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7/29/2019 Kromhout - The-Impossible-Real-Transpires. the Concept of Noise in the Twentieth Century a Kittlerian Analysis

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23-10-2007

The Impossible Real Transpires

The Concept of Noise in the Twentieth Century: a Kittlerian Analysis

By Melle Kromhout


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Melle Kromhout

The Impossible Real Transpires1

The Concept of Noise in the Twentieth Century: a Kittlerian Analysis

1. Defining/Undefining noiseOne of the most striking aspects of musical develoment since the beginning of the twentieth

century is the introduction and slowly increased presence of noise in music. When Luigi

Russolo in 1913 wrote his Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises, proclaiming the abandonment

of the realm of sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself in favor of amore realistic, a more contemporary music of noises, he stood, among some others, at the

beginning of a long process of incorporating virtually every possible sound, among them

those which in earlier days would certainly be branded noise, in musical contexts, up to

musical genres in which artists use nothing but noise to produce their music, creating an entire

genre of noisemusic.

In the light of the broader interest developed in the field of soundstudy for the auditive

in general and most importantly the way sounds, music and hearing relates to, represents or

influences human beings, society, art and other ascpects of life, more and more scholary work

is executed concerning the meaning and interpretation of noise. Much of this work is based on

a dominant discours concerning this meaning and interpretation. Purpose of this essay is to

offer a different point of view as to how noise and noisemusic became an issue in musical

development during the previous century, how this dominant discourse came into being and,

significantly, how it only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and not earlier.

After all, on a closer look, it is not all that clear, what is meant by describing the

introduction and slowly increased presence of noise in music. It is extremely hard to

determine what counts as noise and what does not. Especcialy since the clear distinction

between noise and music (not-noise), the easiest way to determine whether something is noise

or not, itself disappeared along the course of this development, which paradoxically also

creatednoise as concept for musical innovation. With the disappearance of the (negative)

definition (noise is not-music), the conceptof noise arose (noise is, or can be, an aspect of

of music). It is exactly this shift, which is the focus of this essay.

1The title of this essay is a quote from Kittlers Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Bodies themselves generate

noise. And the impossible real transpires. Kittler, 1999 (1986): 46


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Situating this shift explains the problems scholars have to both define noise as an

actual phenomenon, acoustic or otherwise, and at the same time explain its meaning and

function within a larger context, both musical and extra-musical or cultural. These problems

arise from the fact the different definitions that are used andthe different interpretations or

readings of noise all function within and stem from the same discourse, in its broadest terms

modernity. This causes a fundamental circular reasoning, since definition andexplanation

point both to each other and to something which is usually left out of the equation: the shift

which caused noise to become what it is now.

This does not mean the interpretations of the use of noise in music the twentieth century are in

any way irrelevant or false. Danish scholar Torben Sangild formulates four basic readings of

noise in music or musical noise: it is 1. an expression of the abject or of abjection (Kristeva),

2. a way to reach the sublime (Kant/Schiller/Schopehauer e.a.), 3. an expression of infinite

multiplicity (Serres) or 4. a means of transgression and subversion (Bataille/Artaud).2

These interpretations are in itself valuable and do offer a possibility to understand

certain forms of noisemusic in their cultural context. However, they do not, in any way, solve

the problem of defining noise, of determining what counts as noise and what not, and they do

not answer the question how noisemusic, after all a recent (modernist) development, came to

represent the abject, the sublime, multiplicity or subversion.

In his article, Sangild tries to distinguish three definitions of noise: firstly, an

acoustic one noise as impure and irregular frequencies (categorized in colours: white

noise, pink noise, purple noise etc.), second, a communicative definition noise as the

disruption of a signal (the less noise, the better the transmission) and lastly a subjective

definition noise as unpleasant and unwanted sounds (obviously the most common day

definition).3

For him and many others, these three definitions all point to different, only

slightly related phenomena. When it comes to dealing with concrete examples of noise in

music, however, it very often turns out all three definitions are applicable and none of them

offer a possibility of defining what part of the musical structure is in fact noise. In my

analysis of the German Industrial-noiseband Einstrzende Neubauten, I for instance wrote

that all three definitions are right. First, noisemusic uses sounds that are irregular and

impure in music. Second, these noises are used to distort, block or blur other musical

components, in order to confuse or overwhelm the listener and diffuse the actual

2Sangild, 2002

3ibidem


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songstructure. And third, noisemusic has a tendency to deliberately offend listeners either just

by the fact it is noise, or through the extremely loud volume it is produced at.4

So Sangilds definitions and interpretations only stand as long as we assume there is

something commonly identifiable as noise and that this can be apart ofa more general

musical construct. It only stands as long as we stay within the framework of the modernist,

twentieth-century, disourse surrounding noise. It is this discourse I describe in the second

chapter of this essay The noise of the 20th century, build around Luigi Russolos argument in

The Art of Noises .

