[-empyre-] the will to escape identities (and the taboo of destroying property)

[Marie Thompson]

Wow, so much to answer here - thanks!
In any case, Marie, I was wondering if you feel that this active
reaction to rules/canons plays any role in your musical work or
research.
Actually, yes! Lots! I'm interested in thinking of noise/noise music not simply as non-representational but as something that actively troubles or confuses representation; it doesn't simply step outside but, rather, muddles the wires so to speak. So, for example, with Diamanda Galas, what can be so unsettling is not her vocalisation of 'pure noise', the abandonment of language to noise but the 'cracking open' of language; its morphed into something vaguely familiar but unrecognisable. In my own stuff, i'm really interested at exploring notions of interruption rather than excess (although I appreciate thats a false binary...). I spent a while doing the 'full with noise' strategy - playing all sounds, all at once, loudly. But where do you go once you've done that, when you've reached (what you hear as) the limit? While that can be fun, and its got its place, I currently prefer juxtaposing and mixing what you could call harsh noise, or moments full with noise, with other musical styles, forms and ways of doing things. Or I guess what you can call other types of noise not just the sounds or practices that we expect to hear as noise. So i'll play weird nursery rhyme songs about how being a unicorn would be cool, because it would mean that I fall over less, with a background of bleeps and clicks, and then move to a broken cassette player improvisation and then to 30 seconds of all out noise. Because when you're (hypothetically) playing with 3 other guys at a noise gig, doing the harsh noise thing, then, actually, standing up and singing about unicorns with the audience wondering whats just happened, is possibly a way of bringing back the noise to a noise gig. I'm also an oboist (and learnt to play that 'properly' before I started breaking everything!) and i'm interested in the idea of acoustic noise (in the sense of acoustic instruments). It sometimes seems to be where the division between free improv and noise is sometimes drawn; noise uses electronics where free improv uses more 'traditional' instruments. But again, showing up to a noise gig with an oboe can be an interruption in itself.


Besides the *equipment*, what else is under threat? The room’s
electric installations? The artist’s voice and reputation? The
audience’s amusement and inner eardrums? Someone’s job? Social and
economic contracts?

Among all the possible risks, why is the destruction of property still
the strongest taboo?

I didn't mean to imply that breaking the equipment would be the strongest taboo and I think these kind of questions stand as, to some extent, unresolvable problems. So they require a dynamic, relational 'doing' in response.
R.e ethical compromises of audience expectation/entertainment and possibly feeding into the notion of audience annoyance. This is a little aside but i've been thinking (very superficially, admittedly) about politics of taste. It stems out of my previous intolerance when I was younger of people who would say they just like 'anything' when answering the question about what music they like. For me, when I was younger, this was incomprehensible, because music was so bound to identity. I think there is something potentially radical, as a listener, in actively seeking the 'good' or the 'enjoyable' in sonic experiences; not expecting to be entertained but finding what is entertaining. I think there are loads of problems with this and i've really not thought about it enough so i'll leave it there for the moment.
Fascinating study! Besides this relation between noise and presence,
it suggests how noise seems to be in-between public and private
communication, softening their boundaries.

Would it be possible to understand gossip through a similar logic,
especially when it acts as a form of social engineering that modulates
institutional and personal regimes (often, in the most perverse ways)?
Absolutely. The threat of gossip can be heard as the threat of exposure; the overspill of the personal into the professional. But gossip works not simply by making the private public but by revealing the permeability of these boundaries or rather, conflating them. Theres a really great piece by Giselle Bastin, which sees Pandora's box as an archetype for gossip. Pandora’s transgression comes not with the box being open instead of closed but with the erasure of the dialectical opposition between inside and outside and the subsequent disruption of symbolic categorisations. She also sees this conflation of boundaries in Pandora's box and gossip mirrored in feminine/feminized body (to my mind, and possibly very superficially, echoing Derrida's remarks on the hymen). The inbetweenness of gossip; between truth and lie, public and private, personal and professional, is perhaps what makes it such a powerful and dangerous form of knowledge.

I too would also like to here about Magnus's collaboration with Mattin - do you think the discomfort with silence was partly to do with what I was implying earlier in this email about the expectations of noise scenes/gigs?

Marie



On 16 Feb 2012, at 10:51, Gabriel Menotti wrote:

Hey!

It might seem strange that i'm interested in escaping
identity when this current work is so heavily routed
in identity politics. There are two primary responses
to this.  First, I feel that you have to work through
identity in order to escape it. [Marie Thompson]

Actually, there is a peculiar resonance between this (let’s say)
political strategy and your poetic interests, if we consider another
divide besides the noise-silence one: the separation between noise and
language (or signal).

Some people involved with particularly creative practices (writer
Clarice Lispector and Picasso are two that come to mind, but I’m sure
there are other examples) have posited that in order to overcome
(abandon) grammar/rules, they must be first mastered.

In that sense, the way to get to the undefined seems to be through a
highly-defined territory. Regardless of superficial impressions, noise
(the awkward prose, the convoluted drawing) would not be something
prior to the structure of language, but something that is beyond (or
in spite of) it. (Maybe as a result of linguistic saturation, which
makes language become the unwanted/rejected?)

(This might take us back to the issue of assessment, and parents
pointing to modern art and saying that their kids could do better.
Would this be a good or a bad thing to Picasso, who once declared that
it took him a lifetime paint like a child?)

In any case, Marie, I was wondering if you feel that this active
reaction to rules/canons plays any role in your musical work or
research.


So I guess there is also the question of do I have a
responsible to create certain sounds that don't risk
equipment? (I appreciate this isn't the most interesting
question, and I feel that its been asked a lot of times...) [MT]

Or maybe it is *the* most interesting question, as it points towards
boundaries that *seem* unshakeable. But why? Bruno Latour once
mentioned how highly political is the definition of materiality, and I
believe this could be extended to such claims about the
infrastructural limits available to action, thus throwing open
dynamics of ownership and authorisation.

Besides the *equipment*, what else is under threat? The room’s
electric installations? The artist’s voice and reputation? The
audience’s amusement and inner eardrums? Someone’s job? Social and
economic contracts?

Among all the possible risks, why is the destruction of property still
the strongest taboo?


Of particular interest to me has been the noise of
neighbours. A number of participants have commented
on missing the sounds of their neighbours, when they
have been (forcibly) relocated to ‘better’ housing with
thicker walls.  [MT]

Fascinating study! Besides this relation between noise and presence,
it suggests how noise seems to be in-between public and private
communication, softening their boundaries.

Would it be possible to understand gossip through a similar logic,
especially when it acts as a form of social engineering that modulates
institutional and personal regimes (often, in the most perverse ways)?


I felt myself lucky to participate in a performance
'going fragile', involving Mattin and other contributors
to Noise and Capitalism. […] It seemed as if people
('audience') couldn't bear the silence and the absolutely
(radically) open structure of this collaboration. [Magnus Lawrie]

Annoyed audiences always get me curious, Magnus. =) Could you please
bring more details about the performance?

Best!
Menotti
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