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GENDYN and Merzbow: a noise theory critique of Xenakis’s dynamic stochastic

synthesis and its relevance on noise music today

Ryo Ikeshiro Department of Music, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

info@ryoikeshiro.com - http://www.ryoikeshiro.com/

Proceedings of the Xenakis International Symposium Southbank Centre, London, 1-3 April 2011 - www.gold.ac.uk/ccmc/xenakis-international-symposium

Aesthetic considerations of Xenakis’s GENDYN, his general dynamic stochastic synthesis program, are compared with those of today’s noise scene, using Merzbow as an example. Concepts discussed include definitions, their relationship to technology, structure and form, meaning, and notions of failure. Noise theory is used in evaluating GENDYN, and Xenakis’s own writings are referred to in analysing noise music in order to determine the nature of their relationship.

In 2002, the CD release of Xenakis’s Persepolis contained a second disc of remixes by artists working in the field of noise music including Masami Akita, aka Merzbow. These remixes are inevitably “noisier” than Xenakis’s original from 1971, due perhaps to progress in technology in the intervening thirty years. Whilst his influence on these artists and beyond is undeniable and the reason for the additional disc of the release, one may be further inclined to assume that this was of a more general and inspirational nature concerning his radical stance to music or technology, but from a bygone era. However, in 1991, he had completed the first incarnation of his GENDYN program that would produce compositions that are almost comparable in terms of “noisiness” to the participating artists on the remix CD. The aim of my paper is to establish whether a more explicit relationship between his late electroacoustic compositions with noise music today exists, in terms of aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Through a noise theory interpretation of GENDYN and a Xenakian reading of Merzbow using an assemblage of terms and theories from both fields, it is hoped this paper will be helpful in gaining new ways of appreciating and understanding both the GENDYN compositions and noise music.

Merzbow Merzbow is a project started by Japanese artist, Masami Akita, in 1981. The name refers to Merzbau, long-term projects by the Swiss Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters, which transformed rooms within houses inhabited by himself with grotto-like surfaces, columns, sculptures, protruding angled surfaces and tableaux. Merz was his term for work involving collages made from fragments of found or discarded objects. Indeed, early Merzbow recordings are assemblages in the maner of musique concrète, albeit in a very “unmusical” and bastardised form. Samples of recorded sounds were gradually dropped or transfigured beyond recognition, and his music became increasingly noisy from the mid 80s. From meagre beginnings offering mail-order noise on cassette tapes, his name has become synonymous with not just Japanese noise, but noise in general since the 90s.1 Merzbow was chosen as the subject for comparison with GENDYN for the reasons that he is perhaps the most “famous” noise artist, for his prolific output and for being one of the most noisy and uncompromising, thus making him the noise artist par excellence.

Definitions Defining noise as a genre of music, which is itself open to debate, is as arduous a task as defining music. The issue is compounded by the fact that the delineated category appears to be contradictory by satisfying the conditions of both noise and music. Most noise theorists offer several non-musical definitions of noise from various disciplines; Caleb Kelly gives four: “acoustic noise, noise in information theory, subjective noise, and material noise” (Kelly 2009, 69).

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Acoustic noise 2 refers to a physical definition that would seem to be Xenakis’s primary understanding of the term: “Now, what is noise? So-called white noise can be represented by a curve with no smoothness at all, and no periodicity” (Xenakis 1996, 152).

Noise in information theory refers very approximately to that which is not signal, signal being the intended meaning or message.3

For Paul Hegarty, “noise is already that qualification [e.g. unpleasant, loud etc]; it is already a judgement that noise is occurring. ... Noise is cultural ...” (Hegarty 2007, 3).4 Akita was aware of noise as being subjective: “most pop music is noise to me” (Akita, in Bailey 2009, 70).

For the previous two definitions, noise is negative i.e. unwanted, other, not ordered. Noise is negatively defined “i.e. by what it is not (not acceptable sound, not music, not valid, not a message or a meaning)” in terms of information theory, subjective, as genre and as law. Noise is a negativity: exists only in relation to what it is not, and “In turn, it helps to structure and define its opposite (the world of meaning, law, regulation, goodness, beauty, and so on)” (Hegarty 2007, 5). Being defined against a dynamic entity such as music, noise itself is unstable i.e. as what is or is not music shifts, so too does noise. This is in direct contrast to acoustic noise which we consider to have been Xenakis’s primarily understanding: for him noise becomes fixed and quantifiable, as well as constrained within limits.

