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Noise in the Clouds

by Meat Glue + Social Drift

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Social Drift: The point of this text is to develop the relation between my own noise and Schoenberg's music. There are three things that Adorno talks about that I have completely taken out of context, probably misunderstood, and used to draw parallels between timestretched noise and Schoenberg's music. This is not a direct attempt to justify my own noise, but really my intuitive or emotional understanding of it; all I can hope is that the latter has some reality to it. Part one Expressive-dynamic and rhythmic-spatial listening. I started timestretching noise to help me understand the meaning of a passage in Adorno's Philosophy of New Music. He says: "The unity of rigor and freedom was conceived in the sonata: From dance it received a patterned unity, the intention of achieving the whole; from song it received the opposing, negative impulse in turn producing the whole by its own rigor. In maintaining the identity of the composition in principle - through the tempo" .? It seems to me that Russolo strongly suggests that the features that defines noise as noise are independent of tempo. To quote The Art of Noises: "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". Whereas timestretching does indeed change the harmonic content of timbre, ideally it does not, as its pitch shift component should not and changing speed itself leaves the harmonic relations intact. I mean that noise is just defined by its timbre. So I have argued that timestretching noise changes what is essential to it, the same - its timbre. But nevertheless, it seems obvious that noises are changed even by perfect timestretching. What I think differentiates noise and music, here, is that music, though it can have sensuous qualities, say e.g. resembling the sound of bells (an example Adorno uses in Analyses of Hit Songs), that resemblance is always independent of tempo. Noise is that class of sound that's sensuous referent is onomatopoeia, not a thing, quacks not ducks. And that onomatopoeia, being represented as the word, changes as its length does, whereas the real like referent does not. This may seem like a minor point. But Russolo does break down noises into bangs etc., not those that represent banging things. It means that the sensuality of noise is changed, unlike that of music. Noise is essentially defined as noise, by its timbre, but is categorized by how it sounds. I believe that if there is timestretch throughout the noise recording, that means that sameness and difference are mediated through the structure's *totality* - all of the recording, all of the meaningful structure to it, and what makes the recording one self identical thing. The claim about the first meaning of totality, should be obviously true. With respect to the second meaning, I try to make timestretching the only structuring of anything in the work. Sameness and difference are mediated through every facet of the recording's structure, though that structure is just one fact. Finally, the sameness and difference brought by timestretching changes, or is mediated by, the totality of the structure in the sense of what makes the recording one thing: "The unity of rigor and freedom was conceived in the sonata: From dance it received a patterned unity, the intention of achieving the whole; from song it received the opposing, negative impulse in turn producing the whole by its own rigor. In maintaining the identity of the composition in principle - through the tempo" ? The fact that essential sameness and difference are mediated through the structure's totality, is what makes Scoenberg's music progressive in relation to peers like Stravinsky. I now quote some contemporary commentators on Adorno. "Adorno put forward the general categories of sameness and difference as being the most fundamental to a theory of form... They are always mediated through the totality of the work's structure". "Dynamic subjectivity in its dual aspect of thematic development and variation articulates times though the generation of identity and difference... the extension of variational development to the sonata form as a whole... is further developed by Schoenberg, who thereby... can lay claim to the heritage of classic bourgeois music"
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Based on writings by Social Drift

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released December 6, 2012

Meat Glue, Social Drift

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Extreme Volume Pop Indiana

Hopefully, my various musics are ultimately like magic bullets that enter and impact at the base of the skull, ricochet around the brain chamber, and then leave a gaping exit wound in the forehead. You may hate them


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