"noise" vs. "noisy": is noise a genre unto itself, or just a catchall term for the total set of "noisy" variants of pre-existing musical genres?

Well Borbetomagus do come out of free jazz, really; it's just a shame they don't do it very well (see, e.g., Borbeto Jam album where they are embarrassingly shown up by Honsinger, Kowald and Kondo).

Merzbow I've always seen as determinedly Anti-Music as opposed to Pure Noise, insofar as if noise were "pure" there would be no need for Mr Masaki to put them into some form of predetermined order as indeed he has been doing prolifically since 1981.

(which i guess indirectly answers your second post, also cf. John Cage locked in the soundproof lab and he could still hear the blood circulating in his head)

I wonder where Crass come into it all, given the members' historical links with things like the People Show and what have you on the extreme left of the Brit improv movement. Certainly things like "Reality Asylum" come awfully close.

(Vicki Bennett's vocal on your superb take of "Do They Owe Us A Living?" sounds to me a bit like a declasse Eve Libertine)

but then again what happens when improvisers/musicians "lose it" and simply go for the undefined racket - would that count? or would the placement of such a sequence on a programmed CD nullify any "purity" (i.e. its inclusion has been planned, so it stops being random)? Can it only happen on a street, or on a stage?

This was a joke surely?

(that wz one thing with keenan's article for the wire: he didn't define give a strict def to this stuff so he recommended stuff from the mego label, ryoji ikeda etc.)

Fucking awful, by the way

If that's true, noise-ists seem to be walking well-tread ground. Besides, I think it's clear that no musician can completely forego all of his/her musical knowledge, and therefore if trying to "negate musicality" will inevitably fail to achieve purity. Furthermore, the "absolute silence" example is not only OTM, but points out an aesthetic and musical preference for loud harsh sounds in noise music, whereas if the only purpose were to negate musicality, the same could be done with quiet sounds.

And if this is the case, then I just wrote the "best" noise piece ever. If you have access to a Linux machine (or probably any Unix) you can hear it right now. Just type this in at a shell prompt and smack the enter key like a rock star:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

That's right: pure pseudo-random noise.

But that's not what anybody is looking for, and musicians, for the most part, could care less about number theory. I think the first example shows, that "noise" artists want to neglect as much of what they see as traditional music theory, but in doing so have created their own framework. When someone deviates from what is expected in "noise", especially when their deviation is seen as moving towards the traditional, they will be criticized much in the way a person in support of traditional structure would criticize "noise". So are they incredible hypocrites or are they crafting a new structure for music? I guess that depends on whether or not you like screetchy tones?

better

you've got classical, jazz and folk musicians introducing noise elements into their performances dating back the whole century, noisemaking gadgets and whoops and muting devices and tone clusters, with outlying experiments such as tchaikovsky's canon fire in the 1812. so there isn't really any escape for noise, it has been integrated into music just like drumming was integrated into music [drumming is a kind of noise anyway, in a weak sense, because it's sometimes ideally toneless and used for punctuation/interjection not rhythm].

that said i think with cage noise becomes a little genre of pure music, under the big tent genre of experimental music, ie post-classical music. no matter what a noise musician's influences [jazz, japanese hardcore, whatever] if he's making noise records, i think they can be best classified as in the tradition of experimental post-classical "composers"/performance and will appeal to fans of other little genres under that umbrella [such as ambient, minimalism, concrete, electronics, atonalism, etc.]

you can't define music anymore as "that which has melody, harmony, rhythm". we know from the history of western music that at one time rhythm wasn't really part of the description of highbrow music; it was just melody and harmony that was deemed important... and now, we recognize the crucial contribution of timbre as well. and that's what noise is: virtually no melody, no harmony beyond harmonics, no rhythm usually, tons and tons of timbre. there is also the performance art aspect of noise, but that's another debate i think. it isn't necessary to my point anyway.

an early epiphany reading reviews of stravinsky that were vague enough to effectively be describing TG, 'all new music initially sounds like noise'. then we live with it long enough to hear the organization involved, and begin hearing the message

if noise is 'unwanted sound' it's because we can't discern the point in it, but if you listen harder, often you can eventually discern a voice in it.

the second people had the realization that noise was a valid frontier for musical expansion, the clear distinction began to evaporate. pure noise might exist but I haven't heard it yet.

my favorite chapter in 'The Art of Noise' (besides the opening pure-manifesto) is the section where he transcribes, categorizes, and organizes the sounds of the WWI battlefield he survived: music.

And anyway, Puritans are always The Enemy.

Can I get this to work in OSX? I tried using Terminal and it said permission denied or some shit.

Haven't heard this in a while but i remember thinking the euro-jazz guys provided a helpful framework or meshed or whatever .. ie that there was a musical outcome thanks to/ despite of Borbetomagus (ie i could not simply favour the euro guys simply because their contribution was inherently more obviously musical, and that largely thanks to their natural more heavy reliance and communication via pitch). I think of it as one of my favourite Borb. records, although one side is better than the other (from memory -- i'm in a different city from my record collection right now).

Generally i have found Borb. somewhat random, but that's the timbre of their work that i can't get past perhaps. I have enjoyed Borb. collaborations with Voice Crack, but these often sound like layer replaced by layer augmented by layer .. .. noise which nevertheless by virtue of that structure and maybe because of other non-pitch patterns operating at maybe semi-perceptable levels, did seem to produce a musical feeling, at least for me.

I can't recall which Cowell text is the one that argues that noise has always been an element present in every expressive example of music, that within the timbre of a violin there is noise, basically that the music vs. noise division has always involved a kind of "infra-thin" membrane of mutual contamination. That's helpful, and maybe you could pair it up with the AMM dictum "Every noise has a note" as its complement, ie. that every individual burst of "noise" also contains, however minimal and overdetermind, some kind of pitched "color" (probably technically untrue of pure white noise, but still) which, the in flow of events, before and after other noises, still contains pitch information relative to what preceds and follows it, relationships, dialogue, etc. ie "every noise has a note" would suture noise back into at least *potential* music. Now add to this interlock between music and noise the Cage-ian practice of listening for the musicality of all sounds including noise and you've got a very different picture than the absolutist Hijokaidan "apartheid" model that started this thread. Still, I wonder about the Douglas Kahn position in that Noise Water Meat book, that Cage's push for us to hear noises (including the minimal noises within "silence") as music is itself a kind of imperialist gesture that claims the terrain of sound for the sake of enlarging the domains of "music". It's an interesting and subversive suggestion . . . cultivating and celebrating noise *as noise* would then be a kind of resistance to the encroaching of music, rather than the triumphant claiming of noise for the sake of music. You can imagine the banner: LET NOISE BE NOISE! GET YOUR MUSIC OFF MY SOUND!

Here's a piece of writing that, in part, addresses that idea. It's written concerning sound art.

what does this mean?
i think i need to research.