Rambling introduction...
A few years ago I was listening to the Johnny Cash cover of 'Hurt,' originally by Nine Inch Nails. It's a particularly dynamic recording in which the intensity of the playing and the volume of the recording are allowed a wide range of expression at key points in the song for an increased dramatic effect (the key to most musicians' use of dynamics: to increase the audience' emotional response TURN IT UP at the right bits. If you're into NLP - hee hee - it's an auditory/kinesthetic synesthesia in which *volume: low-to-high* is the driver submodality). Some people might find it strange to consider that aspect of the music at all; as though they consider the mysticism of music worthy of preservation in a manner different to that which they expect of other mediums. Other people might find it strange to consider those as controllable variables; in effect, studio and performance options. The recording process lends itself to producing a static result that doesn't vary upon replay. If you don't have access to the 'Unearthed' box set (along with the comprehensive liner notes) you might think of this music as captured spontaneously and in the moment, that these Rick Rubin produced recordings are simple and without artifice, that this is Cash' *definitive* cover. But regardless of how simply you wish to record there are still countless choices involved. A choice to exclude options is still a choice involving that option. Recording is a medium as highly constructed as any other, and the act of capturing a 'simple' performance for posterity inescapably remains an infinitely variable process overlaid on top of what was originally a living experiential moment, a moment that cannot ever be reproduced.
On this specific listen the moment that most caught my attention came during the climax of the song, at the point where the volume and intensity of the music reach their peak... and I suddenly noticed that Cash' voice itself 'peaked.' This is a term used in sound engineering for when the recording input signal is turned up so high that it distorts. On 'Hurt' the effect is comparatively subtle. I didn't consciously notice it throughout many repeated listens, probably due to it seeming to be a product of Cash' worn-in, gravely, tremulous voice. Once noticed the effect is marvellous: at the high point of the song our ear believes that the titanic presence of The Legendary Johnny Cash cannot be contained by the medium, that he has managed to somehow force his way through it, almost as though it were the audio equivalent of breaking the fourth wall. It's made exponentially more marvellous when you realise that it's an illusion created in the studio. Recording levels are set during soundchecks (the generally – not always – received wisdom being to turn it up high enough to capture the sound in all its quality without the signal distorting). Engineers and producers are trained to notice distorted audio. The vocal track will almost certainly have been listened to in isolation from the other elements in the mix (probably many times) or order for peaking signals to be noticed and eliminated. Even if this moment of distortion – of noise, of that which is being channelled becoming too powerful to capture – was originally an accident its presence in the released version of the song can only be intentional. Therefore we must call it the 'illusion' of the medium breaking because it has been accounted for in the medium itself. That fact perversely implies the opposite of the original perceived meaning. Rather than being a moment in which Cash warps the medium and breaks through the song it brings with it the sad realisation of a Man in Black forever lost to us, a man who we no longer have the opportunity to experience directly.
It's an example of one single moment of noise that is so rich in meaning that it can simultaneously contain two polar opposite readings. Listening to 'Hurt' in this light put me in mind of this quote from Brian Eno's 'A Year With Swollen Appendices':
"In science, noise is random behaviour, or behaviour so complex that we cannot predict it. A signal sent through a medium interacts with it in complex ways and some of the information being sent breaks up into – noise. Noise is unreadable, inscrutable. Noise is not silence but it is also not loudness. It is the absence of coherence.
In music, noise is the signature of unpredictability, outsideness, uncontrolledness. The 'purest' (technically, the 'least noisy') instruments are also those traditionally used to evoke feelings of innocence, tranquillity, dreaminess and so on. Think of the impotent flute, the (literally) emasculated castrato. Then think of the instruments that always are used to evoke something-else-about-to-happen, something-about-to-enter-from-outside – the drums, the cymbals, the gongs and the shimmering high frequencies of strings.
One history of music would chart the evolution and triumph of noise over purity in music. The Renaissance looked for clear, pure tones and coherent, stackable voices. Since then it has been outside all the way, with composer after composer looking for more raspy and complicated timbres. Indeed, if one measured noisiness of instrumentation on a scale of 100, the classical palette would stop at about 50, but the rock palette wouldn’t even start until about 30 (and would then continue all the way out to about 90—a figure constantly rising).
Distortion and complexity are the sources of noise. Rock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise. To allow something to become noisy is to allow it to support multiple readings. It is a way of multiplying resonances.