If all interpretations of noise depend on this discourse, the reason why the clear distinction

between noise and music (not-noise) did not suffice anymore from the late-nineteenth-

century onwards is not because noise was introduced in music or something like that, but

because noise itself came to mean and represent something entirely different. In order to

understand the definitions, interpretations and thus the use of noise in modern times, we have

to trace the rupture which causes this shift. It is this, essentially Foucauldian, enterprise which

I undertake in chapter three, Noise of the Gramophone, noise as the Real. Here I follow the

Foucault-inspired work of Friedrich Kittler, by claiming it was the fundemental discursive

break of the invention of audiorecording in 1877, which paved the way for the new, modern,

definition, encompassing all three of Sangilds definitions, to developed and as such made the

introduction of noise in music possible, thinkable.

For Kittler, in order for the introduction of noise in musical settings to be possible and

meaningfull, noise itself had to become an object of scientific research, and discourses a

priviliged category of noises.5 Next to Foucault, Kittlers work is highly influenced by the

work of Lacan, and it is his connection between the work of this post-strucural psycho-

analysist and the rise of mediatechnology, which provide the theoretical ground to show how

the interpretations usually attached to noise became meaningfull.

As I exemplify in chapter three, for Kittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the

three groundbreaking inventions that mark the beginning of the media-age, coincide with

Lacans triptych of the Imaginary (Film), the Symbolic (Typewriter) and the Real

(Phonograph/Gramophone).

The invention of these three techniques meant the end of the monopoly of

(hand)writing as the only way to preserve reality and as sucha fundemental shift or break in

4Kromhout, 2006: 25

5Kittler, 1999 (1986): 24


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the way people experienced the world, gave expression to it and tried to represent it. It is

Kittlers reading of the status of audiorecording as the only device capable of recording the

Lacanian Real, which I take as the crucial site where the shift in the meaning of noise, and

therefor the rise of the modern concept and use of it, took place. Thanks to the phonograph,

Kittler writes science is for the first time in possesion of a machine that records noises

regardless of so-called meaning. [...] The epoch of nonsense, our epoch, can begin.6

After this description in chapter three of the consequences for the concept of noise of

this status of audiorecording as the Real, I stay in track with the historical development of

audiorecording in chapter four The disappearance and re-emergence of noise in popular

music where I reflect of the impact of the invention magnetic tape-recorder, developed by the

German army in WWII, as a device which reduced the amount of noise significantly and

made it possible to manipulate audio-signals at will. As becomes clear in this chapter, this

machine, which also signifies the beginning of modern popular music, reduced

audiorecording again to the realms of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which is why, from

than onwards, the use of noise came to representthe Real.

It is in the third and fourth chapter that I also relate this new concept of noise to two of

Kittlers other crucially interrelated views: firstly the way the new mediatechnologies in the

last decades of the nineteenth century caused the shift from meaning, an characteristic of the

old discourse of writing,to the concept ofinformation: the transference and selection of data,

devoid of every interpretative act and therefor essentially meaningless. If the phonograph is a

machine that records noises regardless of so-called meaning, the information present in its

overload of signal can be presented, selected, used and transmitted in every possible way,

something which was and is most important with respect to the second of the two views:

mediatechnologies genesis in and close relationship with the army and the practice of warfare.

This relationship, which makes Kittler to conclude that popular music is a misuse of army-

equipment, is central in his work and proves essential to conclude the argument presented in

this essay, which will become even more clear in the fifth and final chapter.

In this last chapter, Over the ruined factory theres a funny noise, I apply my freshly

developed concept of noise in a brief analysis of a the bands that is notorious for its use of

mindnumbing, loud noise, but also for, among many more, its confusing mix of politics,

transgressive imagery, performance-art, guerrilla tactics and rethorics: the British Throbbing

Gristle. This analysis will function as an applied clarification of the theoretical framework I

6Kittler, 1999 (1986): 86


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set out, as a kind of conclusion relating all the terms that passed by and as an example of how

the outcome of the preceding chapters can be put to work and in what way they offer

different, new, possibilities to look at the relation between music and other aspects of art and

culture.

2. The noise of the 20th centuryLet us first examine the discourse surrounding the use of noise as a concept for musical

innovation in the the 20th century, hereby keeping in mind the three definitions of Torben

Sangild: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition, since these definitions are a

concise summary of this discourse. This becomes clear in the fact that all three definitions are

already present in the first manifesto which specifically adressed the matter of noise in music:

The art of noises, written in 1913 by futurist painter Luigi Russolo. In this manifesto,

written as a letter to befriended composer Franceso Balilla Pratella, Russolo introduces three

themes surrounding noise, which prooved central for the understandment and use of it along

the course of the century.

Firstly, he argues in line with other futurist manifestos, the realm of ordinary musical

sounds was exhausted and did no longer have any representational value. Music was a

fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. The

industrial age, however, changed the world of sound and music, because with the invention

of the machine, noise was born.7 Noise, according to Russolo, is the result of the

machinalization of the industrial age, which, as we know, was valued highly by the futurist.

