«Beethoven and Wagner have stirred our nerves and hearts for many years. Now we have had enough of them, and we delight much more in combining in our thoughts the noises of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages and brawling crowds, than in hearing again the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastorale’». (Russolo, 1986, p. 25)
While noises had entered the Western world auralscape in the 19th century with Industrial Revolution and the subsequent spread of industrial machinery-generated noises, it was only at the beginning of the following century that Italian futurist Luigi Russolo offered the first thorough reflection on noise, vehemently arguing for its incorporation within the remits of music. He heralded the beginning of a new era, characterized by the advent of The Art of Noises. «Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men» (p. 23). In line with the Futurists glorification of speed, progress, modern machinery, and even war, Russolo found in the recently disclosed world-of-noises the apt sources to feed both composers’ and listeners’ appetite for new sounds, at the same time as the overstimulation of the modern, industrial world was fostering a renewed sensibility. To satisfy this craving, «we must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds» (p. 25).
Following his manifesto and his Intonarumori – an orchestra of noise-generating devices – the 20th century saw the gates of Western art music opening up to noises, at least in its avant-garde and experimental fringes. A loose thread along this line connects, to name a few, Arnold Schönberg and the Wien School, Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Pierre Henry and musique concrète, Stockhausen, Fluxus, early computer music. Since the late 1960s, noise became one of the leading concerns for various genres and subgenres within popular music too: from Iggy Pop and The Stooges or Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, to free jazz, dub, post punk, no wave, industrial, Merzbow and ‘proper’ noise/harsh noise music, shoegaze, hardcore techno, jungle, breakcore, gabber, glitch. What ties all of these together is the positive value accorded to noise, conceived as unconventional sounds, techniques and structures – anything that subverted widely accepted conceptions of what music should be, and upset the majority of music makers and listeners.
«Generally speaking, Noise Music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition […] noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noises and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways» (Nechvatal 2011, p. 39). I will focus on such aesthetic and imaginative ways in various popular electronic music – especially in genres aimed at making bodies dance.
Noise and electronic music converge in their reliance on technology: its creative use and misuse, and the exploitation of its affordances. We can trace this technological aesthetic at the core of electronic music back to Russolo. He exhorted to lend our ears to the world of noise, itself a consequence of technological development. Likewise, the advent of music technology has allowed us to make «any sound you can imagine» (Théberge 1997). In his landmark book on noise, Paul Hegarty sees technology as «directly vital to all developments in the history of noise and noise music» (2007, p. 23). Similarly, Reynolds writes of dance music technical apparatuses such as the rave sound-system or the infrastructure of pirate radios as a «noise factory» (2012, p. 235).
Firstly, I want to outline a theoretical framework. The shared cultural view of noise conceives it as unwanted sound. Unpleasant, undesirable, noise is Western music’s excluded Other. For Hegarty, «noise is negative: it is unwanted, other, not something ordered. It is negatively defined – i.e. by what it is not» (p. 5). In his analysis on the political economy of noise, Jacques Attali sees it as disorder which threatens social order, represented by music: «noise is violence: it disturbs» (1985, p. 26). The second quality of noise, for Hegarty, is that it represents excess in its broadest sense, not limited to matters of quantifiable loudness. This poetic of excess is acknowledged by other theorists too. Joseph Nechvatal stresses «noise’s overwhelming sensations and qualities of excess» (2011, p. 19), while Joanna Demers contends that «manifestations of excess all purport to transcend meaning, to push sound beyond semiosis to a state in which it communicates directly to listeners’ bodies» (2010, p. 15). Before these writers, Attali too had located a poetic of (sonic and social) transgression as the driving force behind noise. He recognizes a perpetual dynamics between transgression and domestication of noise – and the social instances it stands for. In his view, noise goes from being threatening to being domesticated and rendered innocuous, until a new form of noise appears. Across this dialectic, Attali identifies four main stages of music, each corresponding to different social orders: sacrifice, representation, repetition, and composition – which he suggests is taking shape at his times of writing (1977) and will bring newfound musical languages and social organizations. It is interesting to observe how many features of this fourth stage resonate with dance music culture: «Attali claims that the age of Composition will be characterized by a return to music’s ancient sacred function. DJ cultures fit the bill; surrounded by ritualized festivity, they emphasize participation and the democratization of noise» (Reynolds 2012, p. 370). The philosopher Michel Serres provides another insight into noise when he argues, drawing from information and communication theory, that noise is more than just an interference between the sender and the receiver: it is inherent in the medium, the excluded middle which harbors the potential for new forms and connections. It is in this sense that, turning to the object of this essay, noise is always-already implied in the very technology through which music is made.