It is also a way of 'making the medium fail'—thus giving the impression that what you are doing is bursting out of the material: 'I'm too big for this medium.'"
It is increasingly my stance that what many people perceive as emotion in in a performance is actually a value judgement on the various ways in which noise is incorporated into the sound, that what is frequently attributed to emotion is actually the failing of the medium. In singing it is frequently the imperfect or character voices that inspire us the most; the voices that quaver, rasp, growl, howl, yell, miss notes or lose their timing. These things are often the product of an emotional performer, but they don't have to be. Upon first listen to Portishead's Beth Gibbons we might say that her voice is inherently soulful, regardless of the fact that we cannot know what she is thinking or feeling at any given moment during any given performance. A closer listen reveals the vastness of her attention to detail, the clipped consonants, her diversity of approach to specific songs, her restraint. Her 'sound' has a history. It has been arrived at through a rigorous understanding of her 'instrument' and the choices she has made. You can hear similar histories in the voices of Tom Waits, Jamie Liddell, Annie Lennox, Thom Yorke, or Björk, and you can apply this understanding to any instrument. I focus on singing here because most people experience their strongest emotional responses with that particular element in any given performance or recording. Tom Waits in particular has turned his career into an examination of the applications of noise, to both emotionally involve us and create levels of remove in his concurrent investigation of character and persona. He fetishises devices that produce or reproduce an imperfect signal.
The work of William Basinski has produced some of the most elegant examples of noise alone inducing an emotional response in the listener, particularly his four CD work The Disintegration Loops. Each piece is structurally identical: a loop repeats over and over, degrading as it goes, until what is left has barely any semblance of the original sound. Of all the pieces of music I own it has the most consistently mesmerising effect on all the people to whom I have played it. It also produces the greatest diversity of possible readings and emotional responses. As a loop is degraded it evokes all sorts of remembered sounds in the listener, from fireworks to marching rhythms, to the sound of a record on a turntable, to a funeral procession, to the sound of wood crackling as though in a fire. Each loop becomes ingrained in the listener's experience through repetition but its meaning is altered with each restatement (The Necks' Lloyd Swanton: "If we've been playing the same thing for eight bars, it has a certain meaning. But when you've been playing for one hundred and eighty bars it has a wholly different meaning. It's compounded by the new context it's in - the weight and gravity are different."), and in never repeating in precisely the same manner twice it evokes Morton Feldman's techniques of restating phrases in subtle permutations or variations via an entirely different methodology. The loop therefore endures in memory longer than it does in actuality, and the listener engages in a psychic continuation of the music long after it has decayed into fizzing sounds, pops and crackles. As such many listeners view The Disintegration Loops as an extended meditation on death and memory, on how loss can make a person hallucinate the presence of a loved one, how a memory can entirely inform our response to the present, on how we seek to find patterns and remind ourselves or similarities in our experience, on the transformative process of decay and the abundance of life that springs forth from that process. It is also a preparative experience or gateway to create new kinds of listener: it is remarkable how almost any audience is still entranced by each piece long after it has become pure noise, that from the beginnings that Basinski gives us he can lead us by the hand into chaos and uncertainty in a way that does not induce anxiety, boredom or annoyance in the listener. Noise becomes readily acceptable and inclusive in Basinski's frame in a way that it frequently doesn't in the work of many who might place themselves - or be placed - in the Noise genre.
What's further interesting about The Disintegration Loops is the lack of emotion that went into their 'performance.' Basinski's contribution is essentially just pressing play on a reel to reel. The tape loops were created years before and suffered degradation in storage, and their 'performance' methodology was the product of an accidental discovery when he decided to salvage each tape for preservation in his digital archive. The process of degradation and decay is entirely natural, treated only slightly with reverb and equalisation (it'd be worth extending this discussion to consider the incredibly diverse emotional effects of reverb alone). In other words, one of the most emotionally evocative series of compositions I have ever heard was made with next to no emotional component in it's creation. Although we can imagine Basinski as spellbound as we are in his discovery we have to frame his experience in similar terms to ours. On these albums he is more listener than performer, and whatever he thought and felt when he originally created these loops is likely to be forever lost in the years since he made them. The Disintegration Loops is the archetypal example of the medium being the failure of a medium.
That's enough as a topic starter. Over to Barbelith. What is noise? What does it signify? What are its uses? What other examples are there? |