As goes for the sounds of modern war, which Russolo praises by citing a poem of Marinetti

recalling with marvelousfree words the orchestra of a great battle.8 These new noises, the

sound of modern machines and modern war, should be incorporated in modern music,

because, as Karin Bijsterveld explains, they enabled artists to express a maximum of

reality,

9

which was one of the futurists ultimate goals.Secondly, Russolo justifies the emancipation of noise by the fact that noise in fact can be

differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and

irregular, both in time and intensity. In other words: there is no intrinsical difference between

noises and other sounds, noise is made of the same vibrations as all sounds, including music,

only irregular and confused, which is the reason why noise canbe integrated in music at all,

and is not diametrical opposed to it.

7

Russolo, 1997 (1913)8

Russolo, 1997 (1913)9

Bijsterveld, 2000: 123


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Thirdly, he stretches the uncomprehensibility of noise. Noise, contrary to musical

sounds never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve;

therefor, they are far more suitable to reach us in a confused and irregular way from the

irregular confusion of our life. Noises, thus, are the ultimate expression of the (complex) life

of modern man.

These three observations form the line of thought that was repeated over and over again in

different, positive or negative, forms from then onwards: noise is the sound of the industrial,

modern age and thus stays closer to a truthfull represtation of reality, noise is nothing more or

less than irregular soundfrequencies, and, due to its complexity, noise can never be fully

grasped, understood, expressed or integrated: it lacks or resists meaning.

On a closer look these three arguments also correspond with the three definitions of

Torben Sangild. The first, noise as the sound of the industrial, modern age and thus a more

truthfull represtation of reality, relates to the subjective definition: noise as loud sound, as a

disturbance, as (usually) unwanted or unpleasant sound.

In his seminal workThe tuning of the World, written in 1977, composer Raymond

Murray Schafer, the creator of the word soundscape, argues the same, when he describes

how, before the noise of the industrial age, this enviroment was hi-fi: all sounds were

distinguishable and all soundsignals clearly audible. The soundscape of modern times

however, is low-fi: sounds are masked and covered up by other sounds, or, in other words

noises. These sounds form an undistinguishable noise. For Schafer, noise emerged during the

industrial revolution and obscured all sound of pre-industrial times.10

As already exemplified by Russolo, noise, when viewed as a product of the industrial

revolution, is intrinsically linked up with technology and machines, which is why, as Karin

Bijsterveld describes the association of noise-as-loud-sound with power-as-strength-and-

significance is indeed an important aspect of the attractiveness of specific technologies.11

Noise make machines sound powerfull: the roaring sound of a Ferrari-engine, the noise of

powertools, the deafening bang of guns: noise creates power for someone one who controls it

and fear for the one that is exposed to it. The noise of the technical age is both a tool and an

unwanted, threatheting presence.

10Bijsterveld, 2001: 41

11ibidem: 41


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As exemplified in Karin Bijstervelds article The diabolic symphony of the

mechanical age,12

although the roaring of the see, the sound of thunder or the shouting of a

large crowd are often as noisy as industrial sounds or trafficnoise, the offensive and

threathening nature of noise in everyday life is almost exclusively linked to industrial noise,

warfare and the sound of technical progress.

Russolos second argument for the inclusion of noise in music recalls Sangilds second

definition: the acoustic one noise as impure and irregular frequencies. It is precisely the

discovery of frequency as a way to measure sounds, towards the end of the nineteenth

century, which made it possible to occure to Russolo and others that noise-sounds were no

different from all other sounds: nothing more or less than irregular soundfrequencies, which is

why composer Edgar Varse in 1936 could wish for the complete technical control of all

sounds, in order to reach the liberation of sound: the use ofallfrequencies and combinations

of frequencies to make music the way for composers to execute their ideas without the

annoying interference of musicians and to make their musical ideas audible as exact as

possible.13 This idea was taken to its limits in the fifties and sixties by John Cage, who plead

for the emancipation of sounds: the evaluation ofallsounds, because, after all, all sounds are

equal: they are all measured in frequencies.14

This fact remains one of the main themes in the description of noise as a part of

musical discourse. In the article Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise

Bands for instance, Mary Russo and Daniel Warner explain the fact that music, modes of

speech, modes of dress, certain discourses, indeed anything could be noisy in a particular

context, by arguing thatthere is no absolute structural difference between noise and

signal.15

The apparent difference between noise and a clear signal is the keysite in the last definition

and Russolos last argument: communication theorys conception of noise as the disruption of

a signal, the interference in informationstreams, and the notion that noise can never be fully

grasped, understood, expressed or integrated, because it lacks, resists or disrupts meaning.

This is the most frequently used explanation of noisemusic. The fact that making

sense of noise should be impossible or unfavourable, is paradoxically one of the main

12ibidem

13

Varse, 1998 (1936)14

See Cage, 196115

Moles in Russo, 2004: 48[My Emphasis]


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themes to do exactly that: make sense of noise. Simon Reynolds for instance, complaints that

to speak of noise [...] is immediately to shackle it with meaning again, to make it part of

culture.16

Instead, for him, noise has to be viewed as a way to escape, for a few blissfull

moments, the network of meaning and concern.17 Noise is the absence of meaning.

