Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music

Description

Resonances is a compelling collection of new essays by scholars, writers and musicians, all seeking to explore and enlighten this field of study. Noise seems to stand for a lack of aesthetic grace, to alienate or distract rather than enrapture. And yet the drones of psychedelia, the racket of garage rock and punk, the thudding of rave, the feedback of shoegaze and post-rock, the bombast of thrash and metal, the clatter of jungle and the stuttering of electronica, together with notable examples of avant-garde noise art, have all found a place in the history of contemporary musics, and are recognised as representing key evolutionary moments. Noise therefore is the untold story of contemporary popular music, and in a critical exploration of noise lies the possibility of a new narrative: one that is wide-ranging, connects the popular to the underground and avant-garde, fully posits the studio as a musical instrument, and demands new critical and theoretical paradigms of those seeking to write about music.

Michael Goddard is Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Salford, UK. He has published research in media and aesthetic theory, Eastern European film and visual culture and anomalous forms of popular music. Ben Halligan runs the Graduate Programme for the School of Media, Music and Performance at the University of Salford, UK, teaching in the areas of Critical Theory, Media Studies and Performance at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Nicola Spelman is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Salford, UK.

Resonances offers a conceptually diverse yet simultaneously minutely detailed investigation of noise that draws a line between popular music, cultural and sound studies. ... [Reverberations and Resonances] are a significant achievement, a comprehensive collection of thinking to date about where noise fits into our cultural lives, pointing forward towards a fertile development of the field. -- Adam Behr, University of Edinburgh, UK * Popular Music * From overviews of specific artists--Lou Reed, Einsturzende Neubaten, Diamanda Galas, Filthy Turd--to theorizing about the sonics of feminism, computer sounds, turntablism, and composition, this timely book resituates noise not as Jacques Attali's societal 'herald of change' but as a vital and everyday part of the new media landscape. It's a great addition to any serious sound scholar's library. * Gina Arnold, Adjunct Professor of Rhetoric at University of San Francisco and author of Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana * The collection itself is a diverse mix...Resonances is fairly highbrow. The book's language is intensively scholarly, and its appeal mostly academic. -- Guy Crucianelli * Pop Matters! * The value of this anthology lies in its attempt to be as complete as possible, and its inclusion of perspectives that often go unconsidered. -- Aurelio Cianciotta * Neural (Bloomsbury translation) * In the decade since, a stunning range of new offerings from a variety of publishers has become readily available, and sound studies is a far more expansive discipline. This fact is nowhere more evident than in Bloomsbury Academic's excellent sound studies catalog ... the scholarship here shows how adept the cultural study of sound can be at unearthing the thorny political and social tensions that define contemporary culture. -- Nicholas C. Laudadio, University of North Carolina Wilmington * Journal of Popular Music Studies * Resonances carries its readers from the ideas of Theodor Adorno to 'Hi-Fi Wives,' Russian punk and 60s rock. If you want to know what Iannis Xenakis, Eric Clapton, and the 'Filthy Turd aesthetic' have in common, this is the book for you! Handsomely illustrated and extensively documented, Resonances is a must-read volume for modernists and postmodern cultural critics alike. -- Michael Saffle * Endorsement * 'That's not music, it's noise!' The contributors to this book ask us to think again. They reveal that noise can prove as stimulating a part of sonic organization as melody and harmony-the distorted rock guitar being one example among many. These engrossing essays cover a remarkable variety of musical practices, exploring noise as both accident and deliberate design, and building theories about noise that set the agenda for future debate. -- Derek B. Scott, author of Sounds of the Metropolis (2008) and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). This collection is a massive achievement in laying the groundwork for a new way of thinking about things musical. Its scope is large - Hendrix, Xenakis, deafness, production aesthetics, pleasure, Russian punk - and essays impress in both their attention to detail and the breadth of their conceptual scope as we move from questions of aesthetics to detailed close reading. It is a study which succeeds as both music scholarship and cultural contextualization, particularly in relation to artists in other media (Ballard, Artaud) and key scholars (Attali, Adorno, Benjamin). And although it is hard to photograph noise, the book's photos find some excellent visual analogues. -- Allan F Moore, Professor of Popular Music, University of Surrey, author of Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means