two members to as many as fourteen in its early days. The group is the project of guitarist Yoshiyuki "Jojo" Hiroshige its one constant member, who is head & owner of the Osaka-based Alchemy...
, Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants
Incapacitants
are a Japanese noise music group formed in 1981. It consists of Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai, whose stated aim is to produce "pure" noise, uninfluenced by musical ideas or even human intention, using primarily feedback, vocals, and various electronics...
, KK Null
KK Null
KK Null is a Japanese experimental multi-instrumentalist. He began as a guitarist, but soon added composer, singer, electronic musician and drummer to his list of talents, and also studied with the Butoh workshop....
, Yamazaki Maso
Yamazaki Maso
Yamazaki "Maso" Takushi is the birthname of Japanese noise musician and performer known most widely for his solo project Masonna.Born in Kyōto, 1966...
’s Masonna, Solmania
Solmania
Solmania is the Osaka-based noise music project of Masahiko "Masaki" Ohno , who runs the Works Fatagaga noise record label. Formed in 1984, Solmania is one of the earliest noise projects out of Japan...
, K2
K2 (Japanese band)
K2 is the influential noise music project of Japanese musician Kimihide Kusafuka. K2's work typically consists of crashing, creaking, and scraping sounds made with pieces of junk metal, usually edited in a jarring, unpredictable style, and often accompanied by the sounds of various electronics...
, The Gerogerigegege
The Gerogerigegege
The Gerogerigegege is a music project created in 1985 in Shinjuku, Tokyo by Juntaro Yamanouchi , who runs and maintains the Vis a Vis record label in Japan.- Biography :...
and Hanatarash
Hanatarash
Hanatarashi , meaning "sniveler" or "snot-nosed" in Japanese, was a noise band created by later Boredoms frontman Yamantaka Eye and featured Zeni Geva guitarist Mitsuru Tabata. The outfit was formed in Osaka, Japan in 1984 after Eye and Tabata met as stage hands at an Einstürzende Neubauten show...
. Nick Cain of The Wire
The Wire (magazine)
The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine, founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. The magazine initially concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music, but branched out in the early 1990s to various types of experimental music...
identifies the "primacy of Japanese Noise artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants" as one the of the major developments in noise music since 1990.
Post-industrial and Post-digital music
Following the wake of industrial noise, noise rock, no wave, and harsh noise, there has been a flood of noise musicians whose ambientAmbient music
Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
, microsound
Microsound
Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds, including the audio frequency range and the infrasonic...
, or glitch
Glitch (music)
Glitch is a term used to describe a genre of electronic music that emerged in the mid to late 1990s. The glitch aesthetic is characterized by a deliberate use of glitch based sonic artifacts that would normally be viewed as unwanted disturbances reducing the overall sound quality and are thus...
-based work is often subtler to the ear. Kim Cascone
Kim Cascone
Kim Cascone is an American composer of electronic music who is best known for his releases in the ambient, industrial and electro-acoustic genre on his own record company, Silent Records...
refers to this development as a postdigital
Postdigital
Postdigital is a term which has recently come into use in the discourse of digital artistic practice. This term points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with...
movement and describes it as an "aesthetic of failure." Some of this music has seen wide distribution thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing
Peer-to-peer file sharing
P2P or Peer-to-peer file sharing allows users to download files such as music, movies, and games using a P2P software client that searches for other connected computers. The "peers" are computer systems connected to each other through internet. Thus, the only requirements for a computer to join...
services and netlabels offering free releases. Goodman characterizes this widespread outpouring of free noise based media as a "noise virus."
Post-industrial noise artists from the late 20th and early 21st centuries include Nicolas Collins
Nicolas Collins
Nicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A...
, William Basinski
William Basinski
William Basinski is a United States avant-garde composer of ambient music via tape music and process music. Basinski is also a clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist...
's The Disintegration Loops
The Disintegration Loops
The Disintegration Loops is an album by William Basinski and was released in 2002. It is the first of the Disintegration Loops series, followed by II, III and IV.-Content:...