On the other hand, as Russolo already mentioned, it is the complete opposite, which is

is viewed as the reason for this incomprehensibility: the complexity of noise. Kasper

Eskelund describes it as the overwhelming amount of information that makes it so hard to

sort out anything important.18

Noise as the overload of meaning.

The reality which is assumably expressed by noise, is therefor not so much

translatable into words or meaning, but rather only in experience and, as Henk Oosterling

explains [er] resten slechts intensiteiten, waar [...] lichamelijkheid en lust aan beantwoorden.

[] Voor veel luisteraars kan dit echter niets anders meer betekenen dan de afwezigheid van

iedere zingeving.19 In noise, the absence of meaning and the extreme, overwhelming

multiplicity of meaning lie the closest to each other.

From Luigi Russolo onwards these themes prevail in the discours on noise: it is linked to

technology; acoustically it is considered no different from other sounds, except for the fact

that it is irregularand impure; it is said to defy clear definition, because it is either non-sense

or an extreme multiplicity of sense and thus supposedly transgresseses the comprehensable,

but expresses reality.

So the question is how did noise come to represent all this and how did the use of noise in

music as a cultural phenomenon emerge in, and not before, the 20th century.This Foucauldian

question shows the the most significant objection to readings of noise from Russolo to

Sangild a.o. In all these explanations of noise in music or noise as music the concept of noise

is ontologized in such a way that it becomes an ahistorical, fixed concept. As if the conception

of noise at the end of the twentienth century is the same as at the beginning of the nineteenth

century. What they in fact do is use the modern concept of noise, with all its conotations of

industrialisation, meaninglessness, irregularity, abjection, transgression, multiplicity and

sublimity and use it anachronisically to trace back its heritage. Of course, if we take the

question of how this conception did emerge, in the West, at the end of the nineteenth and the

16Reynolds, 2004: 56

17

ibidem: 5818

Eskelund, 200419

Oosterling, 1989: 156


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beginning of the Twentieth century seriously, we must acknowlegde the disourse in which it

took form and examine the preconditions for the modern concept of noise to emerge. The

question what shift occured towards the end of the ninteenth century leads me to Friedrich

Kittlers emphasis on the rise of modern mediatechnology.

3. Noise of the Gramophone, noise as the RealFor Kittler, the fundamental change in the conception of music, sounds and the auditive, has

nothing to do with the sounds of the industrial age or the emergence of the era of the machine,

but everything with the factsound itselfbecame something else: such was the logic upon

which was founded everything that, in Old Europe, went by the name of music: first, there

was a notation system that enabled the transscription of clear sounds seperated from the

worlds noise; and second, a harmony of spheres that established that the ratios between

planetary orbits (later human souls) equaled those between sounds. The nineteenth centurys

conception of frequency breaks all this.20

Frequency meant the end of the seperation between

clear sounds, notated and categorized, and non-clear sounds, noises, irregular and

uncontrolable: when sound became frequency, all sounds became equal.

So it is Sangilds second definition, the acoustic one, which seems to be the root of the

development of the modern concept of noise according to Kittler. His line of thought,

however, follows a different path. The theoretical andpractical conceptualization,

measurement and use of audiofrequencies made possible the most fundemental break with the

pre-modern soundscape: audiorecording. The idea of frequency, of breaking up and

measuring noises and sounds in discrete airwaves, was crucial for the phonograph to be

conceivable. And thus, it was only in July 1877 that mechanical sound recording had been

invented and Speech has become, as it were, immortal.21

And it is audiorecording which

initiated the modern concept of noise.

In the article Voices of the Dead: Transmission/Translation/ Transgression, Anthony Enns

introduces the same link that is crucial to Kittlers account of the rise of media technology:

phonography transformed voice into object at the same time as psychoanalysis dissociated

meaning from conciousness. [...] Psychoanalysis represents a communication model drawn

from and contemporaneous with the rise of sound technologies.22

20

Kittler, 1999 (1986): 2421

ibidem: 2122

Enns, 2005 : 12


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Lacan formulated the psychoanalytical theory proper to its time, drawing the model

from the most influencive inventions in storage and communicationmedia to data, just as

Freud, argues Kittler, developed psychoanalysis, the talking-cure, modelled after the most

influencive invention of his time: the telephone. For Kittler, writes John Johnston the

difference between Freuds model (and psychoanalysis more generally) and Lacans rewriting

of it simply reflects the differences in the operating standards of information machines and

technical media in their respective epochs.23These observations, the sheer contemporaneity

of the invention of media-technology and psychoanalysis andthe influence the former had on

the development of the latter, are exactly what Kittler pursuits when he links the three ground-

breaking inventions (film, gramophone, typewriter) with psychoanalysis: for Kittler, the first

three storage media of the modern age, film, gramophone and typewriter correspond,

respectively, exactely and not coincidentaly to Lacans triple register of the Imaginary, the

Real and the Symbolic.24

The Symbolic, the world of language, takes the form of the typewriter: linguistic

signs in their materiality and technicity.25

Film, after all nothing more than an optical

illusion, a way of making the impossible possible, is the Imaginary. And, the Real has the

status of Edisons invention that was able to record andplay sounds, the only device capable

of storing everythingit recorded, capturing the real-time event, almost capturing time itself;

the Real [...] has the status of phonography.26

According to Lacan, the Real is impossible, We were closest to it right after our birth, but,

pretty soon, in what Lacan dubbed the mirror-phase, it is replaced by the Imaginary and, after

being introduced into the realm of language, encompassed by the Symbolic.

