The Art Of Neu!s

I feel it's like dissecting a living animal, and does it smell like you wan to take a bite out of it or not?

Some Noise sounds like an Everest-like achievement - mainly that static almost-pointless seeming mammoth stuff you get by bands like Hijokaidan, Haters, etc. But most just intoxicates me - it really really thrills me. Its extreme textures, what they DO with all that sound, its patterns...

Prime harsh Merzbow (aside from VENEREOLOGY - I don't like that album at all aside from one track) sounds, to me, like how water looks in a river. But I've mentioned this before on some other thread about Noise.

i don't listen to noise music really, but i imagine that if i did, it might yield something the way Autechre does for me, something gradually becomes less impenetrable and my relationship with the record shifts over time.

i have a Masonna track on tape, which is nice. i guess the Surgeon remix of Mogwai doesn't count? if it does, then that for Plane taking off style exhilaration.

i think i listen to the overpowering stuff as a sort of the sonic equivalent of samadhi, it helps stop the brain from thinking and wipes out all the brown muck deposited there by a day chained in the cubicle. sort of the way metal did for me as a younger person (and is doing for me again lately), but minus baggage. and restraint.

as for the less thoroughly headscrubbing noise/drone stuff, i listen to it for various reasons - but a large part of the fascination for me is new sounds, new methods, surprising textures and juxaposition. but lately i tend to like stuff that sits snugly on the edge of pure chaos and more ordered forms of music, that combines turns the sugar rush of white noise into something more tangible, maybe more endurable.

As someone who has in the past listened at high volume to a detuned TV for up to an hour on end ( to "find the music"), I would say that you cannot listed to noise.

There are two parts to music: the bit that's the sound wave and you could look at with an oscilloscope and the bit in your head after the eardrum turns the signal into an electrical wave - the uh... 'perception'. You can't - except probably with lots of drugs- turn off the processing that goes with that second bit.

In the 40s - 50s the abstract expressionists (or more probably the critics who discussed them) were obsessed with the opposite of representational art... if an image on a canvas could be construed as looking like something they were unhappy - there is an amusing commentry on this in Tom Wolfe's 'Our House to Bauhaus' when the critics get into a lather about whether you could fly a spaceship into a Robert Motherwell painting and so therefor it still had some representationalism. (Oh irrelevant aside I once told Mark Beazley out of Rothko (the band) that I was starting a Scottish tribute to Rothko and calling it Motherwell).

Erm where was I?

Oh right - I love listening to what is called Noise if I can listen to it in a way that I can turn it into music in my head.

My supposition is that there is a value judgement going on here - in the same way that you can prefer one Pollock painting to another Pollock painting (I wonder if anyone ever said "Hey Jackson that one sucks, I prefered your earlier dribble").

I don't know quite what critera I judge "noise" - I like the good stuff and I know what I like when I hear it. I'm not that fond of stuff like Aube and I dont think much of that album by Chris Watson (I got the buildings one, I heard that the animals one is better). Perhaps they just stay too much like noise on the way to my synapses. Something I dislike will not get time to grow on me as I won't listen to it again -though I have been known to worry a piece of music like a loose tooth when I can sense there is something to be, uh, uprooted.

I love Aube. His stuff really does swing wildly from amorphous masses of glutinous noise to lovely ambient pieces taking in rhythm along its way.

And gareth - what MASONNA track do you have?

Kodanshi, i'm afraid this answer is going to be rather unhelpful. it was called 'Untitled'. it was taped from Peel circa 98?

As I alluded to in this thread, what's not noise? Also, see that thread for why I like it, tips on listening to it, and quite possibly Kodanshi's comments referred to earlier.

I dunno what Peel played in 1998 but I know he has played something like 3 or 4 cuts by MASONNA. Hmmmm...

Don't know exactly what you mean by noise. But, I listen to it in the same way I listen to free-improv, i.e., trying to discern structures and patterns, following movements and patterns, appreciating the textures. To me, some textures are more attractive than others, there's probably some complex, psychological reason for my choices. I think sometimes droney-noise stuff can help to clear all thoughts, as someone mentioned. Is there a 'proper' way to listen to it? I definitely listen to it, or process it differently to other, more conventional music.

Harsh noise is extremely physical, almost a parody of rock and roll. I love getting beaten around by it, if only even mentally. the mellow stuff I have to be in the mood for though.