Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To Noise Music

Luigi Russolo and his intonarumori.

Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Noise Music.

So, what is noise music?
It’s a general term that covers the avant-garde approach to making music using non-traditional means like broken equipment, anti-instruments, machine sounds, noise, static, feedback, repetition, distortion, atonality, two foxes making out—anything that has the potential to rupture the skull of a rhino.

Where did it come from?
Luigi Russolo is credited with being one of the first people to make a racket and call it music. He was a Futurist whose manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913), proposed a new musical aesthetic for the industrial age. The Dada movement helped keep things blarring with work like Anti-Symphony (1919) by Berliner Jefim Golyscheff, which featured a movement called “Chaotic Oral Cavity”. In the 1930s French composer Edgard Varèse made records with sirens and lions roaring. In the 1940s, in the US musical innovator John Cage was creating music from other people’s old junk, turning flower pots into ad hoc percussion tools, while across the pond in Europe Pierre Schaeffer was experimenting with sounds on tape (eventually coining the term musique concrète). In popular music Jimi Hendrix was partial to the odd feedback fury in the 1960s, and in 1975 Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music, a commercial release by RCA Records that sounded like an aggressive robot farting. Then in the 1980s, Japan was bleeding eardrums dry with cacophonous musicians like Merzbow and Masonna. Now, we have glitch electronica to make sure no one sleeps at night.

Luigi Russolo’s piece “Veglio Di Una Città,” recorded in 1913 on his “intonarumori” noise instruments.

This week you’re really digging…
CD mutilating band Oval, who create electronic music from damaged equipment that’s soothing, ambient, and rather beautiful.

Nano talk
As long as someone can bang two pans together, as long as CDs can skip, as long as computers crash, mp3s corrupt, and humanity continues to evolve with two ears, noise music will not sound out.

Describe yourself as…
Orchestrally manoeuvring in the dark.

Japanoise musician Merzbow’s “Minus Zero”

Keywords
Noise, uproarious, loud, electronic, non-musical, extreme, industrial, glitch, experimental.

Difficulty level
Up to 11.

Age range
107 – 194dB (decibels).

Oval’s “Aero Deck”, sampled on Bjork’s track “Unison”

Tagline
If music be the food of love, let’s have a food fight.

To recap: Organized noise.

Next week: Wearable technology