Additionally, Xenakis viewed the prevailing acoustic notion of noise as being a construct of multiple sine tones to be both unrelated to human perception and unnecessarily computationally expensive. Thus he asks: “Using the principle of harmonic analysis, it is possible to create a route from simplicity to higher complexity. How might one reverse this progression? By starting from random walks produced by stochastic functions, and by injecting symmetries, regularities and periodicities, even up to the point of repeated waveforms” (Xenakis 1996, 153). Xenakis proposes an acoustically and hence positively defined zero-point of noise from which a range of sounds to the opposite end of the spectrum can emerge. At least in concept, musical tones are defined somewhat negatively, in relation to noise, and not vice versa.

This has an affinity with Serre’s description of material noise and his analogy with the sea: “Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages. ... Noise is the basic element of the software of all our logic, or it is to the logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is the background of information, the material of that form” (Serres 1995, 7). Similarly, Hegarty writes: “Noise offers something more like dark matter which may be what allows a structure for everything else to exist (i.e. music, meaning, language, and so on, emerge from and against noise) ...” (Hegarty 2007, 139).

This conceptual model also seems appropriate for recent noise music where the majority of what is heard appears to be white-noise or distortion, devoid of any traditional musical elements. Instead of the resultant sounds being a culmination of distorting periodic sounds, it becomes the starting point from which snippets of recognisable parameters can emerge.

Technology Xenakis’s later electroacoustic style is often viewed as being idiosyncratic. This is in part due to the lack of affinities with either of the two leading electroacoustic institutions in France: GRM and IRCAM. Although his programming style is certainly idiosyncratic, his use of the computer is highly idiomatic to the medium, and hence the technology with which electroacoustic music is created currently. Using Gerhard Eckhart’s terms, Peter Hoffmann very approximately identifies IRCAM with the “Technology of Writing”, GRM with the “Technology of Editing”, and CEMAMu with the “Technology of Computing”. Broadly speaking: at IRCAM, audio analysis is undertaken for the purposes of score-following and the combining of instruments with electroacoustic or tape parts; at GRM, combinations and transformations of recorded sounds are explored. Both approaches involve the use of computers, but merely for the extensions of the possibilities of notation in the former and tape music in the latter. However, Xenakis’s own research institue, CEMAMu, is concerned with the use of computers for the advancement of music that is unique to computers, or more specifically, digital signal processing and the manipulation of audio samples and binary information (Hoffmann 2009, 59-63).

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One area where at least an attempt at the creation of idiomatic computer music is made is in noise music today. Akita describes his early encounters with technology: "My first motivation for creating sound was anti-use of electric equipment - Broken tape recorder, broken guitar, amp etc. I thought I could get a secret voice from equipment itself when I lost control" (Christie, in Pozo n.d). Later, the main source of sound became no-input mixer feedback (Hensley 1999). Misuse, by revealing the limits of the medium often exposes the idiomatic, through a removed and culturally unconditioned viewpoint: the residual is exposed, highlighting materiality. As Greg Hainge explains, “Noise musicians ... highlight those [unwanted] elements of music production that the production process attempts to silence, and as such they foreground the technological system itself” (Hainge, in Kelly 2009, 57-58).5

Structure/form, or noise at the macro level Xenakis was also aware of the other definitions of noise. One of his motivations for the use of stochastics was for the purposes of modelling “natural events such as the collision of hail or rain ... or the song of cicadas ... the sonic phenomena of a political crowd of dozens or hundreds of thousands of people” (Xenakis 1992, 9), i.e. in the organisation of sonic events. These laws of probabilities made available at his disposal a range “from complete order to total disorder” (Xenakis 1992, 9). He describes the evolution of the chanting of a crowd, from periodicity to a cloud, or being chaotic. In these two schemes, total disorder, cloud and being chaotic can be associated with noise. And as he states, this noise appears on all time-scales (Xenakis et al n.d.), from the micro to the macro, the latter being an amalgamation of information theory, subjective and material noise - a description that is also apt for noise music.