, Psyclones
Psyclones
Psyclones is an experimental music industrial band started in 1980. Psyclones are a long standing band with a diverse sound, ranging from punk/post-rock/synth-pop to electronic industrial/ambient music. They released their Greatest Hits CD which spans over a decade of intensely rich, enthusiastic...
, The Haters
The Haters
The Haters are a noise music and conceptual art troupe from the United States. Founded in 1979, they are one of the earliest and best-known acts in the modern noise scene...
, Boyd Rice
Boyd Rice
Boyd Blake Rice is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard...
, Pole
Pole (musician)
Pole is the artistic name of Stefan Betke, a German electronic music artist commonly associated with the glitch genre as well as dubtronica.-History:Pole took his name from a Waldorf 4-Pole filter which he accidentally dropped and broke in 1996...
, Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello is a visual and sound artist. Originally a punk guitarist he is influenced by video artist Nam June Paik who he worked with after meeting in 1991...
, If, Bwana
If, Bwana
-History:Al Margolis has been working under the musical pseudonym If, Bwana since New Year's Day 1984. He has since earned an international reputation for his experimental noise music.-Recording history:...
, PBK
PBK (composer)
PBK is a composer that works in the genres of Noise and/or Ambient music.-Background:American composer, Phillip B. Klingler, better known as PBK, has been active in the experimental music underground since 1986. His soundwork correlates to electroacoustic, classic industrial and free jazz genres...
, Howard Stelzer
Howard Stelzer
Howard Stelzer is a composer and live performer of electronic music whose work is made primary from sounds generated by cassette tapes...
, Chris Douglas
Chris Douglas
Chris Douglas , nicknamed pseudonym O.S.T., is an electronic musician from San Francisco, California.-History:Born August the 4th 1974, Chris Douglas' time has been a series of trials and confrontations where facts bore no truth and the present resides outside his creative musical energies...
a.k.a. O.S.T., Aube
Aube (band)
Aube is the name used by Japanese musician for his experimental noise records. He has released many CDs, LPs and cassettes since 1991, and is regarded as one of the most important noise musicians working today. He himself does not like to term his work "music," preferring the term "design": "I...
, Andrew Deutsch
Andrew Deutsch
Andrew Deutsch is a sound artist who also teaches at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.-Life and work:Deutsch received his BFA in Video Art and Printmaking from Alfred University in 1990. He obtained his MFA in Integrated Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic...
, Leif Elggren
Leif Elggren
Leif Elggren , is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm.Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual...
, Robin Rimbaud
Robin Rimbaud
Robin Rimbaud is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance...
, Alva Noto
Alva Noto
Alva Noto is a stage name of sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses art and music as complementary tools to create microscopic views of creative processes. Another alias he uses is Noto...
, Oval, Boards of Canada
Boards of Canada
Boards of Canada are a Scottish electronic music duo consisting of brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin...
, DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
, Florian Hecker, Farmers Manual
Farmers Manual
Farmers Manual is an electronic music and visual art group, founded in Vienna in the beginning of the nineties. The core members of the collective are Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner and Nik Gaffney...
, Negativland
Negativland
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! song, while their record label is named after another Neu! song...
, Thanasis Kaproulias
Thanasis Kaproulias
Thanasis Kaproulias is an audio artist who creates noise music under the name of Novi_sad.-Life and work:Thanasis Kaproulias was born in Greece in 1980...
, Fennesz, Pan Sonic
Pan sonic
Pan Sonic was a Finnish experimental electronic music duo consisting of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen.-Music:...
, Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone
Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist who has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and...
, Pavel Zhagun
Pavel Zhagun
Pavel Zhagun is a Russian poet, musician, record producer, artist, and curator. Zhagun was raised in Ukraine and graduated from R.M...
, Arcane Device
Arcane Device
Arcane Device was the recording name of musician David Lee Myers from 1987 to 1993. He has collaborated with musicians such as Asmus Tietchens, Tod Dockstader, Marco Oppedisano, and Kim Cascone.-Discography:* Devices 1987-2007 double CD...