For us, Symbolic-creatures, the Real is only experienced as a lack, as an ideal state of

wholeness forever lost and out of reach.27

It should not be confused with reality: reality is

what humans construct by means of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, in order to structure the

world they live in. Of the Real, on the contrary, nothing more can be brought to light than

what Lacan presupposes that is, nothing.28 The presence of the Real can only be sensed

through a crack in the Imaginary and Symbolic making up reality, as a sudden apparation; but

it can not be put into words, because it is pre-lingual, before or below language.

23Johnston, 1997: 23

24ibidem: 24

25Kittler, 1999 (1986): 16

26

ibidem27

ibidem: 15-1628

ibidem


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Why is the phonograph the only device able of storing the Real, of recording the

impossible? Because the phonograph is the only device which records everything,

independent of its meaning or relevance. Humans, introduced in the Symbolic order of

language, have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise.

The phonograph on the other hand does not hear as [...] ears do and registers acoustic

events as such.29 Only the phonograph is able to record all the noise produced by larynx

prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning.30

Therefor, because the phonograph does not filter at all, but instead records everything: signals,

information, meaning, noises and nonsense, all signals become equal and articulateness

becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise.31 Meaning becomes obsolete and

noise is emancipated from unwanted sounds, to the allencompassing sound. Noise, thererfor,

is on the one hand reminiscent of a world before meaning, a world which we left as soon as

our development as a child entered the Imaginary (mirror) stage, analogue to the film: the

Real.

On the other hand, since we cant overcome the Symbolic, we are always searching for

meaning. This is why noise can also be interpreted as the infinite meaningfull: the overload of

information. In this sense, when all sounds became equally meaningfull, recorded without any

preselection, noise becomes the threshold were information becomes disinformation,

nonsense.

Therefor, in our age, noise means all and/or nothing.

Furthermore, every recording of a phonograph, and later gramophone, was

accompanied by a. the noise of the recording, b the noise of the recording-process and c. the

noise of the play-back process. Early audio-recording was noisy in every aspect of its being: it

recorded noise, it played noise and it emitted noise. With recorded sound, there is nothing but

noise, the noisy recording and the noisy reproducing of the Real.

4. The disappearance and re-emergence of noise in popular musicFrom the moment soundrecording became possible, the biggest effort was put in the

improvement of soundquality. In other words: the reduction of noise. On the one hand people

tried to improve the machines, materials and techniques used to record audio in order to make

the recording and reproducing as clear and unnoisy as possible. On the other hand, the

29

ibidem: 2330

ibidem: 1631

ibidem: 23


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conditions under which sound recordings were executed were made more and more

controlable, by means of studios, specialized equipment and trained audio-engineers and

producers.

The most important revolution in this development came with the discovery by the

Allied near the end of World War II of an invention the German army had been using during

the second world war. For years, they had been wondering how recordings that could have

impossibly been transmitted live, nonetheless sounded like they were, which means: without

the usual recording and play-back noise of a gramophone. In 1944 they discovered the

machine the Germans developed to make this possible: the magnetic tape-recorder. They took

it with them and shipped it to Londen, where it functioned for more then ten years in the

famous Abbey Road studios, where it attributed to the birth of popular music by creating the

first studioband in history: the Beatles.

Recording with a magnetic taperecorder did not only mean a significant reduction of

noise, it also created the technique that would determine sound-recording from then onwards

andfurthermore would set the stage for the emergence of modern popular music: cut and

paste. For the first time it became possible to cut audio-signals, to cut the Real, in order to

create new, unimagined, sounds and combinations. Up to the invention of taperecording,

soundrecording could do nothing more than record everything surrounding it: raw, undiscrete,

noisy. Now it had become, just as film had always been, managable, shapable. The magnetic

taperecorder meant the introduction of the Imaginary in the world of soundrecording and the

covering up of the Real, which initially defined it...

After all, the Imaginary, film, is nothing more than slicing and cutting up images in

order to create the illusion of movement. Cuts mark the beginning of the development of film,

but the end of the development of audio-recording. Accoring to Kittler this fact can be seen

as a fundamental difference in terms of our sensory registration, which inaugurated the

distinction between the imaginary and the real.32

Besides, audiotapes made it possible to filter meaning out of recorded noise. To

produce chains of symbolic meaning instead of an unmanipulable, fundamentaly

incomprehensable manifestation of the Real. Editing and interception control make the

unmanipulable as manipulable as symbolic chains had been in the arts.33

By means of the

Imaginary, Symbolic soundstructures could be shaped, obscuring the Real.