Formlessness, or the disruption of form in noise music, or form as noise are important concepts of noise. “The disruptiveness of this ‘form’ ... through volume, unpredictability and relentless change, makes a settling or dwelling difficult. This ecstatic non-music continually structures and destructures both the listening subject and music ... It is the movement and alternation between that makes it noise. ... as listener and performer alike find and lose structures, find and lose repetitions and recurrence ...” (Hegarty 2007, 139).

The question arises of whether noise can remain noise upon repeated listenings. Similarly, Xenakis was well aware that even a compositional structure modelled on the laws of chance and probability of exceptional events heard several times would lose its surprise, or noise effect: “during successive rehearings the relations between the events of the sample ordained by “chance” will form a network, which will take on a definite meaning in the mind of the listener, and will initiate a special “logic,” a new cohesion capable of satisfying his intellect as well as his aesthetic sense” (Xenakis 1992, 37). Whilst the repetition of musical cells, motifs and sections that are fundamental in traditional music is avoided to an extent in noise and stochastic music, its appearance at the level of a whole work cannot be avoided through successive performances; the difference is merely that of scale.

He proposed a possible solution in 1956-57, which could be interpreted as a form of generative music still being explored today: “If, on the other hand, we wish the sample to be unforeseeable at all times, it is possible to conceive that at each repetition certain data might be transformed in such a way that their deviations from theoretical frequencies would not be significant. ... Perhaps a programming useful for a first, second, third, etc., performance will give aleatory samples that are not identical in an absolute sense, whose deviations will also be distributed by chance. ... a system with electronic computers might permit ... a music which can be distorted in the course of time, giving the same observer n results apparently due to chance for n performances” (Xenakis 1992, 37).

With GENDYN, the production of different versions of the same piece became a possibility, though one he did not pursue. This appears to reinforce the view that he was advocating the generation of new aesthetics and significations through repeated listenings. The option of giving n different results on the other hand is one way of viewing Merzbow’s output. On many albums, tracks often just cut in at the point where the previous one faded out as if continuing from an arbitrary point. Individual albums mostly do not have a conventional beginning nor an end: they abruptly fade in and out as if it was an extract from a larger scale work. And between different albums, “the listener can veer between thinking it is all just noise, and that it’s all basically the same, or be awed by the sheer infinity of possibilities unleashed. ... You

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may get used to one album, even start thinking of it as music, but the next one will do something else” (Hegarty 2007, 157). And the fact that there will always be a next one is guaranteed by the amount of music in some releases (the 50-CD Merzbox in a specially-designed case with Merzbow goods including a book and art work being the prime example) and the prodigious number of releases - hundreds, perhaps thousands - on numerous labels, in different formats with many rare, limited editions (e.g. in addition to the usual LPs and CDs, there were the early mail-order cassette tapes wrapped in photocopied pages from pornographic magazines, and also the limited edition of one Merzcedes, a Mercedes with a Merzbow album permanently fixed into the CD player): the task of listening to his entire output becomes an impossibility, in addition to commenting on the consumer fetish of collecting.

Xenakis described his proposal for generative music with n results as thus: “the performances will be statistically identical with each other ... [and] capable of establishing a more or less self-determined regulation of the rare sonic events ... a fundamentally stochastic behaviour, a unity” (Xenakis 1992, 37). In other words, the same laws governing the work are also followed when considering the distribution of all possibilities. Again, compare with Merzbow’s oeuvre: “It does not build logically, or coherently, but it does accumulate – in clumps, in scale, around points of attraction, and in so doing, the edifice of sound or music – or even noise – is filled ...” (Hegarty 2001, 196). His back catalogue could be viewed as a noisy or stochastic accumulation of noise works, or albums, each consisting of noise tracks made of noise in one gigantic self-similar formation of noise.