Again, Hegarty: «Many noise strategies involve misuse, reuse or abuse of instruments, machinery, contexts and practices» (2007, p. 181). The history of popular and electronic music abounds with such instances of misuse-reuse-abuse. While noise genealogies and histories almost always focus on Western art and avant-garde music, or narrow it down to the distinct genre best represented by Japanese musician Merzbow, it is through various strains of popular music that noise has reached a widespread diffusion, penetrating the collective aural landscape. And it is dance and DJ cultures, with their longing for novel sounds, rhythms, techniques, their relentless pulse, chiseled rhythms and cavernous bass frequencies, which widely adopted noise aesthetics and politics.
Three pivotal shifts, in this sense, were the inclusion of pre-recorded and/or non-musical sounds into music composition; the transformation of the turntable from a passive sound-reproduction technology to an active sound-production one; and the emergence of the recording studio as a locus of creativity and invention. The first two were championed by avant-garde composers still working within the framework of art music: Pierre Schafer and his cohort of musique concrète practitioners have been the forefathers of sampling, as they sough to use pre-recorded sounds and manipulate them to obtain new and unfathomable sonic configurations, as in Cinq études de bruits (1948) or Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50); meanwhile John Cage, another experimental composer who redefined the boundaries of music, was incorporating turntables in his compositions/performances such as Imaginary Landscape n.1 (1939), and may equally be seen as the forefather of turntablism; finally, the studio-as-instrument was pioneered by early (academic) electronic music composers in Europe and the US, many of whom were working in specialized studios with up-to-date equipment.
However, my argument here is that such practices and aesthetics fully flourished outside art and academic elitist circles. The punk, post-punk and industrial axis is a well-known example. But another sonic lineage has conducted forays into noise doing away with traditional instruments altogether. This lineage stems largely from Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean sonic cultures and is often referred to as Afrofuturism or the Black Atlantic. Here, we can see a shift from a preoccupation with ‘pure’ noise to an interest in emerging rhythmic configurations. Steve Goodman, adopting Kodwo Eshun’s notions of the “futurhythmachine”, “rhythmelody” and “texturhythm”, argues that «Afrofuturism takes sonic futurism beyond a preoccupation of noise toward rhythm […] it is the rhythmachine that motivates and underscores the musics of the Black Atlantic» (2010: 60).
The cities of Kingston and New York in the 1970s laid the foundation for much of musical Afrofuturist thought and electronic dance music to come. In late 1960s Kingston, sound system culture was already established. Mobile systems comprising stacks of loudspeakers, people in charge of the music (selectors) and of entertaining the crowd on the mic (toasters) were bringing ska, rocksteady and reggae into the streets of Kingston’s downtown in huge open air parties. Fine-tuned audio equipment, massive basslines, extremely loud volume, the dancing frenzy of the crowd – all these elements of sound system culture can be retrospectively posited as rave culture’s forerunners, as both were based around sonic and social noise: the bone-shaking sound volume, especially from the low end of the frequency spectrum, and the noise of thousands of people from marginalized social classes. It is in Kingston, too, that the concept of the studio-as-instrument (as well as the technician-as-musician) was taken one step further with the invention – or rather, the discovery – of dub. Around 1968-69, the story goes, the engineer cutting a record for sound system operator Ruddy Redwood forgot to bring in the vocal track on the mixing board.
