PASSIVE NOISE

Abstract

This paper aims to establish a distinction and relationship between two types of noise – active noise and passive noise – while giving emphasis to the latter. Active noise is the discourse of negativity and violence that some theorists associate with noise’s materiality, an association particularly pronounced in engagements with Japanoise. The problem with this discourse is that it relies on a culturally normative understanding of noise as well as novelty. This narrative inevitably leads to a dead end. Noise, and artistic practices like Japanoise that draw on noise sounds, have a short lifespan if their entire purpose is one of shock and disturbance. However, Japanoise is not dead: it persists both as a genre and as a sonic idea/gesture. This article suggests that noise persists, and Japanoise remains relevant, because it comes from a region not exhausted by categories of negativity and violence. This article will show how underneath active noise there resounds a deeper, more profound a-cultural noise. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s account of passivity, which names the anarchic region of absence in his thought, this noise will be described as passive noise. In this context, passivity must be understood differently from the conventional sense as something opposed to activity. Likewise, passive noise does not refer to background noise. Instead, passive noise will be described as the interiority of excess that manifests as a breach in the closure of active noise. This breach will be shown to be consistent with Blanchot’s view of the inexhaustibility of art and will be described, specifically in the context of Japanoise, as the intimacy of excess that is the lifeblood of maximalist forms of noise-making. This will also amount to a reconsideration of the idea of transgression by reframing Japanoise in terms of inertia.

Keywords:

• noise
• passivity
• Japanoise
• transgression
• Blanchot

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

abbreviations

IC	=	The Infinite Conversation.
SL	=	The Space of Literature.
SNB	=	The Step Not Beyond.
TO	=	Thomas the Obscure.
WD	=	The Writing of Disaster.

Notes

1 There is something inherently absurd about trying to describe music that invites misunderstanding and whose discourse is centred on the issue of definition. There is something doubly absurd about trying to describe this music when the aim of this article is to problematise, even further, the issues raised by various theorists in that discourse. With this in mind, there are a few general and mundane things that can be said. Japanoise artists use “noise” sounds instead of “musical sounds.” They use white noise, static and feedback in place of instrumentation, melody and rhythm. It is often played loudly. It has no clear structure. The majority of Japanoise compositions are one continuous sound, with various textures and inflections making slight alterations. All of this is contentious. All of this invites debate.

2 Early incarnations of Japanoise, particularly the early work of Merzbow, married the extreme noise levels with a Sadean–Bataillean aesthetic. Album imagery often consisted of violent sexual imagery, bondage and death.

3 Onkyô is a free improvisation movement that emerged in the late 1990s in Japan which emphasised minimalism and quiet noise by combining elements of techno, noise and electronic music. In opposition to the maximalist form of noise, onkyô works toward an almost complete abolition of sound bordering on a Cagean silence. It favours sonic blips and glitches that punctuate the sounds of environmental space.

4 There are similarities between Hainge’s argument and my own, particularly the effort to think noise as “the incommensurability of identity” (Hainge 48). The difference, it seems, is a matter of neutrality. Whereas Hainge thinks in terms of ontology, the idea of ontological positivity for Blanchot, and by extension this idea of passive noise, is problematic.

5 Hegarty addresses this issue in Noise/Music. He claims that noise cannot carry content which means it cannot overtly be fascistic (124). Of course, many noise and industrial acts have an interest in fascistic imagery. Whether the aim is just to offend by engaging with every cultural taboo imaginable, or whether it represents an actual ideology, can only be presumed. Noise, beyond this presumed content, cannot in itself be fascistic.