Meaning, or noise at the micro level Descriptions of noise are often littered with adjectives such as primordial, pre-linguistic, pre-subjective, pre-phenomenological, primitive, etc.6 As well as being evocative and serving a poetic function, grounding in theory is often evident. 7 An analogous attempt at the pre-linguistic are made with GENDYN, through “microcomposition”, at the sample level: “By acting "within" the sound rather than "on" it, Xenakis's mechanism aims at creating a network of relations on a presyntactic (or subsymbolic) level, allowing perceptually relevant data to emerge at a time scale relevant to the listener.” (Di Scipio 1998, 237). With the exception of macrolevel structures i.e. lengths of each section, and microlevel manipulation, no other time scales such as those corresponding to notes, cells or motifs are explicitly stipulated, in both the composition and listening of the work. As the sample level is too short to be significant or relevant “at the level of the elements (or symbols)”, i.e. to become syntax, it is up to each listener to determine this mesolevel for themselves, if at all.8

The possibility of the formation of new meanings in noise music and Xenakis is an attribute of noise as described by Jacques Attali: “Noise does ... create a meaning: ... the very absence of meaning in pure noise ... by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings ... a construction outside meaning. ... It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level of organization, of a new code in another network” (Attali 1986, 33).9

This can inform listening strategies for both Xenakis and noise. For Hegarty, the significant difference between contemporary classical music (the example given being Boulez) and noise involves the virtuosity required in listening, as well as in its performance i.e. “to learn before, and during the listening” in the former as opposed to “a process of unlearning” in the latter (Hegarty 2007, 141). And not only could both approaches be suitable in appreciating Xenakis, but both are essential, i.e. one must unlearn and then relearn: “For me it is always important to go to the limits, to push them, as it were, and to explore these domains which, in a sense, are beyond the aesthetical concerns of art” (Xenakis 1996, 149).

This approach is equally valid for noise. Hegarty’s argument refers to the extremely esoteric nature of contemporary classical music (symptomatic of our technocratic society and the phase of repetition for Attali), and the anti-culture or anti-establishment tendencies in aesthetics and form represented in and by noise. The following, even as metaphor, are perhaps useful at least initially in conceiving what the processes of unlearning (of what culture has ingrained within us as acceptable and musical) and relearning anew (how to appreciate and experience it) might be: “I think I pick up noises from them more than I see them, touch them, or conceive them. I hear without clear frontiers, without divining an isolated source, hearing is better at integrating than analyzing, the ear knows how to lose track” (Serres 1995, 7); “Many people have said

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they could get into a trance from the music. This is a better way of understanding Merzbow.” (Akita, in Hensley 1999).10

Failure There are several notions of failure in noise,11 one being its attempt at being and remaining noise, as a continuation of the same “noisiness” cannot remain noise as “Pure deterritorialization is an end to noise, a new locatedness ...” (Hegarty 2007, 139), as with free jazz’s formlessness which has become a type of form in itself (Hegarty 2007, 47 and EN14), or perhaps was so from the very outset. This could refer to its evolution over the duration of both a single work as well as its progression over several works (as described previously) and by different artists in the genre.

For Attali, “noise is violence ... a simulacrum of murder” (Attali 1986, 26), identified with transgression. Hegarty describes the Bataillan notion of transgression and its failure associated with forms of industrial music, which could be paraphrased to be made applicable to noise music generally, as an analogy for transgression over musically accepted norms through its exploration of its limits and the idiomatic: “successful transgression ... maintain[s] the prohibition ... in order to benefit by it. ... So successful [noise] can only ever aspire to be ‘successful’ - it is caught in a loop of alternating failures - in its mundane failure in not disposing of the taboo [of noise], its alternative failure in getting rid of it and thereby becoming the norm, and above (beneath) all, its failure to even fail properly, as it negotiates between various ways it does not come to be. ... but this does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle [a UK industrial act], acting as if it were possible ...” (Hegarty 2007, 111).

Therefore, if noise succeeds in removing the taboo and becomes acceptable as music or even tomorrow’s pop music, then it has failed on account of being commercially appropriated and would no longer be noise. In other words, once the listeners subjected to Merzbow’s noise are won over (and converted to “noisehands” as once described by Akita), it would no longer be noise. In order to remain noise, the taboo has to be maintained i.e. it cannot become incorporated into or as music. But then it has failed in terms of disposing the taboo i.e. as transgression. Noise lives on in this failure, as residue (Hegarty 2007, 147).

