Salome VoegelinThinkers

Noise music is a genre that forces the question on us how to hear something when we not only do not know what to listen out for, but have in fact been categorically told not to listen.

Noise music is a genre whereby the voice as noise pursues no legitimation in language. It is thinging in its most provocative fashion.

Noise music is a kind of music that encourages you to fall into the work’s sensorial rhythm, to abandon any attempt to summarize or judge it, to understand that it is simply there to be heard.

Noise music is an assault that does not diminish or weaken the ears but stretches them further and further, sending us reeling in extremes that verge towards something so loud it is impossible to hear.

Noise music is an inescapable assault (unlike the eyes which we can close at will at any moment), forcing our organs to take on a new shape, that extends, dents, and turns them inside out.

Noise music is characterized by aesthetic simultaneity. It demands a consideration of itself in its sensorial complexity without recourse to art historical, political, relational, social, etc. theories that present it with a language that precedes its encounter and immobilizes its present production.

Noise music is a break with the language base. It can only find its way to language in the acknowledgment that it can’t. In it, t hething discussed is the body that heard not the work that played.

Noise music is a genre representing the desire to communicate, to seek and practice signifying, not however its meanings.

Noise music is constitutive of an amplified demand to be considered in its immersive contingency rather than in relation to a system.

Noise music is not about surrounding the ears gently to allow one to hear its sounds. Instead it pins the ears to themselves: piercing them and ties them up.

Noise music is productive of an an acoustic blindness that allows you to hear anything you can imagine.

Noise music is marked by an ‘aesthetic autonomy’ whereby the work becomes a moment, a fully immersive subjectivity that is more felt than heard.

Noise music is productive of the desire to communicate without recourse to a system of communication.

Noise music is radically and always just simply noise. As such it upsets meaning and even unsettles the infrastructure of the very game of meaning.

Noise music is a genre whose danger is also its allure; the exposure to its physical assault clasps us in its force, allowing us to enjoy the painful awareness of our body tested and stretched by the physicality of the noise.

Noise music is a genre whose sonic sensibility is marked by an extravagant demand for involvement, a sheer insistence on the body and a referential messiness to the modernist oeuvre.