Listening Through the Noise by Joanna Demers

Author:Joanna Demers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

NEGATIVE BEAUTY

It is no coincidence that the titles of many works examined in this chapter allude to extremes of nature. There are the many references in drone music to the sun: the drone metal band Sunn O))); John Cale’s album Sun Blindness Music (1965–1968); the album cover of clarinetist Anthony Burr and cellist Charles Curtis’s performance of several Alvin Lucier drone pieces (2005), which features an infinite promulgation of sound waves that could easily be mistaken for a depiction of sun rays. Even Phill Niblock’s “Valence” (2006) refers to radiation, except that here it involves the level at which electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. Drone music also features nocturnal references, such as Jim O’Rourke’s two-hour drone work Long Night and Model 500’s techno hit “Starlight.” If we are generously metaphorical in interpreting the sun as a symbol of warmth and therefore life, its antipode would be Radigue’s Trilogie de la mort, a three-movement drone rumination on Tibetan Buddhism’s interpretation of death.

What these works and many others like them share is a sense of extremity, of excess, of long duration, and of testing the limits of endurance. This is not a new sensation: Kant famously classified these traits as constituting the sublime, which, he wrote,

is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought…. Therefore the satisfaction in the one case is bound up with the representation of quality, in the other with that of quantity. But the other [the feeling of the Sublime] is a pleasure that arises only indirectly; viz., it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them, so that it seems to be regarded as emotion,—not play, but earnest in the exercise of the Imagination. (Kant 2000, 101)

Sublime objects are impossible to encase within a frame because of their sheer scale. They inspire within the viewer a sober respect and awe that Kant describes as a “negative pleasure,” whereas beautiful objects elicit unambiguous pleasure thanks to their adherence to perfect, universally recognizable forms.

Yet the paradox in maximal works by Alva Noto, William Basinski, Fennesz, Tetsu Inoue, and the many rock bands influenced by My Bloody Valentine, is that their materials might be considered conventionally beautiful if heard without electronic amplification or processing. These works contain a great deal of noise, and we can hear them as sublime objects because they contain an admixture of beautiful and dreadful elements: simple tonal language submerged in pure noise or extreme dissonance, loud volumes, and long durations. The noise in these works has hardly gone by without notice. Noise is one of the most popular subjects in electronic and contemporary music studies today, and thanks to Hegarty’s work (2007; 2008), we now have a critical vocabulary and historical frame in which to contextualize (or fail to contextualize, as Hegarty would see it) noise works. The facet I

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