, Francisco López
Francisco López (musician)
Francisco López is an avant-garde experimental musician and sound artist.He has released a large amount of sound pieces with record labels from more than fifty countries and realized hundreds of concerts and sound installations worldwide; including some of the main international museums, galleries...
, Kommissar Hjuler
Kommissar Hjuler
Kommissar Hjuler works as a sound recordist in the field of Noise and Post-industrial music, visual artist and film maker at Flensburg, a town on the German border with Denmark. He often works together with his wife Mama Baer as Kommissar Hjuler und Frau. As self-taught artist he began making...
und Frau, Bryan Lewis Saunders
Bryan Lewis Saunders
Bryan Lewis Saunders is a performance artist, videographer, and performance poet widely known for his disturbing spoken word rants, tragic art performances and Stand up tragedy....
, and others. In 2009 noise was said to be trending heavily with "lo-fi" acts such as Wavves
Wavves
Wavves is an American surf pop/noise punk band based out of San Diego, California.-History:Wavves started in 2008 as the recording project of Nathan Williams. Wavves released several 7"s as well as a cassette leading up to the first two releases 'Wavves' and 'Wavvves'...
and Times New Viking
Times New Viking
Times New Viking is a lo-fi indie rock band from Columbus, Ohio. The lineup consists of guitarist Jared Phillips, drummer Adam Elliott, and Beth Murphy on keyboards. Murphy and Elliott share vocal duties....
.
Richie Hawtin
Richie Hawtin
Richard Hawtin is an English-Canadian electronic musician and DJ who was an influential part of Detroit techno's second wave of artists in the early 1990s and a leading exponent of Minimal techno since the mid 1990s...
, Jan Jelinek
Jan Jelinek
Jan Jelinek is a German electronic musician who also operates under the names of Farben, Gramm and The Exposures. His music is usually categorized as minimal techno, glitch or microhouse, and is characterized by deep basslines, extensive use of samples from earlier jazz and rock recordings, and...
, Ricardo Villalobos
Ricardo Villalobos
Ricardo Villalobos is a Chilean-German electronic music producer and DJ. He is well-known for his work in the minimal techno and microhouse genres, and is one of the most significant figures in today's minimal techno scene....
, Decomposed Subsonic
Decomposed Subsonic
Decomposed Subsonic is the alter-ego of musician Hartmut Wessling. He performs minimal house that uses static, and found noises to create a variety of different sounds...
, Trentemøller
Trentemøller
Anders Trentemøller is a Danish electronic music producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Copenhagen, Denmark.-History:...
, and other Minimal techno
Minimal techno
Minimal techno is a minimalist sub-genre of techno. It is characterized by a stripped-down aesthetic that exploits the use of repetition, and understated development. This style of dance music production generally adheres to the motto less is more; a principle that has been previously utilized, to...
and Microhouse
Microhouse
Microhouse, buftech or sometimes just minimal, is a subgenre of house and glitch music.-History:Microhouse has its roots in the minimal techno, glitch , and house genres of music. Its first echoes appeared in a glitch album by German experimental artist Oval, in 1993...
DJ
Disc jockey
A disc jockey, also known as DJ, is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience. Originally, "disc" referred to phonograph records, not the later Compact Discs. Today, the term includes all forms of music playback, no matter the medium.There are several types of disc jockeys...
s have been using noise elements such as buzz, hum, and clicks as sonic flavor since the early 1990s.
Definitions
Various definitions of noise music shift over time. Ben WatsonBen Watson (music writer)
Ben Watson is a British writer on music and culture of Marxist views, known especially for his books on Frank Zappa.Watson is well-known for his writing in The Wire , as well as the author of numerous books, often entailing studies of popular culture from a Marxist perspective...
, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...
’s Grosse Fuge (1825) “sounded like noise” to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven’s publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately.
In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
, Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art...
and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
composition 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
to NON
Boyd Rice
Boyd Blake Rice is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard...
to Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
.
