Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music

by Michael Goddard (Editor)

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 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.

Genres: Music, Theory, Art

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 20, 2013

About the author

Michael Goddard is Reader in Media and PGR Director in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford. He has published widely on Polish and international cinema and visual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He recently published a book, Impossible Cartographies on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations and Resonances. He is currently completing a research project, Guerrilla Networks, examining radical media ecologies in film, TV, radio and radical politics in the 1970s from a media archaeological perspective.

Reviews

[fergoose · Rating 2 out of 5]

read it for the ‘shoegaze’ chapter, rest was garbage and narrow-sighted in its exploration of noise music