Of course, there is no real reason why this taboo has to be disposed of except in this analogy with Bataille’s notion of transgression. Not all noise musicians consider the aim of their activity to be transgression, though their exploration of limits and the idiomatic provide a conceptual basis. But part of noise’s theoretical appeal at least, lies in its similarities in public reception with other genres involving shocking or offensive material, but through noise alone, as Nick Smith explains in his description of Masonna, another Japanese power electronics noise artist: “Unlike bands that offend with nasty narrative content, such as Anal Cunt, or physical assault, such as G. G. Allin or the Dwarves, Masonna repulses with nothing but noise. Masonna challenges us formally ...” (Smith 2005, 45).12

What constitutes noise is confined within rather narrow limits, though initially, music would appear to be the more restricted category with noise occupying the remaining space of not music. Despite being negatively defined in some respects, there is little room for deviation in order to satisfy all or many of the definitions mentioned previously. Currently, noise requires a certain amount of acoustic noise e.g. in the form of white noise or distortion, for it to be qualified as noise. Yet subjective noise is a historical and cultural construct. Therefore the same acoustic noise will not always remain subjective noise. The qualification of noise depends on the extent that it conforms to these descriptions. Yet there is a contradiction inherent in this grouping, manifest in the impossibility of fulfilling all of these criteria.

One criticism of GENDYN by Agostino Di Scipio concerns its event-insensitiveness: “the unexpected, the singularity of events, does not become a source of information and transformation, but rather favors a levelling-off tendency reflecting the relentless increase of entropic disorder ...” (Di Scipio 1998, 236); “Indeed, the spectrum of probabilistic functions allows for one only global property to emerge, an ineluctable rush toward the average final point or ‘mean state value’ (i.e., stochos, destination, destiny)” (Di Scipio 2002, 25); “Being memoryless, Xenakis's mechanism does not learn from the history of its previous states; it cannot interact with the external, nor can it interact with its own history. ... it is not an eco-system - it has no context” (Di Scipio 1998, 237).

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GENDYN was probably not intended to be an eco-system: an automaton is perhaps more accurate (Pape 2002, 18-19), similarly to how Akita describes Merzbow as “automatism, not improvisation” (Mertalo, in Pozo n.d.). 13 However, the initial part of Di Scipio’s criticism concerning the “levelling-off tendency” to the “average final point” is validated to a certain extent by Xenakis’s own opposing rationale for the use of stochastics. On the one hand, he states that “This law implies an asymptotic evolution towards a stable state, towards a kind of goal, of stochos, whence comes the adjective ‘stochastic’” (Xenakis 1992, 4), whilst on the other hand, advocating indeterminacy in the form of stochastics for the introduction of accidents or surprises (Xenakis 1996, 148). Within his use of stochastics is an inner contradiction and potential for failure: as partially controlled disorder, exceptional events or noise is regulated; however, an asymptotic convergence to a statistical mean is achieved that would appear to be opposing this aim.

The strategy adopted in overcoming this issue by Xenakis is in imposing “very simple overall formal shapes, with separate sections for each of which the mechanism is reset with new input data” (Di Scipio 1998, 237). Though this is achieved by PARAG, an additional program also using a stochastic process that creates a formal, self-similar structure, by the very use of the same process the issue of event-insensitiveness is reproduced at a second time-scale i.e. the sections themselves reach some form of statistical mean determined by the probability distribution chosen in the same manner as the synthesis.

It is possible to view the GENDYN compositions as a series of failures: as each section becomes increasingly less noise-like, the algorithm is restarted with new parameters, only for this process to be continually repeated until it gives up at the end of the piece in attaining noise. The transition to a new section becomes the most consistently noise-like element, but by virtue of this fact, it gradually fails to be noise. In describing this “failure”, Xenakis writes: “When these exceptional events multiply and become the general case, a jump to a higher level [to that of disorder] occurs” (Xenakis 1992, 25). Whilst for Di Scipio this “denies time the power of endowing the elements of the musical flow with a coefficient of creativity” (Di Scipio 1998, 237), for Xenakis this “[disorder] proclaims itself as engendered by the complex, vast, and rich vision of the brutal encounters of modern life. Forms such as abstract and decorative art and action painting bear witness to this fact. Consequently chance, ... an extreme case of this controlled disorder ... enjoys all the benevolent characteristics of an artistic regulator.” (Xenakis 1992, 25). Rather than dynamic evolution, musical flow or an eco-system, Xenakis opts for noise and an automaton, the segmentation and the lack of development in GENDY3 and S.709 being byproducts of his approach. He embraces noise by using the same inherent contradictions present in stochastics.