Writer Douglas Kahn
Douglas Kahn
Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the , at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies and is Professor Emeritus in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Kahn is known primarily for his...
, in his work Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
, George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein , né Eizenshtein, was a pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, often considered to be the "Father of Montage"...
, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
, Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
, and Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
David Abelevich Kaufman , better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov , was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist...
.
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Noise: The Political Economy of Music is a non-fiction book written by French economist and scholar, Jacques Attali.Attali's essential argument in Noise: The Political Economy of Music is that music, as a cultural form, is intimately tied up in the mode of production in any given society. For...
(1985), Jacques Attali
Jacques Attali
Jacques Attali is a French economist, writer and senior civil servant.Former adviser to President François Mitterrand and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, he founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance and was nominated President of the Commission for...
explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society. He indicates that noise in music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious
Subconscious
The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....
of society – validating and testing new social and political realities.
Characteristics
Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways.In music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, dissonance is the quality of sounds which seems "unstable", and has an aural "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" consonance. Despite the fact that words like "unpleasant" and "grating" are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music which is perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance.
In common use, the word noise
Noise
In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...
means unwanted sound or noise pollution
Noise pollution
Noise pollution is excessive, displeasing human, animal or machine-created environmental noise that disrupts the activity or balance of human or animal life...
.
In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image. In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication.
White noise
White noise
White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency...
is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light
White Light
White Light may refer to:*Light with the color white*White Light , a 1980 novel by Rudy Rucke*White Light , 1971 album*White Light , 2010 album...
which contains all frequencies.
In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art
Naïve art
Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true...
, some contemporary digital art
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge
8-track cartridge
Stereo 8, commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or simply eight-track, is a magnetic tape sound recording technology. It was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s, but was relatively unknown in many European countries...
, and vinyl records. Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
software used in creating the viral symphOny
Viral symphOny
viral symphOny is a collaborative electronic noise music symphony created by the digital artist Joseph Nechvatal . It was created between the years 2006 and 2008 using custom artificial life C++ software based on the viral phenomenon model. It is 1 hour and 40 minutes in length...
by Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...
).
Noise compilations
- An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music, Volumes 1–6 Sub RosaSub Rosa (label)Sub Rosa is a record label based in Brussels. The label was established at the end of the ‘80s, and expanded its catalogue in the mid-‘90s through the release of electronic music. Directed by Guy Marc Hinant and Frédéric Walheer, the label has released over 250 titles...
, Various Artists (1920–2010) - Bip-Hop Generation (2001–2008) Volumes 1–9, various artists, ParisParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
- Independent Dark Electronics Volume #1 (2008) IDE
- Japanese Independent Music (2000) various artists, Paris Sonore
- Just Another AssholeJust Another AssholeJust Another Asshole was a short-lived no wave art/music/sound art magazine publication project launched from the Lower East Side Manhattan in the early 1980s. It was edited by Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca.- Just Another Asshole: The Book:...
#5 (1981) compilation LP (CD reissue 1995 on Atavistic #ALP39CD), producers: Barbara Ess & Glenn BrancaGlenn BrancaGlenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca... - New York Noise, Vol. 1–3 (2003, 2006, 2006) Soul JazzSoul jazzSoul jazz is a development of jazz incorporating strong influences from blues, soul, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often an organ trio featuring a Hammond organ.- Overview :Soul jazz is often associated with hard bop. Mark C...
B00009OYSE, B000CHYHOG, B000HEZ5CC - Noise May-Day 2003, various artists, Coquette JapanJapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
CD Catalog#: NMD-2003 - No New YorkNo New YorkNo New York is a compilation album released in 1978 by Antilles Records under the curation of producer Brian Eno. Although it only contained songs by four different artists, it is considered by many to be the definitive single album documenting New York City's late-1970s No Wave...
(1978) AntillesAntilles RecordsAntilles Records was an American record label that was a subsidiary of Island Records.Its jazz catalog is now managed by Verve Records.-Discography:*1001 Joanne Brackeen - Special Identity 1981*1002 Biréli Lagrène- Routes To Django 1980...
