ABSTRACT

Introduction and history Where does noise come from? Noise is everywhere, of course, but the liberation of noise is a story peculiar to twentieth-century music. The story begins, perhaps, with the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo who, in 1913, called for a new music of noises in the manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’. He defined a classification of the noises produced by his self-built instruments, the intonorumori (cf. Russolo, 2000). More noise arrived with the development of (radio) studio technology from the 1950s onwards, as the artists of the musique concrète movement incorporated everyday noises into their musical narratives, the technology enabling an aesthetic in which extra musical sounds were to be treated as musical material and moulded into compositions (cf. Ruschkowski, 1998: p. 207ff.). Music made of noises made its first grand appearance only later in popular culture. The artists of the Industrial scene first introduced the new noise aesthetic here. The early experiments of groups like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and SPK (to name but a few) led to the liberalization of sound and positioned seemingly dysfunctional noises as important elements at the heart of popular music. This new movement started to emerge internationally in the second half of the 1970s and was later termed ‘industrial music’ (cf. Hegarty, 2007). It was a crystallizing moment in music. Through its liberalization of musical means and its promotion of ‘access to information’, as well as artistic and philosophical ideas, and through the use of shock tactics, industrial music created a singularity point that abolished predominant values and musical norms and allowed something entirely new to emerge (Savage, 1983: p. 5). The groups of the industrial scene issued forth under a bold and often violent aesthetic and employing crude strategies of destruction (cf. Kleinhenz, 1995: p. 94). Throbbing Gristle – once dubbed the ‘wreckers of civilization’ (cf. Ford, 1999: pp. 6-22) – and their contemporaries sought to create something new by demolishing the old and the given: be it musical harmonies, concrete buildings or semantic chains. This was achieved by applying tactics of disassociation, utilizing the literary method of cut-ups and releasing their product (mostly tapes and vinyl) by themselves, independently of any more traditional record company.