The result was an instrumental version of a reggae song which, played in the dance after the original, sent the crowd into a craze. From this point, legendary engineers such as King Tubby, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Scientist perfected the art of dubbing, using studio equipment to strip reggae tracks down to their rhythmic bones and to add delay, echo and reverb, shattering songs into hallucinatory audio-mazes (Veal 2007). If dub can be seen as the popular counterpoint to the studio trickery of musique concrète, another sonic street culture brought the creative (mis)use of turntables to new heights. Hip hop was born in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s. Kool Herc is credited as the founder of the genre, switching between extended drum-breaks isolated from funk records on two turntables (a technique he called ‘merry-go-round’). DJ Grandmaster Flash mastered the art of jumping seamlessly back and forth between recorded breakbeats to keep the dance going, physically manipulating records to turn them into active media for the production of new sonic configurations. He showed that «despite its normal usage, the turntable was really a percussion instrument with a tonal range and expressive capability far beyond that of drums, woodblocks and marimbas» (Shapiro, in Young 2002: 166). Another fortuitous creative discovery within hip hop is scratching: DJ Grand Wizard Theodore inadvertently found out that moving back and forth a playing record generated a screeching noise which could be incorporated into DJ performance to astounding rhythmic effects. As digital samplers became available in the ’80s, hip hop producers have perfected the art of sampling pre-existent material. Via sampling, all the available recorded sounds suddenly became raw material to be mined for beat-making purposes. Meanwhile, the New York disco scene laid the foundation for modern DJing. DJ Francis Grasso is credited as the inventor of beat matching – a technique consisting in manually matching tempos between two tracks and seamlessly transition from one to the other. The disco scene also paved the way for the use of the 12 inch vinyl single (often called the ‘disco mix’) as well as for remix culture, with DJs/remixers like Tom Moulton, Walter Gibbons, Danny Krivit and Larry Levan extending and modifying songs to make them more dancefloor-friendly. If the electric guitar was the main engine behind rock’s noisiness, then turntables, drum machines, samplers, sequencers, mixing boards and later Digital Audio Workstations were the guitars of dance music: sonic technologies whose creative use paved the way for new kinds of noise.
The trajectory of electronic dance music and its aforementioned precursors – dub, hip hop, disco – echoes many of noise’s features listed above. Indeed, if by noise we mean unwanted or non-musical sound, we can see how many electronic dance genres have been (and are still) commonly deemed as nothing more than noise, unworthy of critical appraisal nor aesthetic value. Such noisiness is due to extreme repetition, the emphasis on rhythm and timbre over melodic and harmonic development (both at the heart of much Western art music), the common use of non-traditional and non-musical sounds, and overwhelmingly loud volumes; not to say the metaphorical noise of the youth, of marginalized communities, and suburban working class which often spawned these genres. Even Attali acknowledged this disruptive potential within popular music, which he saw as «an instrument of the ecstatic cult […] a locus of subversion, a transcendence of the body […] these rites gathered marginals together in forest clearings and caves: women, slaves, expatriates» (1985, p. 13). When he writes that in the fourth stage of music – composition – “the listener is the operator” and that “to compose is to take pleasure in the instruments, the tools of communication” (1985, p. 135), it is hard not to think of the most immersive and transcendent dancing experiences, co-created by DJs and dancers, or of common images of electronic music producers surrounded by their machines.
The nexus between noise and industrial development foregrounded by Russolo found a new life when house and techno producers in Chicago and Detroit began using technological tools to make new, machinic sounds: the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, or the TB-303 bassline generator. While these were largely discarded by pop musicians for their lack of fidelity to original ‘organic’ sounds – i.e., they were too noisy to be considered music – it was precisely this Otherness that fascinated electronic producers. These genres have been most radical (read ‘noisy’) when they didn’t strive to emulate real instruments but came up with new sounds: such is the case of the psychotic and paranoid acid house basslines discovered by acts like Phuture tinkering with the TB-303 (again, noise as the result of technological mis-use).