, (2006) Lilith, B000B63ISE - Women take back the Noise Compilation (2006) ubuibi
See also
- Aleatoric musicAleatoric musicAleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
- AtonalityAtonalityAtonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...
- Cassette cultureCassette cultureCassette culture, or the cassette underground , refers to the practices surrounding amateur production and distribution of recorded music that emerged in the late 1970s via home-made audio cassettes...
- Chip music
- Circuit bendingCircuit bendingCircuit bending is the creative customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators....
- Colors of noiseColors of noiseWhile noise is by definition derived from a random signal, it can have different characteristic statistical properties corresponding to different mappings from a source of randomness to the concrete noise. Spectral density is such a property, which can be used to distinguish different types of noise...
- Dark ambientDark ambientDark ambient is a subgenre of ambient music that features foreboding, ominous, or discordant overtones. Although it had its roots in the 1970s, Dark ambient emerged in the 1980s and 1990s with the introduction of newer, smaller, and more affordable Effects units, synthesizer and sampling technology...
- Digital hardcoreDigital hardcoreDigital hardcore is a subgenre of hardcore punk incorporating influences from electronic music. Digital hardcore fuses elements of hardcore punk with various forms of electronic music...
- Grime (music)Grime (music)Grime is a style of music that emerged from Bow, East London, England in the early 2000s, primarily as a development of UK garage, dancehall, and hip hop...
- List of Japanoise artists
- List of noise musicians
- No-FiNo-fiNo-Fi is a term used to describe music or media created outside conventional technical standards.-The name:Where "Hi-fi" and "Lo-fi" are short for "High Fidelity" and "Low Fidelity", respectively, "No-fi" is a play-on-words intended to be interpreted as meaning "No Fidelity".-The sound:No-Fi is an...
- Post-punkPost-punkPost-punk is a rock music movement with its roots in the late 1970s, following on the heels of the initial punk rock explosion of the mid-1970s. The genre retains its roots in the punk movement but is more introverted, complex and experimental...
- Sonic artifactSonic artifactIn sound and music production, sonic artifact, or simply artifact, refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, resulting from the editing or manipulation of a sound....
Further reading
- Álvarez-Fernández, MiguelMiguel Álvarez-FernándezMiguel Álvarez-Fernández is a sound artist, composer, theorist and curator based between Madrid and Berlin, where he has taught at the Electronic Music Studio of the Technical University of Berlin...
. Dissonance, Sex and Noise: (Re)Building (Hi)Stories of Electroacoustic Music. In ICMC 2005: Free Sound Conference Proceedings. Barcelona: International Computer Music Conference; International Computer Music Association; SuviSoft Oy Ltd., 2005. - Barthes, RolandRoland BarthesRoland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
. "Listening". In his The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. ISBN 0-8090-8075-3 Reprinted Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-07238-3 (pbk.) - Brassier, RayRay BrassierRay Brassier is a member of the Philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.He is the author of Nihil...
. Genre is Obsolete. MultitudesMultitudesMultitudes is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt...
, no. 28 (Spring 2007) Multitudes.samizdat.net. - Cobussen, Marcel. Noise and Ethics: On Evan Parker and Alain Badiou. Culture, Theory & Critique, 46(1) pp. 29–42. 2005.
- Collins, NicolasNicolas CollinsNicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A...
(ed.) "Leonardo Music Journal" Vol 13: "Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music" 2003. - Court, Paula. New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978–88. London: Soul Jazz Publishing, in association with Soul Jazz Records, 2007. ISBN 0-9554817-0-8
- DeLone, Leon (ed.), Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
- Demers, Joanna. Listening Through The Noise. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.
- Dempsey, Amy. Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Schools and Movements. New York: Harry A. Abrams, 2002.
