from the desk of Elucidated.Voyyd
Noise, Music, etc
The point of all of this is just to offer some ways of thinking about sound art in general,
to people who enjoy or makenoise or music of any kind.
I've been making noise and music for a decade and a half at this point. I've seen both "noise people" and "music people"
be pretentious dickheads, although in most of my experience honestly, people who hate "noise music" tend to be bigger
assholes. They tend to project onto people who like noise that noise music people somehow think noise is more "deep" or
"intellectual" than "normal" music, which the vast majority of the time is not the case, and people who make noise are
just making something they enjoy, and people who like noise just like it.
This is a general problem with a lot of art movements and shit, is that often times avant-garde weirdos will kind of just
do shit that is weird, then will get criticized for it as not being "good" or whatever, and then - guilt on both sides -
the avant-garde folks will get pissed off at being dismissed or insulted and then become edgelords and be provocative and
shitty, making things worse. As with most stupid cultural skirmishes, it is fucking childish, and like with kids you have
to kind of say "it doesn't matter who started the fight, you have to stop fighting because its fucking annoying."
In general with art and music, people get so fucking heated and invested in it to an absurd degree. They act like music
and art are literally limbs attached to them, and any bickering about it they will act like someone's trying to start a
fucking war or kill them. So the first thing I just have to say is, don't be that fucking person. You're aesthetic
preferences are arbitrary, mostly meaningless in the grand scheme of life, and theres more important shit to fight about
like your bosses and landlords fucking you over or politicians being evil or something. literally anything else really
is more important and worth your time and energy than high-school bickering between subcultures.
types of noise music
We should be skeptical of "art history" writing in general. Like most of history, it tends to be written by the "victors".
That being said, the idea of "noise" in music is usually credited to Luigi Russolo, an Italian futurist composer. Some
recordings actually exist of his compositions, recordings of his noise-making machines. To someone familiar with what post-
industrial, post-rock "noise music" has become since the 80's, it is pretty boring crap: it just sounds like "normal"
classical music with random scraping/pounding/clanging sounds layered on top with no real rhyme or reason.
Another of the "victors" of musical history are people like racist asshole Karlheinz Stockhausen, but also folks like
Penderecki or Harry Partch. Harry Partch didn't focus explicitly on noise, but built microtonal instruments which had such
small tonal intervals that it sounds to an untrained ear to be often completely atonal (without specific notes).
This is kind of the primary dichotomy in "noise music":
Atonal avant garde sound art, which does away completely with most familiar musical composition methods like
harmony or "traditional" rhythm - although it often heavily utilizes lyricism and abstraction, owing to the influence
of folk and "aboriginal" music, opera and theatre.
Experimental/modernist music, which rather than throwing out traditional music, seeks to expand it, by
adding parameters like timbre, performance, improvisation, "concreteness" (as opposed to abstractness).
results of this paradigm
This dichotomy of the "revolutionary" overthrow of traditional music, versus the "progressive" expansion of music is present
in pretty much every later experimental or new music genre, and through this lense we can interpret them in unexpected ways.
For instance, much of the most "extreme" noise music actually falls into a modernist framework of expanding music, keeping
much of the traditional methods of composition intact but adding new or unfamiliar parameters. Vice versa, a lot of newer
genres of more "normal" music like hip hop, with its focus on sampling and lyricism, is more "avant-garde" and radical in
its relation to traditional music. As with any way of categorizing things, it gets more complex and nuanced, but what I am
mainly trying to point out is that many people think noise is the opposite of music, or that simply because music has very
harsh sounds or a certain atmosphere or mood to it, that means it is noise.
The general thing is, a lot of it is just acquired tastes people develop, but the thing is that the way tastes are "acquired" is
necessarily a process of "un-learning" different cultural cliches and stereotypes and whatnot, and coming to the experience
with less pre-conceptions and letting music or art tell you its own story. A good way to think of this is to think of minor
and major chords: we stereotypically associate minor as "sad" sounding and major as "happy", but sometimes its the opposite,
depending on how the composer uses them in combinations with other chords or whatever. Another example being atonality itself: we
are sort of "programmed" to think of atonal music as "scary" or "brooding" etc, but there is plenty of atonal music that is just
the opposite, and can sound "whimsical" or "silly" etc.
Plenty of "normal" music uses harsh sounds - just think of the cymbal as a ubiquitous instrument in rock music, or the harsh,
distorted sounds of dubstep or metal. These genres are far from "noise". On the other hand, plenty of "normal" music, plenty
of classical music for instance, follows compositional structure that is very strange compared to the verse-chorus-verse style
of most pop music, and is therefore really radically different, even though it may be less "harsh" sounding in timbre, or whatever.