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Trashing, un)un)un)educated
august 23, 2008.
Portable Noise Kremator is post-musician Wim van Gelder, from the village of Hoegaarden in Belgium, and former member of the experimental death-trash impro band ManGenerated, defunct since 2004. He keeps a blog, called the Noiseblog, that is both informative and entertaining.
This being the Soundblog, I wondered whether I should jump at the occasion and write some lines about the why and what of musics and sounds that are named noise ... Noise is a fascinating word, with a highly complex semantics. Writing a "Meaning of noise" might - nay, should ! - be the task of a lifetime, as it would undoubtedly lead one to re-consider much of our history. Does not noise stand to signal as a yin stands to a yang? It is part of any kind of communication, and it is communication through which we shape ourselves and our world. But then, should one ask, are we shaped through the signals, or rather shaped by the noise ? ... Several of you probably read Jacques Attali's Noise, Torsten Sangild wrote a short and interesting 'Aesthetics of Noise', a text that you should go and read over at ubuweb, and to which a follow-up 'Noise - three musical gestures' appeared in the spring 2004 issue of the Journal of Music and Meaning ... Somewhat more recent, there's Paul Hegarty's Noise/Music: A History, an attempt at tracing the history of noise in music from the early 18th century onwards way up to our japanese friend Merzbow and relating it to the writings of a handful of pretty much the usual suspects in (post-)modern philosophy ... Also fuzzy logician Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Thinking, wrote a book about Noise, exploring it in all of its color and glory : white, pink, brown, speckle, crackle and thermal, "to name just a few. Even chaos is a form of noise," I just read on the book's front flap ... All of these, I am sure, are but minute fragments of a far larger picture that still asks to be drawn...
"[N]oise needs a listener - probably some sort of animal or a non-organic
machine with hearing capacities," Hegarty writes on the very first
page of 'Noise/Music' ... 
Like this text needs a reader- probably some sort of animal or a non-organic
machine with reading capacities ... It reminded me of the picture you see
to the left, that I shot for and together with Rien-us van Alebeek at the
Nation
metro station, on our way to w a r - or rather: to perform noisi-ly
at La Miroiterie - on july 17th. (More noising
about that soon, in the next entry ... you did know that to
noise (about) actually means 'to talk about', 'to make known publicly', didn't you?)
Apart from being a fine epithet for Rinus' ongoing curatorial efforts
at Das
Kleine Field Recordings Festival, Beaucoup de bruit pour Rien
also is the (or: a) french translation of Much
ado about nothing. A comprehensive philosophy of noise would surely
include Shakespeare's work. "I use the word 'noise' in characterizing
the movement of language on Shakespeare's stage, because it helps suggest
a theater in which the human voice takes shape from the way that language
interferes with itself," Kenneth Gross writes in his study Shakespeare's
Noise.
It leads to a fascinating and very general observation: let's say that noise is that what you get when a signal
interferes with itself ...
Now start thinking ...
Uneducated
Trashing is Portable Noise Kremator's latest CDr. Wim hand
packaged the very limited edition of 11 copies, and I became the proud owner
of one of them. The Noiseblog
was among the 'sound-art-music' sites dedicating an entry to Michel
Waisvisz' demise. What marked me in this particular entry, is that Wim,
almost in passing, mentioned that until then he had never heard of Michel,
nor of STEIM. He merely read about his death on yet another blog ... (Don't
get me wrong. This is no dissing. I guess most of us are but too well aware
of not knowing a myriad of things, of people and of facts) ...
But what happened next, is that Wim immediately ordered a cracklebox from
STEIM. And then, in two recording sessions each of about one hour, with
his newly acquired kraakdoos and a couple of effects, recorded the 8 tracks
that together make up Uneducated Trashing.
Together it makes for a wonderful tribute.
The CDr's title is also that of a Noiseblog entry dated july 13th, 2008: Uneducated Trashing. Together with a lot of info on Michel Waisvisz and the schematic of a cracklebox, the entry is reprinted as the CDr's inlay. I think you should read it.
"This
is not noise.
The rest is." ( * )
notes __ ::
(*) "The
rest is noise" is the title of a recent 'history of the twentieth century
through its music', by author and New York Times (classical) music critic Alex Ross.
It is also the title of Alex Ross'
blog. [ ^ ]
[ earlier related SB-entry: Michel's Song of Praise ]
tags: cracklebox, kraakdoos, noise
# .270.
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