- Doss, Erika. Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
- Foege, Alec. Confusion Is Next: The Sonic Youth Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
- Gere, CharlieCharlie GereCharlie Gere is a British academic who is Director of Research at the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.-Career:* His PhD, ‘The Computer as an Irrational Cabinet’, was part practice-based and was from the Centre for Electronic Arts and the Department of Visual Culture,...
. Digital Culture, second edition. London: Reaktion, 2000. ISBN 1-86189-388-4 - Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art Since 1960. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.
- Goodman, Steve a.k.a. kode9Kode9Kode9 is a London-based electronic music artist, DJ, and owner of the Hyperdub record label. An MC, The Spaceape, is a frequent collaborator...
. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2010. - Hainge, Greg (ed.). Culture, Theory and Critique 46, no. 1 (Issue on Noise, 2005)
- Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood. Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992.
- Harrison, Thomas J. 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
- Hegarty, Paul Art of Noise. Talk given to Visual Arts Society at University College Cork, 2005.
- Hegarty, Paul. Noise/Music: A History. New York, London: Continuum, 2007. ISBN 9780826417268 (cloth); ISBN 9780826417275 (pbk).
- Hensley, Chad. "The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow". In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by C. Cox and Dan Warner, pp. 59–61. New York: Continuum, 2004.
- Helmholtz, Hermann vonHermann von HelmholtzHermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...
. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, 2nd English edition, translated by Alexander J. Ellis. New York: Longmans & Co. 1885. Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1954. - Hinant, Guy-Marc. "TOHU BOHU: Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78 fragments". In Leonardo Music Journal Vol 13: Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music. 2003. pp. 43–47
- Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Iles, Anthony & Mattin (eds) Noise & Capitalism. Donostia-San Sebastián: Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series). 2009.
- Juno, Andrea, and Vivian Vale (eds.). Industrial Culture HandbookIndustrial Culture HandbookRE/Search No. 6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook from RE/Search Publications, 1983 is a book about industrial music and performance art edited by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. It features interviews and articles with Throbbing Gristle, Mark Pauline, Cabaret Voltaire, NON, Monte Cazazza, Sordide...
. RE/SearchRE/SearchRE/Search Publications is an American magazine and book publisher, based in San Francisco, founded and edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale in 1980. It was the successor to Vale's earlier punk rock fanzine Search & Destroy , and was started with $100 from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti...
6/7. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983. ISBN 0-940642-07-7 - Kahn, DouglasDouglas KahnDouglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the , at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies and is Professor Emeritus in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Kahn is known primarily for his...
, and Gregory WhiteheadGregory WhiteheadGregory Whitehead Gregory Whitehead Gregory Whitehead ((Nantucket, MA) is a writer, radiomaker and audio artist based in Lenox, Massachusetts.-Work:Allen S. Weiss considers him to be a major international figure in the fields of audio and radio art, from the 1980s to the present....
(eds.). Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1992. - Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Boston: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
- LaBelle, Brandon. Noise Aesthetics in Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, New York and London: Continuum International Publishing, pp 222–225. 2006.
- Lander, Dan. Sound by Artists. Toronto: Art MetropoleArt MetropoleArt Metropole was founded in 1974 by the Canadian artists' group General Idea as a not-for-profit corporation incorporated under the laws of the province of Ontario. It is located in Toronto, Canada....
, 1990. - Licht, AlanAlan LichtAlan Licht is an American guitarist and composer, whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism. He is also a writer and journalist.-Biography:Licht was born in New Jersey in 1968...
. Sound Art: Beyond Music, between Categories. New York: Rizzoli, 2007. - Lombardi, Daniele. Futurism and Musical Notes, translated by Meg Shore. Artforum Danielelombardi.it
- Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern'. New York: Routledge, 2005.
- McGowan, John P. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
- Miller, Paul D. [a.k.a. DJ SpookyDJ SpookyPaul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
] (ed.). Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2008. - Morgan, Robert P. "A New Musical Reality: Futurism, Modernism, and 'The Art of Noises'", Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994): 129–51. Reprinted at UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
. - Moore, ThurstonThurston MooreThurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
. Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. Seattle: Universe, 2004. - Nechvatal, JosephJoseph NechvatalJoseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...
