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Originally Posted by fugazifan
i think recently my tastes have move from enjoying more free noise to prefering noise as a means rather than an end. a lot of my reasons for disliking noise s by speaking to noise artists and noise fans, who can be so booring. the main problem with them ( very broad generalazation) is that they seem to think that since the genre itself is "bad" ie noisy, that justifies any peice of shit record or show, as long as it lives up to that criteria.
so if i say, man that show was shit, all they did was shout and push buttons, they say, what do you expect, its noise. that attitude opens up the slate for such a long list of talentless frauds that justify their musical exsitence because the noise is the final stop in their creativity.
cause i do think, no matter what, to make music, just like every art form one needs talent. thats why extreme free jazz noise, like boerbetomagus is more interesting to me than some asshole with an osscilater and dist pedal through a mike, because not everyone can play sax that way... kind of like any idiot can throw paint on a canvas, but not everyone is jackson pollock...
but i still like noise sometimes....
i hope some of that was coherent and not just random babble
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It's the old thing of reading with context. When we're in a thread about Whitehouse/ Wolf Eyes (or whomever) we understand that the word 'noise' may refer to the musical genre 'noise', characterised by x and y (alluded to above).
When we're saying it's shit, prurient sound (the idea that Celine Dion is offensive sound), 'noise' is an adjective meaning 'sound I didn't enjoy'. Or, if we're being Kantian aesthetes, we're broadly generalising to say that this is tasteless, bad music.
In the context of Cage-ian aesthetics, we understand that Cage sought to destabalise the Western 'classical' notion of tonality being central to music (something that Schoenberg, to Cage, didn't succeed in doing).
Often by 'noise' we mean something that doesn't fall under the auspices of accepted Western tonality - precisely the sort of argument that dismisses quartertonal music (or just intonation) as being outside of the accepted boundaries of Western tonality.
We've also got the sense of 'noise' whereby it's used as synonymous for what a lot of people (your spectralists/ post-Xenakisians) refer to as enharmonism.
All are fine, methinks, but when people read things out of context and just say "I believe Cage was right, absolutely" we miss the context of reading. Cage didn't do away with the ideas of good or bad (he had preferences and dislikes, like everyone), he just made the decision 'good' or 'bad' art less important than (drumroll) its context.