I envy anyone who has yet to witness their first NOISE show. For those with virgin ears, within the first couple minutes, it is almost impossible to halt the instinctual reaction of an auditory red flag. The brain computes the sounds coming from the artist on stage and signals to the logic “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” But you don’t leave, because NOISE is what you expected and why you bought the ticket.
Being from the fertile NOISE scene of Western Massachusetts, I was aware of the lineage of noise art beginning with Luigi Russolo’s L’Arte dei Rumori (1913) and Marcel Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise (1916). I assumed that this lineage was restricted to being a beautiful but sickly side effect of only the industrial West. As if NOISE was a radiation induced tumor growing off the large body of Western classical music.
I was, of course, wrong. Even worse, when I first moved to South Korea I discovered that I was the stereotypical Westerner, staring bleary eyed through Edward Said’s Orientalist glasses. The walk from the Seoul airport to my hotel even further engrained my faulty assumptions. The alien street noise frightened me to the core, from the languages, to the distorted K-Pop blasting out the the store shops, to the men in trucks slowly driving up and down the streets screaming into megaphones as if the apocalypse had arrived.
With my non-understanding of Korean, and taken in context, I felt adrenaline hit the bottom of my stomach as it dawned on me that the men on the megaphones were warning the public: THIS IS NOT A TEST... THIS IS NOT A TEST... NORTH KOREA HAS FIRED NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT SEOUL... YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO TAKE SHELTER UNDERGROUND...AGAIN I REPEAT THIS IS NOT A TEST...
I was, of course, wrong again. As I found out when I reached my hotel, the men driving thought the streets screaming through megaphones were selling apples. From this experience of street-noise overload, I learned not to assume anything.
Being from the fertile NOISE scene of Western Massachusetts, I was aware of the lineage of noise art beginning with Luigi Russolo’s L’Arte dei Rumori (1913) and Marcel Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise (1916). I assumed that this lineage was restricted to being a beautiful but sickly side effect of only the industrial West. As if NOISE was a radiation induced tumor growing off the large body of Western classical music.
I was, of course, wrong. Even worse, when I first moved to South Korea I discovered that I was the stereotypical Westerner, staring bleary eyed through Edward Said’s Orientalist glasses. The walk from the Seoul airport to my hotel even further engrained my faulty assumptions. The alien street noise frightened me to the core, from the languages, to the distorted K-Pop blasting out the the store shops, to the men in trucks slowly driving up and down the streets screaming into megaphones as if the apocalypse had arrived.
With my non-understanding of Korean, and taken in context, I felt adrenaline hit the bottom of my stomach as it dawned on me that the men on the megaphones were warning the public: THIS IS NOT A TEST... THIS IS NOT A TEST... NORTH KOREA HAS FIRED NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT SEOUL... YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO TAKE SHELTER UNDERGROUND...AGAIN I REPEAT THIS IS NOT A TEST...
I was, of course, wrong again. As I found out when I reached my hotel, the men driving thought the streets screaming through megaphones were selling apples. From this experience of street-noise overload, I learned not to assume anything.
It turns out that in South Korea, just like in the USA, golden age jazz plays on the speakers of hip cafes, K-USA pop melts the plastic of tacky storefronts and clubs, and NOISE in all its sadistic reincarnations rules the underground scene.
In the USA it is no big deal to shrug off tradition and wave the middle finger at the aesthetics of your ancestors. After all, we have only 500 years of history, most of which was spent slaughtering frontiers and imitating Europeans. In Asia, however, the history of cultural tradition is immense, going back farther in years than Western culture can count.
There is something profound about listening to NOISE in a performance setting, as some golden Buddha smirks, hidden in some mountainside temple just miles away. If experimental music is to go against the grain of tradition, the tradition of the East certainly provides a solid anchor for the dawning of the NOISE age.
With the onset of the maturation of globalism, Western music fans have no excuse for being ignorant of the NOISE coming from the East. I realize only now that I didn’t need to travel to South Korea to discover what was already available on free internet forums and websites.
Most modern music waves the flag of lyrics about generic and manic emotional states. NOISE is not exclusive to the understanding of a particular language. NOISE is a universal language.
(fin)
In the USA it is no big deal to shrug off tradition and wave the middle finger at the aesthetics of your ancestors. After all, we have only 500 years of history, most of which was spent slaughtering frontiers and imitating Europeans. In Asia, however, the history of cultural tradition is immense, going back farther in years than Western culture can count.
There is something profound about listening to NOISE in a performance setting, as some golden Buddha smirks, hidden in some mountainside temple just miles away. If experimental music is to go against the grain of tradition, the tradition of the East certainly provides a solid anchor for the dawning of the NOISE age.
With the onset of the maturation of globalism, Western music fans have no excuse for being ignorant of the NOISE coming from the East. I realize only now that I didn’t need to travel to South Korea to discover what was already available on free internet forums and websites.
Most modern music waves the flag of lyrics about generic and manic emotional states. NOISE is not exclusive to the understanding of a particular language. NOISE is a universal language.
(fin)