. Into Noise. Open Humanities Press in conjunction with the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
Library's Scholarly Publishing Office. Ann Arbor. 2011. - Nyman, MichaelMichael NymanMichael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edition. Music in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-65297-9 (cloth) ISBN 0-521-65383-5 (pbk) - Pratella, Francesco BalillaFrancesco Balilla PratellaFranceso Balilla Pratella was an Italian composer and musicologist.-Life and work:Pratella studied at the Pesaro Conservatory where he was a pupil of Pietro Mascagni....
. "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians" from Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos. Brain, Robert, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall, trans. New York: Viking Press, pp. 31–38. 1973. - Popper, FrankFrank PopperFrank Popper is a historian of art and technology and Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII. He has been decorated with the medal of the Légion d'honneur by the French Government...
. From Technological to Virtual Art. Cambridge: MIT Press/Leonardo Books, 2007. - Popper, Frank. Art of the Electronic Age. New York: Harry N. Abrams; London: Thames & Hudson, 1993. ISBN 0810919281 (New York); ISBN 0810919303 (New York); ISBN 050023650X (London); Paperback reprint, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. ISBN 0500279187.
- Ruhrberg, Karl, Manfred Schneckenburger, Christiane Fricke, and Ingo F. Walther. Art of the 20th Century. Cologne and London: Taschen, 2000. ISBN 3-8228-5907-9
- Russolo, LuigiLuigi RussoloLuigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
. The Art of Noises. New York: Pendragon, 1986. - Samson, Jim. Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977.
- Scaruffi, PieroPiero ScaruffiPiero Scaruffi received a degree in Mathematics in 1982 from University of Turin, where he did work on the General Theory of Relativity. For a number of years he was the head of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, California. He has been a visiting scholar at...
. "Japanese Noise-Core". 2003. - Schafer, R. MurrayR. Murray SchaferRaymond Murray Schafer is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for his World Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World...
. The Soundscape Rochester, Vt: Destiny Books, 1993. ISBN 978-0-89281-455-8 - Schaeffer, PierrePierre SchaefferPierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
. "Solfege de l'objet sonore". Le Solfège de l’Objet Sonore (Music Theory of the Sound Object), a sound recording that accompanied Traité des Objets Musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) by Pierre Schaeffer, was issued by ORTF (French Broadcasting Authority) as a long-playing record in 1967. - Sheppard, Richard. Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2000.
- Steiner, Wendy. Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art. New York: The Free Press, 2001.
- Stuart, Caleb. "Damaged Sound: Glitching and Skipping Compact Discs in the Audio of Yasunao ToneYasunao ToneYasunao Tone is a Japanese artist who has worked with many different types of media throughout his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and...
, Nicolas CollinsNicolas CollinsNicolas Collins is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A...
and Oval" In Leonardo Music Journal Vol 13: Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music. 2003. pp. 47–52 - Tenney, JamesJames TenneyJames Tenney was an American composer and influential music theorist.-Biography:Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College and the University of Illinois...
. A History of "Consonance" and "Dissonance". White Plains, NY: Excelsior; New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. - Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2002.
- Voegelin, Salome. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. London: Continuum. 2010. Chapter 2 Noise, pp. 41–76.
- Woods, Michael. Art of the Western World. Mandaluyong City: Summit Books, 1989.
- Woodward, Brett (ed.). Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise. Melbourne and Cologne: Extreme, 1999.
- Young, RobRob YoungRob Young is a British music author, journalist and current editor-at-large of The Wire, a British based experimental music magazine.Young has contributed to various publications including The Guardian, Gramophone, The Independent On Sunday, Uncut, Frieze and Jazz Times.-Rob Young, coastal...
(ed.) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. London: Continuum Books. 2002.
