ABSTRACT
Japanese Noise music is characterised by its blatant lack of traditional musical architecture; it evolves from schemes that ignore melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic progressions. It is thereby commonly considered as a brutal and radical expression of postmodernity. In certain regards, Noise can indeed be interpreted as a general ecology of the interference whereby the junction between human activity and nature can be re-evaluated with sounds, through a violent criticism of structures and exclusive systems. This chapter, through the prism of Noise in Japan, questions how the enjoyment and production of sound in an artistic capacity can be linked to the creation and development of cultural characteristics; this is done both in the context of contemporary society and, by extension, in an ahistorical, essentialised fashion. Noise as a topic of research is an important subject as, by going beyond a strictly musical framework, it convenes the culture of sound in a broader sense.