32ibidem: 117-118

33Ibidem: 109


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So, with the machine that reduced the signal-to-noise ratio of audio-recording and

made it possible to manipulate sound at will, the machine that marked the birth of popular

music, the impossible Real of the phonograph was replaced by the Imaginary and Symbolic of

modern-day sound-recording. It widened the gap between the source of the recording and the

receiver, between recorded and listeners. As Hans-Joachim Braun says in the introduction to

an collection of essays about music and technologies in the 20th century: Indeed, improved

sound reproduction technology has rather increased the difference between sound recording

and sound reproduction than diminished it.34

It made it less Real.

In the process of diminishing the amount of noise, both recordedby a machine unable

to distinguish between noises and meaningfull sounds and at the same time emittedby that

very machine, the Real, initially the content of audio-recording, was replaced by the

Imaginary (cut) and Symbolic (paste). From that moment onwards audio-recording had very

little to do with the Real, nor with the impossibility to discriminate between noise and signal,

between sense and nonsense. Only when noises do crop up in the sterile and man-made world

of modern-day recording, the trace of the new defined meaning of noise, the confrontation

with the impossibile and inmanipulable Real, is confirmed. Noises are reminiscent of the Real

underneath the Imaginary or Symbolic. The representation of the experience of the slit in

reality caused by Real.

So the introduction of the audiotape granted producers and engineers the possibility to select

signals and create meaning with them, which, in a way, restored the function these devices

(radio, audiotape, stereo-recording etc.) had prior to their lives as massmedia entertainment-

system: selecting, distributing and storing information for the purpose of warfare.

Once again, as did the notation system that enabled the transscription of clear sounds

seperated from the worlds noise, noise could be emitted as being irrelevant and unwanted.

Once the possibility to seperate them existed, the age-old distiction between noise and non-

noise became relevant again. As John Johnston writes: only certain data (and no other) are

selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being noise35 The challenge

in wartime is to get information were one wanted it to be and to either intercept or block the

information of the enemy, because war itself is noisy and the more silent the

recording(device) is, the more it covers noise of war.36

34

Braun, 2000: 2235

Johnston, 1997: 9-1036

Kittler: 1997: 119-120


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Noise is meaningless, war is meaningless. The Real is primary, before the Imaginary

or the Symbolic are installed, before meaningappears, but blindness, invisibility, and random

noise are the irreducible background of technical media.37

Um [...] Gitarren und

Motorenlrm, die Noten einer Musik und die Gerusche einer Umwelt berhaupt mischen und

manipulieren zu knnen, brauchte die Rockmusik ein Speichermedium, wie die altmodische

Schallplatte es nicht hergab.38 The audiotape made this possible. The continuous undulations

recorded by the gramophone and the audiotape as signatures of the real, or raw material

could be manipulated at will39

to cover up the noises and create the illusion of the clear,

unproblematical, perfect soundrecording. Just like the German army did when they confused

the Allied with their impossible live-recordings.

Popular music, the music of the media-age, was born with the gramophone, a machine

that records noises regardless of so-called meaning.40 Rock- and Popmusic is, according to

Friedrich Kittler, a missuse of army-equipment.. Inflight movies, microwave cuisine, and

Muzak all serve to screen out the real background: noise, night and the cold of an unlivable

outside.41

Jazz and Blues blossomed through it. Ol Man River, dieser Held der frhen Jazz-

Songs, ist genau das Rauschen, das Edison und seine Fortsetzer, also Phonograph und

Grammophon, musikalisch mglich gemacht haben.42

It is the noise that Edison and his

succesor made musically possible. Noise made musical. Noisemusic. It reached maturity

however, with the possibility to draw out the noise again, to manipulate the Real, to insert the

symbolic, to cover up the noise of war; to cover up the noise, to cover up the Real.

5. Over the ruined factory theres a funny noise.43And there we are: the conception of frequency made possible the invention of audiorecording,

the undiscriminative recording of all sounds, the liberation of sound, to speak with Varse. It

was recording which created the modern discourse around noise and incorporated it inevitably

in music. With the taperecorder, signalnoise disappeared from recording again and audiocould be spliced, cut, pasted, manipulated. Noise disappeared, but during the development of

popular music (the electric guitar, the syntheziser, massive amplification,) noise reappeared:

now no longer a necessary consequence of audiorecoding, but a deliberate artistic choice,

37Kittler, 1999 (1986): 208

38Heeresgert, P.25

39Kittler, 1999 (1986): 118

40ibidem : 85-86

41

Johnson, 1997: 342

Kittler, 1998: 243

Ford, 1999: 6.28


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noise became a representative of the Real and the confirmation of the nonsense of the modern

age, in which all sounds are equal and meaning is just a sound among others, a part of noise.

