38

Ausschreibung®”

„Noise Please“
Issue 3.0 / Interference A Journal of Audio Culture

Interference is an online peer-reviewed journal in association with Gradcam and the
CTVR, Trinity College Dublin.

As seen with the growing vocabularies of dissonance, the retro-commodification of glitch
aesthetics, and the many rich-media anthologies now exclusively devoted to the characte
risation of noise, the act of qualification frequently absorbs difference. In distributing this
call for papers, therefore, it is not an ontology we seek, but a necessary reflection on the
politics of noise as these relate in turn to new media ecologies, cultural practices and fluC
tuating modes of governance. Here an array of definitions - from unwanted sound, chaotlc
frequency distribution to deconstructive remainder, systemic glitch or excess, blend, and g&
sture at once to cultural practices of dissent and their broader socio-political resonances.

Such an enquiry acknowledges the vast legacy of noise across auditory cultures, tracing
echoes in historical practices engaged with public assembly, protest, territorial dispute an(
the management of difference. This legacy also travels the twin trajectories of industrialisation
 and urban development in the early Twentieth Century, reflected in various cultural
 movements from Futurism, dissonant compositional and instrumentation techniqueS.
through to Musique concrete, early Electronic Music and Free Jazz.

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, the parallel development of systems theory (coM'
cerned with the management of equivocation) alongside the growing acknowledgement of
textual ambiguity in the Arts, reflects an ideological contradistinction between scientific a7
cultural epistemes in terms of how noise was negotiated. Increasingly contingent on tech“
niques for the quantisation, synthesis and transmission of signals, and formally influenced
by the proliferation of stochastic and aleatory processes as compositional techniques,
this dialectic has had a significant impact on the grain of audio culture, and the fluctuating
signification of noise in particular. A canonical work such as Christian Marclay’s /Record
Without a Cover/ or Yasunao Tone’s /Wounded CD/ cuts to the very heart of this relation”
ship, such that the exploit of the technological medium provides the material from which to
perturb the boundaries of musical aesthetics.

Today we encounter a situation in which the aesthetics of failure or dissent are comfortabl)
subsumed within the vocabulary of commercial pastiche. Where software manufacturer$S
produce plug-ins to homogenise digital distortion alongside a healthy trade in circuit-bent
electronics over the internet, so too the rhetoric of subversion is increasingly indistinguiS- ,
hable from the neo-liberal reflexivity of governments, institutions and states, and our tact@
the selfsame logics of viral capital and soft control. It might seem that our noise echoes I"
a vacuum. If we’re screaming, we're not making any sound. We may need to reconsider
the apparatuses of noise.

Taking a theoretical perspective that draws from Jacques Attali onwards to writers today
such as Steve Goodman, Mattin, Anthony lles, Paul Hegarty and Simon Reynolds, we cal