External links
- People Who Do Noise A documentary film about the experimental noise music in Portland, Oregon. Directed by Adam Cornelius
- Noise A short noise music documentary film by N.O. Smith
- Freshwidow.com, Marcel DuchampMarcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
playing and discussing his noise ready-made With Hidden Noise - http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=314Paul Hegarty, Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music on CtheoryCtheoryCTheory is a peer-reviewed academic journal published since 1996. It focuses on technology, media theory, and culture, publishing articles, interviews, book reviews and "event-scenes." It is edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The journal is published by the University of Victoria, BC, Canada....
.net] - The Future of Music: Credo, John CageJohn CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, (1937) from Silence, John CageJohn CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Wesleyan University Press - Alphamanbeast's noise directory Information base with links to noise artists and labels
- 804noise.org, a collective of artists & enthusiasts from Richmond, Virginia dedicated to experimental noise and avant-garde sounds. First organized collective in a global network of (areacode) based noise collectives.Noisewiki.info
- White noise in wave(.wav) format (1 minute)
- UBU.armob.ca La Monte YoungLa Monte YoungLa Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
's 89 VI 8 c. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore (10:33) on Tellus Audio Cassette MagazineTellus Audio Cassette MagazineLaunched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
archive hosted at UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:... - Noise generator to explore different types of noise
- PNF-library.org, Free Noise Manifesto
- Torben Sangild: "The Aesthetics of Noise"
- UBU.com, mp3 audio files of the noise music of Luigi RussoloLuigi RussoloLuigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
on UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:... - Noiseweb
- List of noise bands in the Noise Wiki created by noise artists for noise artists
- Russolo's Intonarumori
- #13 Power Electronics at Tellus Audio Cassette MagazineTellus Audio Cassette MagazineLaunched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
housed at UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:... - MP3 files by harsh noise artists
- UBU.com, Wolf VostellWolf VostellWolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
's De/Collage LP FluxusFluxusFluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
Multhipla, Italy (1980) at UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:... - Emily Thompson on Noise and the Soundscape of Modernity
- UBU.wfmu.org, noise music of Antonio RussoloAntonio RussoloAntonio Russolo was an Italian Futurist composer, brother of the more famous Futurist composer and theorist Luigi Russolo. The 78 rpm record made by him in 1921 is the only surviving sound recording that features the original intonarumori...
from Tellus Audio Cassette MagazineTellus Audio Cassette MagazineLaunched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time... - Noise.as, Noise: NZ/Japan
- UBU.artmob.ca Walter De MariaWalter De Maria-Early life and career:De Maria was born in Albany, California on October 1, 1935. He studied history and art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1953 to 1959. Although trained as a painter, De Maria soon turned to sculpture and began using other media...
Ocean Music (1968) - Torben Sangild: "The Aesthetics of Noise"
- Weirdmusic.net WeirdMusic.net, an e-zine dedicated to weird experimental music
- Japanoise.net
- Dotdotmusic.com, Paul Hegarty, General Ecology of Sound: Japanese Noise Music as Low Form (2005)
- UBU.artmob.ca, audio excerpt from The Monotone Symphony by Yves KleinYves KleinYves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany...
- WNYC.org, The Art of Noise: WNYC radiocast (May 15, 2009)
- UBU.com, Genesis P-OrridgeGenesis P-OrridgeGenesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
on the origins of Throbbing GristleThrobbing GristleThrobbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
: interview by Tony OurslerTony OurslerTony Oursler is a multimedia and installation artist.- Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989:Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special...
on UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:... - UBU.com, Group Ongaku (1960–61) at UbuwebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
Recorded in 1960 & 1961 at Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo - RWM.macba.cat, mp3 radio lecture on FluxusFluxusFluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
noise music - Continuo.wordpress.com, Sound recordings from Nicolas SchöfferNicolas SchofferNicolas Schöffer was a Hungarian-born French artist. He can be considered as the father of cybernetic art. He was born in Kalocsa, Hungary and resided in Paris from 1936 till his death in his Montmartre atelier in 1992. His career touched on painting, kinetic sculpture, architecture, urbanism,...
’s spatiodynamic sculptures sourced from the DVD of an exhibition at Espace Gantner, France, 2004, titled Précurseur de l’art cybernétique.