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Abstract
Japanese noise music (Japanoise) has strong associations with death. In the early stages of Japanoise’s development, practitioners would often make reference to eroticism, violence and death in their performances and album artwork to help visualise the “excess” of their sound. The discourse of Japanoise also draws on these associations, through concepts such as disembodiment, to help frame this transgressive enterprise. Death becomes a way of visualising and conceptualising a subversive style of music that attempts to leave the world of limits and meaning. Paul Hegarty and Eugene Thacker both account for Japanoise in these terms. Although death is only implicit in their writing, it will be argued that this understanding of death is essential to what Hegarty means by failure and what Thacker means by disembodiment. This paper will show how, for both theorists, death names a paradoxical yet extreme form of possibility that enables Japanoise to test limits. However, the problem with this understanding is that it holds Japanoise to a limited framework. It essentialises the concepts of negativity and subversion to the economy of Japanoise. This paper will argue that Japanoise cannot be limited to these concepts if it hopes to be more than an oppositional form of music and a tired form of transgression. This requires that its relationship with death not be reduced to a form of production or act of will. By arguing that Hegarty and Thacker’s accounts of noise can be read as Heideggerian, this essay will critique this understanding by drawing on Maurice Blanchot’s account of death. This critique will show how a different understanding of death enables a more nuanced understanding of Japanoise.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. As explained by David Novak in his book Japanoise, Japanoise is a term that came into use in 2009. It was used in the USA to invoke musical aspects of what was seen as “Cool Japan” (Novak, Citation2013, p. 10): elements of Japanese popular culture that were gaining momentum and popularity in the West during this time. The terms “noise music”, “Japanese noise music” and simply “noise” have also been used in the discourse of this music.
2. The most common recourse when defining noise music is to refer to the idea of “harsh noise”, exemplified by artists like Merzbow and C.C.C.C, whose sound is full of white noise, static and feedback. At the other end of the sonic spectrum is Sachiko M and the music of Onkyōkei (音響系) or Onkyo, whose almost entirely absent compositions, like her recording Detect (Citation2000), frame a type of music based on a lack of sound. In between these two extremes is everything else, which varies in degree of intensity, volume, instrumentation (or lack thereof) and improvisation.
3. This series was comprises six films produced by Yuuri Sunohara in 1990 and released by Right Brain Productions.
4. Pink eiga (Pink Film) is a broad cinematic term in Japan that encompasses a number of films with adult content.
5. As William Large makes clear at the end of his text Heidegger's Being and Time, “there is something faintly absurd about explaining such a distinction in a glossary”, or in this case in an endnote, given that such a distinction was “the aim of Heidegger’s whole philosophical life” (Large, Citation2008, p. 107). But we can follow Large’s admittedly crude definition for the purpose of remaining focused on the issue at hand. Sein (Being), often written with a capital “B”, “refers to how things are” whereas Seiendes (being), sometimes written with a lower case “b”, refers to a specific something. The ontological explanation of Dasein has to do with how Dasein is, “as opposed for example, how a stone, plant or animal is” (Large, Citation2008, p. 107).
6. This interpretation of Heidegger is not without contention. Reginald Lilly, for instance, argues that this interpretation is a “fantasm that affords him [Levinas] a certain escape: a fantasm that simplifies Heidegger’s thought (and being) not so as to newly engage being, but so as to set being and the question of being out of play – to dismiss both being and Heidegger in favour of an ethics beyond being” (Lilly, Citation2008, p. 36). Although Lilly’s argument is fascinating and convincing, he is equally dismissive of the complexity of Levinas’ reading – a reading that will help illustrate, in this paper, what death as a condition of possibility might mean for Japanoise.
7. Hegarty argues that the overdetermined need to transmit a clear message, on the part of extreme right groups, is “merely the extension of rationalised liberal society”. Beyond the surface level of certain noise and industrial acts using extreme imagery that might be aligned with fascism, noise cannot, as is proper to its want to break out of music and meaning, “carry content” (Hegarty, Citation2007, p. 12) so it cannot be overtly fascist.
8. On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of his own private militia took hold of a commander’s office in the Ichigaya camp of Japan’s Self-Defence Force. They barricaded themselves in the office where Mishima then delivered a speech from the office balcony to soldiers below. His speech was intended to rally the troops toward restoring sovereign rule to the emperor. After his speech was met with laughter and jeers, Mishima returned to the office where he committed seppuku and was beheaded by Hiroyasu Koga.