Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar.It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today’s technological ecology.
Paul Hegarty teaches Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of Noise/Music (Bloomsbury, 2007) and co-series editor of the Ex:Centrics series with Bloomsbury. He jointly runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic, and performs in the noise bands Safe and La Société des Amis du Crime.
Introduction: Where Is Noise as Practice and Theory Today?I. Ungrounding1. Earth Apathy: A General Ecology of Sound2. Catch and Capture: ‘Field’ and ‘Recording’ in Field Recording3. The Empty Channel: Noise Music and the Pathos of Information4. Eon Cores: Noise Prospecting in A Personal Sonic GeologyII. Unsettled 5. Is There Black Noise?6. After Generation: Pharmakon, Puce Mary and the Spatialized, Gendered Avant-Garde7. The SilenceIII. Unmoored 8. Playing Economies9. The Spectacle of Listening10. The Restoration: Vinyl and the Dying Market11. The Hallucinatory Life of TapeIV. Undermined12. Supplementing (in) Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures 13. Less Familiar: The Near-Music of David Jackman and Organum14. BUNK: Origins and Copies in Nurse With Wound and The New Blockaders15. Vile Heretical Misprision: Dante’s Commedia as Metal Theory16. Noise Hunger Noise Consumption: The Question of How Much is EnoughIndex
Annihilating Noise is an excellent contribution to sound studies, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intersection of noise and broader social processes.