This new noise inspired interpretations of subversion, abjection and transgression,

reminiscent of experiencing the Real. With its heritance to modern warfare and the dawn of

the information-era: the emergence of sounds devoid of meaning; It is the stuff popular music

is made of, which is why I will conclude my essay with a short analysis of the work of a band

that deliberatly operated within the realm of popular music, is frequently heralded as one of

the founders of noisemusic and, as will become clear, made concious and subtle use of the

conceptual ties and relations I uncovered in the previous chapters, to construct a musically

and conceptually complex, dense and often highly confusing (and misunderstood) body of

work.

Throbbing Gristle developed in the second half of the seventies out of the performance-art

group COUM-Transmissions, whos core members carried the names Genesis-P-Orridge and

Cosey Fanni Tutti. COUM-Transmissions conducted performances of violent, sexual and

trangressive nature aiming at the examining of the obscenethe obverse of the everyday and

the familiar [... and] the return of the repressed. As Genesis P-Orridge explained, they

were interested in taboos. What the boundaries were, where sound became noise and where

noise became music and where entertainment became pain, and where pain became

entertainment. All the contradictions of culture. 44

This attitude reached its widely covered controversy in the 1976 exhibition

Prostitution, which, consisting of work Cosey did for pornmagazines, used tampons and

images of previous COUM performances, earned them the namewreckers of civilisation,

awarded by a Member of Parliament in the Daily Mail.45

One of the goals of the exhibition, according to the members themselves, was to

demonstrate the gap between representation and reality. It was at the openingnight COUM

presented their new project: a completely abnormal rock-group, which members all played the

instruments they least controlled, made extensive use of self-build electronic instruments

aimed at producing a deafening loud and chaotic sound and which went by the name of

Throbbing Gristle.

44ibidem: 6.10

45ibidem: 6.19-20


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Throbbing Gristle are one of the founders of what was to be called Industrial Music, after

their own label Industrial Records, and they are an often quoted influence for artists

operating in the field of noisemusic, since they were one of the first, at least within the

domain of popular music, who made use of such allcompasing, uncompromising and loud

noise.

However, contrary to popular opinion, the use of actual noise in their music, is not so

much only an artistic choice, as it is a conceptual tool, related to their entire ideological

program. Developed out of the context of performance-art, and as such much more conceptual

and programmatic then many of their contemporaries in the field of avant-garde pop- and

rockmusic Throbbing Gristle combined a variety of themes, intentions, methods and forms of

artistic expression to communicate their, rather extremistic, worldview. A tendency often seen

in early Industrial Music or similar genres.

The use of noise, was just a part of this larger whole. Nevertheless, in most analyses of

their music, this use is exemplified, isolated and completely understood in the ways I

described in chapter two, recalling the three definitions of Sangild and the themes introduced

by Russolo: noise is the sound of the industrial, modern age and thus stays closer to a truthfull

representation of reality, noise is nothing more or less than impure and irregular frequencies

and noise as something lacking or resisting meaning, the disruption of a signal; and it is

interpreted within the familiar terms of abjection,46 transgression,47 sublimity and the

multiplicity or absence of meaning, combined with a tendency to point to the Futurists and

Dadaist movements as their predecessor and main artistic influence.48

This approach renders the inclusion of other, often more conceptual, elements of their

work in the analysis very hard or even impossible. When the work and ideas of Throbbing

Gristle are taken as a whole, it does not suffice to point to their use of actual, acoustic, noise

as the most prominent feature of their oeuvre and take it as the alfa and omega of the analysis.

When one, as I did in this paper, approaches noise at a more conceptual level and takes

into account the developments and changes that preceding and constructing the modern

discourse on noise and created this concept, it becomes possible to view all the themes,

intentions, methods and forms of expression used by Throbbing Gristle as related to each

other and part of an artistic whole of which the actual use of noise is but one exponent. This

use of actual noise can also be interpreted on a more metaphorical level, standing for the more

46

Biba Kopf, in Voorvelt, 1998: 6047

Duguid, 199548

See Ford, 1999: 8.7-8 and Duguid, 1996


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conceptual level, the noisyness of their work and ideas and the themes that are, due to its

origin, logically linked to noise.

As Simon Ford explains in his book about COUM and Throbbing Gristle, for them music

was never really anything but a means to an end.49

This end focused on the control process

and fighting the information warin a general revolution against the obedience instinct.50

This control of information is a keysite in the ideas of the band. To counter it they were in a

sense we [...] trying to make everything more real... As such, they were, according to Jon

Savage enganging in nothing short of a total war on contemporary perceptions,51

exemplified and aesthetisized by firtations with symbols of totalitarianism, militant guerrilla

and survivalism: Do you really want to be a fully equipped Terror Guard? Ready for action?

Assume Power Focus. NOTHING SHORT OF A TOTAL WAR. NUCLEAR WAR NOW!52

These themes - noise, information, war are a logical trio. As my reading of Kittlers

mediahistory showed, the modern concept of noise came into being with the conceptualization

of sound as frequency and the subsequent invention of the phonograph. The phonograph

remained the only device capable of storing the Real, of storing the slit in reality causing the

failing of the Symbolic order, the falling apart of reality.

