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Annihilating Noise
Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music , Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar.
It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.
It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published December 10, 2020
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About the author
Paul Hegarty
22 books11 followersPaul Hegarty is an author, musician, and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork. He performs in the noise band Safe and is involved in running the experimental music record label dotdotdotmusic.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 1, 2023
Quite the difficult read. You really have to be into noise music to power through it.
Fortunately, it is my case and Paul Hegarty's lengthy, often circular reflections on the nature of noise, its origins and materiality and links to other forms of more conventional music not only have enlightened me about noise music, but also about my own nature. Because, let's face it: liking adversarial, disharmonic music says something about you (and the people who like this music) more than it says anything about this music itself. Because noise is everywhere and permeates everything.
Noise is against and disruptive and so are people who willingly engage with it. This is somewhat of a 301 proposition here, but if you're into it as much as I am, it's informative and life-affirming even
Fortunately, it is my case and Paul Hegarty's lengthy, often circular reflections on the nature of noise, its origins and materiality and links to other forms of more conventional music not only have enlightened me about noise music, but also about my own nature. Because, let's face it: liking adversarial, disharmonic music says something about you (and the people who like this music) more than it says anything about this music itself. Because noise is everywhere and permeates everything.
Noise is against and disruptive and so are people who willingly engage with it. This is somewhat of a 301 proposition here, but if you're into it as much as I am, it's informative and life-affirming even
Displaying 1 of 1 review