Conclusions Xenakis’s positive conception of noise, from which tones are somewhat negatively constructed, has a parallel in Serre’s definition of material noise. In listening, this could be a useful model for the scale of “noisiness” that begins at the level of white noise, randomness or background noise from which periodicities, patterns and meaning emerge further up the parameter.

Both Xenakis and noise artists are concerned with the limits of the medium and highlighting its materiality: Xenakis through an idiomatic approach to digital technology; Merzbow and other noise musicians through misuse that exposes the residual.

They are complementary in approach to noise or stochastics as form. Whereas Xenakis opts for the formation of new meaning and aesthetics through repeated listenings of the definitive work that may initially confound musical expectations and sensibilities due to its noisiness, Merzbow chooses the opposite strategy as proposed by Xenakis of releasing an inexhaustible number of albums so that one need never listen to the same work twice, allowing noise to remain noise.

The pre-linguistic nature of noise can be viewed as an analogy for Xenakis’s “microcomposition” at the presyntatic level of samples, both allowing for the formation of new meaning by the listener due to the absence of any prescribed signification or time scale. Listening to Xenakis requires a process of “unlearning” as with noise, and listening to noise requires “relearning” as with Xenakis.

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Corresponding issues of the failure of noise in being and remaining noise are evident in Xenakis’s conflicting motivations for the use of GENDYN and PARAG. The introduction of accidents and the unexpected and subsequent evolution to a stable state are descriptions that apply equally to both noise and the GENDYN compositions.

The affinities in approaches explain why and demonstrate how Xenakis’s late computer works have withstood the test of time, as either electroacoustic or noise music. This paper reiterates Xenakis’s appeal and legacy beyond the confines of contemporary, academic music, inscribing him into the history of noise that includes Russolo, Varèse, musique concrète, free jazz, industrial and of course, Merzbow and power electronics. Additionally, this partly accounts for the non-mutually exclusive nature of the audience and participants of electroacoustic and noise music. Hopefully, it also serves as an aesthetic validation of noise, and explains the fruitful and increasing blurring of boundaries between institutional computer music and underground noise music, as evident in the recent continuation of his work both within and outside CEMAMu e.g. by Florian Hecker and Russell Haswell, Sinan Bokesoy and Sergio Luque.

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Xenakis, Iannis. Persepolis + Remixes. Edition 1. With Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, Ryoji Ikeda, Francisco López. © 2002, 1972 by Asphodel. ASP 2005. Compact Disc.