In a tentative and provisional taxonomy of noise in dance music, acid house and so-called bleep techno exemplify the process whereby non-musical sounds are welcomed, becoming sonic signatures. The manic sound of acid house, from the early days in Chicago to the major exposure at rave parties in the UK during the summers of ’88/89 (with the subsequent media-fed moral panic), demonstrates how noises unsuccessful for the mainstream may herald a grassroots generational revolution once they are valued precisely for their unnatural and unnerving timbres. Meanwhile, in Sheffield, a number of artists and labels (Warp Records being the most important) gave birth to another genre characterized by uncommon noises: bleep (also referred to as bleep techno or bleep’n’bass), named after the onomatopoeic sounds emitted by common electronic devices. This sound originally wasn’t supposed to be “music”, yet it became the foundation for the first UK-born electronic dance music genre. Bleep foregrounded another staple of UK dance music, that is, massive and cavernous basslines. These were often obtained by tweaking sounds not intended for musical purposes. Warp duo Sweet Exorcist produced the seminal EP Testone (1990) using “a non-musical function inside samplers and synthesizers: the sine-wave test-tones provided so that the frequencies can be set on the recording heads, prior to laying a track down on a master-tape”. This tone-generator was not «supposed to be for making music, just for testing the equipment. You’ve got a treble-tone, a mid-tone and a bass-tone, which people used to get the biggest bass possible’» (Reynolds 2012: 100).
Another aesthetics (and sometimes politics) of noise deploys mechanical, extreme repetition of claustrophobic and punishing beats. The result is a sonic assault as a response to the saccharine sounds of the mainstream – e.g. the sound and the political stances of Underground Resistance or label manager Achim Szepanski – inducing an often drug-fueled trance state where time warps and the body is locked into a never-ending dance, a sort of physical endurance test. The pounding pulse of hardcore, minimalist, industrial and hard techno, and their brutalist offshoot, gabber, have built their aesthetics around the libidinal pleasure found in annihilating and relentless beats. Jeff Mills and many other artists from Germany, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands in the early ‘90s gave techno a noisier edge. Reynolds compares the typical Belgian hardcore ‘hoover’ sound (also called the ’Mentasm’ stab, after the homonymous track by Second Phase) to the riffs of Black Sabbath, stating that in hardcore techno «melody was displaced by noise» (Reynolds 2012, p. 110), and remembering how even older dance music heads dismissed hardcore as just mindless noise for the younger generation. Stripped of the black, grooviest and soulful heritage of Detroit techno, these offshoots focused more on metronomic precision, cold textures, asphyxiating repetition. It is in this context that the idea of the DJ tool emerged: tracks conceived as not much more than rhythmic noise to be mixed by DJs with other similar tracks. Hints of this brutalist, functional aesthetics of techno-as-noise can be found in records titles themeselves: Jeff Mills’ The Extremist, Surgeon’s Basictonalvocabulary, Regis’ & Female’s Against Nature. In the second half of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, then, the advent of minimal techno and microhouse shifted the frequency register towards the higher range, using various piercing and high-pitched sounds as noisy sonic tapestry. Meanwhile, German dub techno, pioneered by Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, incorporated white noise and dub-borrowed extreme sub bass pressure, resulting in an immersive audio bath.
Then there is noise as cut-up and schizophony, as found in those genres based on heavy sampling: UK hardcore breakbeat, jungle and drum’and’bass. These are proper sound assemblages, reminiscent of the spirit of the avant-garde but enmeshed in a noise-dance-drugs apparatus. If sampling is «a fundamentally unnatural phenomenon» (Demers 2010: 62), then jungle and drum’and’bass artists championed an unnatural aesthetic allowed by developments in digital sampling and production technologies. They took the sampling-and-chopping modus operandi to unprecedented heights. The tempo got faster, the drum programming more convoluted, the overall mood darker, with melodies often displaced by the ‘texturhythm’ of bass + drums. Rather than composing, these producers were decomposing and reassembling sound. Reynolds calls these radical sampling virtuosos “sampladelic artists” – sampling as the new, digital psychedelia – engaged in expanding our very notions of music.