But in audiorecording also, the Imaginary and the Symbolic were stored on top of the

Real. The decline of one-on-one recording of actual sound, from the invention of the magnetic

taperecorder as the prime device to record and manipulate sound onwards, meant the rise of

popular music. It was in this music, the result of the eradication of noise in music and

recording, that noise re-emerged in the form of distortion, feedback and synthezisers as a

representation of the Real. It was popular music and culture which formed the main vehicle

for Throbbing Gristle to preach their anti-aesthetic; their attempt to try to make everything

more real... and to counter everyday reality. This was supported by their installment of the

element which representedthe Real as no longer just one of several,but instead one of the

main elements of their music: noise. Which makes it completely comprehensible why the

band relied heavely on improvisation and recorded and released every concert they ever

played: the were avoiding the Imaginary and Symbolic acts of cutting and pasting and instead

presenting the audience with a slice of the, because of both content and recording manners

49Ford, 1999: 10.6

50

Vale, V.; Juno, A. (Ed.), 1983: 951

Jon Savage in Ford, 1999: 0.852

Ford, 1999: 10.22


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very noisy, Real. Or, as Genesis-P-Orridge puts it, you are actually there when it was actually

happening.53

This use of noise was directly and intrinsically linked with their main project:

releasing (liberating) information. Expressed in Genesis- P-Orrdiges terms: We're

interested in information, we're not interested in music as such. And we believe that the whole

battlefield (if there is one in the human situation) is about information. We don't think that

politicians or arms have any real power, we think that's just a facade. We think the real power

lies with who controls the information... It is in this emphasis on informationstrategies where

their use of noise as an acoustic phenomenon and the use of noise as a concept, which finds

its origin in the rise of storage and communicatian media intertwine. Or, put in other words,

it is in their focus on information that their actual use of noise and the conceptual use of noise

meet.

With the conception of frequencies and the invention of audiorecording all sounds

became equal and articulateness [became] a second-order exception in a spectrum of

noise.54

Meaning, which (to talk with Kittler) so-called man, trained immediately to filter

voices, words, and sounds out of noise,55 cant stop piecing together, is rendered obsolete by

the phonograph, which does not filter anything. In the media-age information is created, the

opposite of meaning, the purely mechanical act of transferring data. All sounds contain

information. Since the beginning of the technical age, information is therefor meaningless.

Noise is just the threshold were information becomes disinformation, nonsense.

For Throbbing Gristle information is the crucial site in their ideology. Their strategies

are therefor in every aspect noisy, that is devoid of meaning, with a multitude of information,

but without interpretation, without clear directions, only signals. We wanted it to be

unprecious in every way, said Genesis P-Orridge, except the information implicit in material

and in our choice of sound, and its rarity as an object.56

It is the concept of the overload of

information inherent in noise, the realization that with Edisons invention the epoch of

nonsense, our epoch, could begin and that, as Lacan noticed this nonsense is always already

the unconscious.57 The necessary link between audiorecording, information and

meaninglessness.

53ibidem: 11.14

54Kittler, 1999 (1986): 23

55

ibidem56

Ford, 1999: 7.2257

Kittler, 1999 (1986): 86


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So when Genesis P-Orridge states it was in a sense so very meaningless that it was

potent,58

it is not necessarily the meaninglessness of noise to which Simon Reynolds refers

when he said noiserefuses simple explanations and it is at its best when it just exist: deep

and meaningless, but rather the fact that meaning is being absorbed, annulled, rendered

oldfashioned by the noise of recording, the recording of noise, the noise of the Real. And on

the other hand the realization of the potency of transmitting information of showing the

possibility of multiple, endless, interpretations of the information contained by noise (ergo all

sounds), because of its intrinsical meaninglessness. Showing how the noise is usually covered,

filtered out, selected, cut up and pasted in order to communicate a decent message. How

information is being controlled. This pre-selection, or in Genesis-P-Orridges words, this

Control (with a capital C) is where war comes into play.

What they were up against was, according to Martijn Voorvelt, the fact that the mass

media distort reality by pre-selecting information, robbing people of the individual freedom to

think and act for themselves.59 The prime site where information and its transmissions had to

be controlled and devices to do so were developed was, and is, the army. As Kittler

concluded, Rock- and Popmusic is a missuse of army-equipment and as such a way to cover

up the noise of war. It is the result of the invention of the magnetic taperecorder developed by

the German army as the ultimate device to reduce noise and the Real and to transfer

information. Rockmusik als die real existierende Lyrik von heute, ausgestattet mit allen

Attributen einer Wehrmacht: Unentrinnbarkeit, Auswendigkeit und Allgegenwart.60

Throbbing Gristles militant attitude and use of military imagery uncovers the roots of

Popular Music and massmedia: war. War is also the focuspoint of infomationtechniques. For

Cosey Fanni Tutti the sound was cathartic and used as an assault weapon.61 Their total war

on contemporary perceptions, was fought with and againstthe tools of modern warfare:

informationstrategies and the use of noise as the threshold of information and disinformation.

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59

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