Notes 1 Caleb Kelly describes Japanese noise as a particularly noisy subgenre of noise. It is further subdivided into power electronics, to which Merzbow belongs, and psychedelic and free noise that includes Keiji Haino and the Incapacitants (Kelly 2009, 63). 2 Herman Helmholtz states: ”The sensation of musical tone is due to a rapid periodic motion of the sonorous body; the sensation of a noise to non-periodic motion”, examples given being “The soughing, howling, and whistling of the wind, the splashing of water, the rolling rumbling of carriages ...” (Helmholtz 1954, 7-8). 3 E.g. in a phone conversation, noise would include hiss, hums and any alterations to the quality of the sound caused by the telephone line and inherent to the medium as well as non essential sounds in the dialogue and crosstalk (Kelly 2009, 70-71). For a comprehensive overview of entropy and information theory, see: (Shannon 1948). 4 This is evident in phrases such as “turn that noise off,” shouted by parents irritated by what their children consider to be pleasant and enjoyable music. Of course, this qualification applies in the reverse situation where children will consider what their parents enjoy to be noise: one demographic’s music is another’s noise. Or, to go further, “we would have to acknowledge the constructedness of the “subjectivity” of noise”” (Hegarty 2004, 2). 5 Another relevant example of misuse in noise music is Yasunao Tone’s use of compact discs. His Wounded CDs explores the same digital medium through the use of tape and scratches made onto the discs resulting in harsh glitches, skips and erroneous noise from “malfunctions”. By interfering with the correct reading of the laser, the binary information itself is manipulated, albeit in a more crude manner (Kelly 2009, 214). A similar approach is also evident in Nicolas Collins’ misuse of CD players through the disabling of the mute button (Kelly 2009, 249). 6 E.g. "noise is one of the most primitive music forms in the modern city" (Woodward (ed.) 1999, 11) and pre-linguistic and soothing qualities of noise described by John Shepherd and Richard Leppert (Hegarty 2007, 9). 7 Hegarty describes noise as “both always having existed and having been brought into being. ... Instead of being primordial sound, noise is that which comes to have been primordial.” The analogy here is with Derrida’s conception of language of “always already”, as a social construct and hence with a beginning, but appearing and functioning as though it has always existed and with no origin (Hegarty 2007, 139). Similarly, Serre’s definition of material noise comes before the possibility of phenomena: “Noise cannot be a phenomenon; ... As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise ... reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself ... noise is metaphysical” (Serres 1995, 13). For Csaba Toth, noise is “pre-linguistic” and “disrupt[s] meaning; ‘what does this Noise mean?’” and equates to jouissance in the Lacanian sense of “enjoyment”, an excess and that which serves no purpose, and also as defined by Barthes as “pre-linguistic ... unmediated materiality ... [where] signification interrupts meaning, that is, it disrupts the symbolic, the social ...” (Toth 2009, 32-33). More accurately, it is signifiance, the workings of signifiers, as opposed to signification, the workings of signs for the production of meaning (Barthes 1977, 182): “Contrary to signification, signifiance cannot be reduced, therefore, to communication, representation, expression ...” (Barthes 1977, 10). 8 Even a digital audio “glitch” comprised of one sample of “1” relies on roughly 20 ms of silence or “0”s in its adjacent samples to be perceived as thus, so in practice it is never merely one sample in duration. 9 Attali is scathing of what he describes as Xenakis and the post-war avant-garde’s desperate attempt at forming universal meaning (Attali 1986, 113-114); however, Xenakis’s inclusion in this group is perhaps unfair and an over generalisation. 10 Concepts of ma (spacing, in terms of both time and distance) and Zen meditation could also be suitable metaphors for the process of unlearning and relearning, especially if we consider Japanese noise to be part imported Western residue of a process of normalisation without its context, allowing for its subsequent appropriation. Parallels are evident in other aesthetic forms e.g. Akita believes that Japanese practices of sadomasochism such as rope bondage, with which he aligns Merzbow due to their shared underground values and heritage, incorporated the “world of perversion” that emerged in the West through the development of power mechanisms (Foucault 1990, 40-43) without the underlying control structures responsible for their birth. This is what partly allows for the inscription of pre-

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Western meaning (Akita, in Hensley 1999). Similarly, it would be interesting to discover the extent of Xenakis’s knowledge on the context of noise i.e. punk, metal, industrial, 80s electronic music etc. The Foucauldian sexuality analogy could be further explored by comparing the Western “science” of sexuality to “Western Noise [that] is often too conceptual and academic” and “a kind of technique” (Akita, in Hensley 1999), and erotic art - where “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself;” (Foucault 1990, 57) - to “Japanese Noise [that] relishes the ecstasy of sound itself” (Akita, in Hensley 1999). Additionally, Xenakis’s insistence on playing back his electroacoustic works at loud volumes (Harley 2004, 19) as most noise musicians are renowned for doing, concerns the importance of the sense of immersion in both. By its loudness, not only can noise not be ignored, but one becomes subjected to it and in the process, loses one's sense of self and subjectivity to attain a state of ekstasis. This is another possibility for the process of unlearning and relearning. 11 “Noise ... tests commonplace notions of hearing and listening, and tries to destabilize not just our expectations of content or artistic form ... a loss of controlled listening, a failure of adequate hearing ...” (Hegarty 2007, 5). Misuse, described previously, is another component of failure of noise (Hegarty 2007, 181), sometimes resulting in a certain type of desirable malfunction that has created its own aesthetic (Cascone 2000, 12-13). 12 The GENDYN compositions also made quite an impact at the time due to its new sounds, even on electronic musicians and Xenakian scholars. See for example: (Hoffmann 2009, 10; Di Scipio 2002, 22). 13 Though displaying varying degrees of the two facets mentioned (and the particular composer mentioned may initially seem inappropriate as a subject for comparison), both the GENDYN works and Merzbow seem reminiscent of “the curious combination of autonomous composition and pedagogic exercise that characterizes some of Bach’s most powerful instrumental works. They were conceived not simply as compositions, but also as exercises which would enable the composer to get such a grip on the musical material that the difference between it and the musical subject might one day vanish.” (Adorno 1994, 262).