What does Noise mean to you?

[Chankgeez]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m4xkY0WgVw[/youtube]

[Mudfuzz]

y'all are gonna hate me for this, but:

noise as a genre, to me, is mostly navalgazing pointless treading of "avant garde" waters that have been tread before that are more fun for the musician than the listener. messing around in the hopes of making a neat sound and stopping there rather than applying it anywhere. its the purest distillation of improvisation to the point where it loses any point or internal logic besides "i am making". and going off of what aen said, noise is more or less what we make music from, and just arranging it makes it music. for a cheap and probably inaccurate comparison its like abstract expressionism and early surrealist techniques, but instead of developing an internal harmony, its usually some UCLA conceptual jerkwad too far up his own ass to realize that its really easy to see that you're half-assing it. noise as a genre is often a picture someone took of a spill that looks cool, or a sketchbook full of old and retreaded abstract ideas.

not to say that noise can't be musical, or be used in music while still retaining it's noise-ness. theres a shitton of artists who do that, but i'll point to Disco Inferno for what i mean, specifically.

most like... noise-noise music is visually similar to like this

an ad hoc utilization of various improvisational and creative techniques ultimately culminating in a boring and unfinished looking whole

but noise can definitely be used to achieve something like this:

(open in new tab, its a rad-ass piece of art by Minam Apang)
where the whole is still fairly discernable in person, and at first the accessory bits seem like blotches, but the more you delve in, the more they make sense.

but besides that, noise is sound without an intended frame. can it be pretty? yeah, of course. but is it music? no, unless framed and arranged as such. does that detract from any potential beauty of the noise? hell nope.

Actually no I don't see you points very much off mark. Actually when I was first introduced to noise [96...] people were still calling it noise art not noise music.. I'm not sure when people started added music to the word noise.. thing is what is-was noise is not very different from the early industrial stuff.. actually from what I remember the noise term has been around atleast since the 1930s.. blah blah blah.. To me the difference [which there isn't but we want to think there is so a thing is special] is noise as a art form is more about making interesting/emotional/offputting/ect-ing sounds then anything else wether is it structured or improv vs music where it is "supposed" to be musical. This doesn't mean the two things do not overlap each other or are in the end that same thing.. And your brown idea... YES! but I find that is what is a dividing line between interesting and not.. because if you are trying to using sounds to bring up thoughts and emotions and images then you have to understand space and time and sonic colors so that you can bring forth colors other then brown.. or pink

[rfurtkamp]

As long as it's not square wave pushing 0 dB just for the sake of sounding like every other square wave pushing 0 dB for no reason for 32 minutes and 10 seconds, I'm down with it.

The less snarky version is that if it's just noise, with no musical elements or control, I have very little interest in it.

In the end it's like pornogrpahy, you know it when you see it.

For me, noise has to have 'somewhere' - it has to go somewhere, or take me somewhere, or be somewhere that I'm not.

Time and place and subtlety and actual music arne't dirty words in anything that crosses the noise boundary that interests me.

[fiddelerselbow]

As long as it's not square wave pushing 0 dB just for the sake of sounding like every other square wave pushing 0 dB for no reason for 32 minutes and 10 seconds, I'm down with it.

The less snarky version is that if it's just noise, with no musical elements or control, I have very little interest in it.

In the end it's like pornogrpahy, you know it when you see it.

For me, noise has to have 'somewhere' - it has to go somewhere, or take me somewhere, or be somewhere that I'm not.

Time and place and subtlety and actual music arne't dirty words in anything that crosses the noise boundary that interests me.

That's pretty much how I feel about it in a nutshell. I think music no matter what the approach needs some sort of basis in traditional musical constructs. I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs like rhythm and melody are part of what makes music enjoyable. The use or deconstruction of those constructs is what makes the most interesting stuff. It's why I find Throbbing Gristle far more interesting than a lot of harsh noise artists.

[bigchiefbc]

That's pretty much how I feel about it in a nutshell. I think music no matter what the approach needs some sort of basis in traditional musical constructs. I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs like rhythm and melody are part of what makes music enjoyable. The use or deconstruction of those constructs is what makes the most interesting stuff. It's why I find Throbbing Gristle far more interesting than a lot of harsh noise artists.

