In Anna Friz’s work How to Pack a Whale, I experienced a sense of spatial and temporal transformation. The artist’s use of various environmental and electrical sounds left me deeply impressed. Initially, I held the assumption that radio art should be aesthetically pleasing, yet Anna deliberately subverted this expectation. She focused instead on crafting atmosphere and enveloping the listener in a distinct sonic environment, while the textual content, which often obscured and processed through distortion effects, served to narrate her dreams in a fragmented, evocative manner. I feel I can learn from her approach to atmosphere-building, though personally, I might opt for clearer narration. Another aspect I admire and wish to learn from is her narrative style: seemingly free and associative, yet subtly guided by a coherent, unifying thread throughout.
This week, I decided to begin by exploring some references related to noise. I read about the distinctions between anti-music, noise music, and noise itself.
Stephen Graham Becoming noise music
page 49
‘Anti-music’ doesn’t describe a scene, a movement, a genre, or even a subgenre or substyle of noise or any other form. As much as it’s possible to point to previous usage, it is one of a set of terms put forward by artists such as The New Blockaders to describe aspects of their work.
page 190
By this point, noise music had both been established as a genre and taken its place in a wider ecology of challenging, exploratory music. Separating ‘noise from specifically ‘experimental’ music – setting aside the thorny question of how to define experimental music and instead considering it simply as a nebulous but useful catch-all term for a host of adventurous academic, mainstream, underground, and fringe musics – is therefore extremely difficult. Accordingly, noise musicians operated within a broader experimental field in this period, performing alongside non-noise musicians at festivals, being listened to by similar audiences, and competing for some of the same grant money. Moreover, many musicians operating within that broader experimental field blur boundaries between styles such that musicians like Bill Nace or Okkyung Lee, for example, might be recognized as making ‘noisy’ music without ever being described as a noise musician. Looked at from the other side, it’s also the case that many musicians are labeled as noise artists but more accurately work across boundaries.
I find this particularly insightful, as it addresses a long-standing question of mine: how to define noise and noise art. It is important to recognize that not every sound we dislike or find somewhat disruptive can be simply labeled as noise. Some artists intentionally use noise to express their state of mind and emotions. For instance, Ryoji Ikeda’s “dataplex” employs glitch effects and synthesizers to explore the purity and limits of sound at the physical and mathematical levels. He constructs a highly rational, abstract emotional landscape with cold, electronic noise.
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