Noise thrives also in the more experimental fringes of electronic music, whether for listening or dancing purposes. Developed at the turn of the millennium, microsound and glitch made vast use of unconventional and usually undesirable noises. Turning the “failures” of digital technology into an asset – indeed, an «aeshtetics of failure» (Cascone 2000) – and emphasizing the ‘ghosts in the machine’ below the clean, smooth surfaces of digital audio-signal perfectionism, glitch artists recurred to the noises of skipping CDs, hiss, signal disturbances, ‘click & cuts’ (as the name of a seminal compilation goes), extreme dynamic variations, high-frequencies piercing sounds and a constant play with silence. Glitch acts «as noise, as exposure, as disruption» (Hegarty 2007, p. 189), disrupting the “normal” functioning of digital media and exposing its latent sonic affordances. The glitch «warps time, functioning as a temporal wrinkle. It disrupts the flow of sonic information, creating strange, rhythmic articulations» (Thompson 2017, p. 162). A leading figure in this scenario was Achim Szepanski, who, in 1993, launched the label Mille Plateaux (an homage to the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari), one of the most influential glitch labels alongside Raster Noton, 12k and ~scape. Two years earlier, Szepanski had also founded another label, Force Inc. Music Works, focused on pushing techno and breakbeat to their extreme boundaries. His sonic aesthetic was imbued with an anti-mainstream, anti-corporate politics: «perfect melodies and chords, that’s what folk music and pop music offer us today, just the circulation of clean sounds, rinsed of the noises that could disturb prosperity […] so the harmony, the chord, even the tone itself must be exploded; one must open the door to noise itself» (2017: 18). One can also find a glitchy attitude in unorthodox and ‘dysfunctional’ dance music, as made by the likes of Autechre, snd, Vladislav Delay and Monolake.
In the last 15/20 years, new subgenres and aesthetics returned to noise. Artists labeled under the term ‘hauntology’ made frequent use of crackle, hiss, and various noises which foregrounded the material presence of recording media. Others started making lo-fi house and techno tunes, often with analog machines, as a reaction against the standards of digital cleanness and ultra-polished textures in dance music. Not surprisingly, one of the main labels in this scene, L.I.E.S. records, named their first compilation American Noise. Meanwhile, the loose group of artists making what, for a lack of a better term, has been called ‘deconstructed club music’, have been expanding the sonic palette and rhythmic forms of dance music, drawing from previous genres and twisting them upside down. Many such artists use digitally-generated and heavily manipulated noises or sample breaking glasses, gunshots, car crashes, using them as drums.
Ultimately, though, framing noise aesthetics and politics as only a matter of excess and transgression may hinder a more thorough comprehension. Emma Thompson argues that the key to understanding noise is an affective-relational lens: «music implies relationality – be it the relations between sounds and vibrations; the heard and the unheard; the relations between producers, performers, listeners and consumers; or the relations between bodies, instruments, media technologies and acoustic environments» (2017l, p. 161). This view sits within the wider framework of affect theory, referenced also by Goodman in his excursus on Sonic Warfare and the affective power of sound. Under the relational-affective lens, we can see how noise – as extremely loud volumes and sound vibrations – is mobilized in the communal dance experience, eliciting affective responses via its impact on the body. Here, another feature of noise emerges, one that traverses all the authors and genres mentioned so far. When deployed in the producers-DJs-dancers ecosystem, noise can be «a force of rhythmic mutation» (Thompson 2017, p. 162), its aesthetics and politics ultimately «twisted into an engine of construction, and noise becomes a reservoir of rhythmic potential» (Goodman 2010, p. 192). Eshun’s concepts of the futurhythmachine, texturhythm, and rhythmelody are keys here. It is in this emphasis on rhythm engineering as well as on timbre modulation, more than the negativity of the non-musical or the excess of transgression, that all the different aesthetics and politics of noise within electronic and dance music converge: a creative probe into rhythm and timbre as affective transducers.
References
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Lorenzo Montefinese is a Milan-based scholar, DJ and music writer. He has recently completed his PhD in Visual and Media Studies at IULM University in Milan with a thesis on technoaesthetic imaginaries and practices in popular electronic music and their relationships with visual arts. His main research interests are the intersection between popular electronic music, media, culture and society.