I may be starting a huge shitstorm, but I just want to highlight that sentence and call attention to the insane amount of props that sunn 0))) gets, and honestly so many of their songs sounds like a thirty minute long droning note.

[rfurtkamp]

Sunn O etc go somewhere sometimes, but honestly I'd classify most of it as ambient before it ever hits noise.

Ambient music is a whole 'nother can of worms.

[bigchiefbc]

Sunn O etc go somewhere sometimes, but honestly I'd classify most of it as ambient before it ever hits noise.

Ambient music is a whole 'nother can of worms.

Maybe I just haven't lasted long enough for them to actually get anywhere.

[Achtane]

Agreed with many points in this jank.

[Mudfuzz]

I think music no matter what the approach needs some sort of basis in traditional musical constructs. I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCevYLzk8Zs[/youtube]

[Mudfuzz]

I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCevYLzk8Zs[/youtube]

[Chankgeez]

That's pretty much how I feel about it in a nutshell. I think music no matter what the approach needs some sort of basis in traditional musical constructs. I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs like rhythm and melody are part of what makes music enjoyable. The use or deconstruction of those constructs is what makes the most interesting stuff. It's why I find Throbbing Gristle far more interesting than a lot of harsh noise artists.

I may be starting a huge shitstorm, but I just want to highlight that sentence and call attention to the insane amount of props that sunn 0))) gets, and honestly so many of their songs sounds like a thirty minute long droning note.

I highly doubt anybody enjoys a thirty minute long droning note, traditional constructs....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCevYLzk8Zs[/youtube]

Thanks to Mudfuzz for posting this.

Drone "art" music "evolved" from more spiritual forms of drone music.

Drones serve a purpose. They do weird things to the human body.

There's essentially a drone running through most of the length of Indian "classical" ragas and I enjoy listening to those for longer than 30 minutes.

A single droning note for that long?

No, not for enjoyment, but there are other reasons.

[theavondon]

It's all about the atmosphere with Sunn and that shizz. Though, I don't like Earth 2, but it's because it's really poorly mixed.

[Gearmond]

while we're talking about ambient, thats another "genre" i'd like to call bullshit on"

the only defining feature of it seems to be sparseness, and even when going and applying the actual definition of ambient, i can't help but think: isn't that what ALL music should be anyways?

any ambient-as-genre music i hear just sounds like slowed down shitty new age with some ornamentals thrown in to disguise how boring it is.

i'm not saying all music has to be fast, i'm just saying that slowness, as a conceptual threshhold like all others, is something that once passed, is seldom worth returning to in a near identical fashion. thats why most anyone who basically works as an abstract expressionist is met with a resounding "meh". going back to my point about "avant garde" ideas being retread.

and Mudz going to your point about the nonexistent separation of noise art and music, there isn't one. the way quote-unquote noise artists treat noise is as the earliest musique concrete composers worked. its an unnecessary pretense. i had this conversation with my composition professor who also does sound installations, and we talked about how sound is almost inherently treated as music. like its REALLY hard for the mind, without being told when sound is or isnt music, to treat sound as not-music or to make sound art that isn't music. thats how i see it, at least.



like i JUST today thought of the first sound art piece i wouldn't describe as music. the only reason it isn't is because it isn't experienced as something heard, but as something uttered. so its a performance piece of sorts. and then i thought that there ARE a lot of venues where sound art isn't considered music. stuff like foley artists and junk.

though i guess one argument point is the "musical aspects" itself and how perceptable they are. like you could make a noise piece in the serialist tradition and no listener would know you did unless you told them

[rfurtkamp]

After reading this thread again, I'm going to become a post-noise artist.

I'll do stuff that does stuff and call it good.

Oh, wait, that's what I've already been doing.

Cancel that, I'm going to start a KISS cover band.

[Chankgeez]

like you could make a noise piece in the serialist tradition and no listener would know you did unless you told them

That's sorta going back to what we were talking about before. Like not being able to tell the difference between whether a piece is pre-composed or completely improvised. It's all in the process, but you don't necessarily hear the process. You only hear the end result.

Context is very important as well.

Apparently this piece was written specifically as part of a sound installation, but it's still a song that can stand on its own:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2l-T29Asew[/youtube]