A world of noise (and finding respite)

Plowing through Marcel Cobussen's vault on deconstruction and two dreampunk releases from 2020

One of my core ideas on how dreampunk functions, as mentioned in previous essays, is that it reflects the constant tension between humans and technology, a ruthless zweihänder that slashes away at our ability to bond in order to propel growth and development materially. However, dreampunk is also starting to display traces of another type of contradiction, one that harks back to the very beginnings of postmodernist thought: the boundary between music and noise. Thankfully, Marcel Cobussen, professor of music philosophy at Leiden University and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, has compiled numerous ideas and concepts from the mountain of dense tomes on deconstruction that started piling up in the 1960s. If we peruse these, they might just provide deeper insight into how the contrast between humans and technology will manifest itself in the music (and noise) created through the uneasy synergy between the two.

Let's pick a starting point. Perhaps the most (in)famous piece attempting to soften the established borderline between noise and music is John Cage's 4'33”. The piece consists of three movements of musicians sitting still NOT playing their instruments. That's it.

Unsurprisingly, debates around art/not art, subversion of established concert decorum and whether Cage was just yanking a gullible and chin stroking audience's chain raged in lieu of the piece actually being performed. However, these debates are not really the focus of this essay. 4'33”, despite its near-meme status, still retains its ability to force an audience into a confrontation with its way of differentiating between noise and music. This spark for said debate will become increasingly potent in a world getting increasingly loaded with and dependent upon a plethora of sensory stimuli. Once the world of preconceptions that we call “music” drops away (as manifested by the pianist simply sitting at the piano without playing), the audience is immediately confronted with the prospect of “non-obstruction of sound”, room for sounds that have not been intellectualized yet, but possibly can be when given room to breathe inside our established, ringfenced world of music. The end result of this would then be a borderless potential of sound, which stands in contrast to the rigidly defined area called “music” that every artist is forced to work within.

The aforementioned confrontation involved in the performance of 4'33” was also put into practice in the way Cage would host workshops for composers:

“I had the lights turned out and the windows open. I advised everybody to put on their overcoats and listen for half an hour to the sounds that came in through the window, and then to add to them - in the spirit of the sounds that are already there, rather than in their individual spirits. That is actually how I compose. I try to act in accord with the absence of my music.”

This underlines how important it is for Cage to have an active role in listening to and processing the entire aural experience a human has on a daily basis. If listeners don’t dismiss sounds as unwanted and undesirable “noise” because of their irregularity, dissonance or unfamiliarity, they can instead expand their own world of music to encompass them. This makes room for perspectives on sound and, by proxy, humanity as a whole that were previously dismissed, which happened since they did not fulfill certain pre-internalized criteria for classifying what music is or isn't. Cobussen acknowledges this:

“Music no longer drowns out the noise in Cage's works, nor should it; “musical” sounds and “noise”sounds relate accordingly to each other. Symbiosis. Each acts as both guest and host: music is a guest in the domain of the noise and noise is welcomed in the house of music. Cage makes one aware that every house, every home, has an opening (doors, windows). The house of music is open; it gives entrance to the stranger, to the guest, to noise. Cage brings us to accept the other of music, the other that is usually repudiated, that really should not exist. But conversely, the guest invites the host into his house. The guest becomes host of the host. Noise becomes the host of music. Cage denounces the hierarchy that privileges “musical” sounds over “noise” sounds.”

This kind of deconstructive work can be done to fulfill different purposes. An explicitly political example is notorious ambient pessimist Terre Thaemlitz, who used the massive Y2K trendster cred of German glitchmonger label Mille Plateaux to further criticism of LGBT+ commodification on Love for Sale: Taking Stock In Our Pride (1999). While the title track and album opener takes a hatchet to what sounds like local radio covering a LGBT+ rally, half in obvious discomfort at the “weirdos” and half with dollar signs in their eyes, Cage's ideas for bridging the divide between noise and music come vividly to life on tracks like Sloppy 42nds (post-Processed) and Liberation Model. The former buries piano flourishes in pylon buzz drones and bursts of static, while the latter hacks cheesy lounge music into pieces with bitcrushed distortion and aggressive filters. If listeners make it far enough, they will be so active processing the blend of noise and music that the sampled homophobic slurs, punched in between bursts of loud static, in One (Strength in Numbers) carry exactly the kind of political impact Terre's work is known for. Terre even blows a proverbial raspberry to Cage in the liner notes via the fictional title of an upcoming record, “La Cage à Faux: Gaffing Sexuality In The Works Of John Cage.” (Side note: The title might just hark back to one of sound scholar Douglas Kahn's criticisms of Cage: the “silencing of the social by elevating the importance of silence in and of itself”. This will have to be explored more in depth later.) However, the dangers of deconstruction persist here: at which point does the deconstruction end and the construction of something better start, considering that any and all borders are to be ripped up? Can we achieve respite and deeper insight from a fresh, new view of our aural world when breaking everything down is the ruling MO? At what point does our world no longer look like a nail to a critical hammer?

Fast forward another two decades. The weight of constant external stimuli on the human being has gotten considerably heavier. What is the regular daily routine of an urban citizen?

It's not enough to reevaluate noise != music or noise = music strictly from a theoretical perspective. Our emotional turmoil has to be quelled also, and logos alone cannot do this. Enter dreampunk, which as a whole owes a lot to ideas of deconstruction. In dreampunk’s typical world of urban melancholy there are artists focusing specifically on the noise/music borderland. The goal is seemingly to carve out a niche of peace and reflection within it for the listener. One such artist is DCT, who released Sleep Theory (Week 1) last year.

The release seems fairly innocuous at first. It employs the same kind of muted and sparse notes popularized by Aphex Twin on Selected Ambient Works II and many of Warp Records' biggest ambient acts. However, on further inspection, the tracks all carry traces of the same noises that gradually have been internalized and intellectualized as musical to seek relief from the hypercity din (in this particular case, through sleep). There's scattered whispering very close to the mic (a very well known trigger of an autonomous sensory meridian response, aka ASMR), vinyl crackle, ventilation hum, snoring and fragments of lectures on the topic of sleep, all coalescing into a familiar mass of noise providing the same relief as the synthesizer chords being played. Sleep Theory (Week 1) ultimately amounts to an explicit aural anti-stress weapon. The relief it provides just may be sufficient for the listener to forgive its reliance on a familiar sound and frequency range.

Others seem happy to stand squarely in the eye of the hypercity storm. Cyberpunk 2020 by Fentanyl Embrace dives head first into a sea of symbols and noises, encasing itself in a tranquil, yet thin bubble of repeated motifs that just barely resists the onslaught of stimuli. Every track throws shards of 24/7 news coverage at the listener, and the album’s unruly energy peaks with the track Kusanagi, where notification sounds from various social media platforms finally play in time with the album's soaring synth chord patterns. It's an almost gleeful stare into a metropolitan, Otomo-esque hellscape, replete with shouting, massive advertisement screens, decaying infrastructure, smart phone addiction and raging magatsuhi being siphoned up to the spires of the bloated obelisks of power. All we can do is take a step back for a brief second, before we laugh at the absurdity of running head first into the kind of dystopian future we were warned about for decades prior. We have to laugh, because even this brief moment is destined to be absorbed, warped and dissolved by the same magatsuhi absorption process.

In conclusion: What should we do with this knowledge? How does one make the most out of the potential formed through the liberation from the shackles of noise, when said potential is deliberately amorphous and structureless? At some point, a new generation of artists will have to synthesize a compound of introspection, criticism and affection that breaks through the firewall of alienation, which has been analyzed both internally and externally by artists from previous generations. A new chaos of sectarian conflict will not be sufficient. A positive order must rise from the ruins of the deconstructive skirmish, and this cannot be achieved before artists have provided a compelling enough fusion of pathos and logos.