Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Sign, Storage, Transmission) - Softcover

David Novak

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082235392X ISBN 13: 9780822353928

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience.

For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?

In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.

About this title

About the Author

David Novak is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

JAPANOISE

MUSIC AT THE EDGE OF CIRCULATION

By David Novak

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5392-8

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
vii
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 Scenes of Liveness and Deadness..........................................
28
2 Sonic Maps of the Japanese Underground...................................
64
3 Listening to Noise in Kansai.............................................
92
4 Genre Noise..............................................................
117
5 Feedback, Subjectivity, and Performance..................................
139
6 Japanoise and Technoculture..............................................
169
7 The Future of Cassette Culture...........................................
198
Epilogue: A Strange History................................................
227
Notes......................................................................
235
References.................................................................
259
Index......................................................................
279

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SCENES OF LIVENESS AND DEADNESS

There are about forty-five people in here, bathing in the blast of Noise rightnow: a group of older fans, some college kids already holding CDS they'vepurchased from the merchandise table, a handful of foreigners (mostlyCanadian and American), and a lot of familiar faces among the regulars,local performers, and store and label owners here for the show. These all-Noiseconcerts usually happen about once a month in Tokyo, in differentvenues. The livehouse, 20,000V, is set up like any small hole-in-the-wallrock club, a poorly maintained, boxy room in the basement—actually, twofloors down in the subbasement—of an anonymous building on the mainshopping street in Koenji. It's about a hundred square feet, and there arehuge black wooden speaker enclosures chained to the ceiling on either sideof the stage; flyers on the walls for both current and past hardcore, scum,punk, and Noise shows; a tiny bar in the back by the toilets selling cupsof beer; and a little table near the door where recordings by the evening'sperformers are sold.

I stand about halfway toward the front of the room, slightly to the sideof the stage, in line with one of the huge towers of speakers. MSBR ison stage now, and he is very interesting to watch. His body movementsare much more conservative than those of the energetic eighteen-year-oldLong Islander Viodre, whose thrashing set preceded MSBR, but his handsare always moving: constantly adjusting pots and faders, starting and stoppingsounds, changing them, pushing against pedals, and switching themoff and on with the base of his hand. In comparison with tonight's otherperformers, MSBR's Noise is more multilayered and rhythmic, and he isalmost completely still as he sits in the center of an earsplitting whirlwindof sound. He cuts in and out of an analog delay, shuttling through a spaceyblur as he shifts out of one timbre and into another, never letting any texturelinger for more than five or ten seconds. Everyone is rapt, falling intothe steady flow of sound. No one talks; no one could talk if they wantedto.... Besides, it costs ¥4,000 (about US$50) to get in, so you can't affordnot to get it—you just listen.

Indeed, everything about this audience shows that they already knowwhat they are doing here, as they stand scattered about the floor of theclub, now watching the next band, Nord, blasting through the speakers,two huge thickets of incense burning on stage as blue light illuminates theperformers from behind. The low-end vibrations are inside my chest, forcingmy lungs to compress as I exhale slightly, involuntarily, along with theblasts of sound. Nord is so heavy, pounding deep drum sounds, droningmoans with electric clatter over it all, and as the atmosphere intensifies,growing louder, the lights begin to come up—white, glaring spots in myeyes as their set crashes to an end.

Finally, the famous harsh Noise duo Incapacitants takes the stage. It'sso loud I can't breathe—they vibrate the air inside my mouth, in the backof my windpipe, as the volume grows and grows. I fear for my eardrumsdespite the wadded-up balls of wet toilet paper I stuffed in my ears as theset began, and I retreat a few meters to the back of the tiny room whereit's slightly—barely—quieter. Two or three others have done the same, butmost press closer to the center as Mikawa and Kosakai crash their soundsagainst us. One Noise musician I recognize is right up in front, directly infront of a speaker, bouncing his head and shoulders back and forth, andoccasionally thrusting his arms out in front of his body toward the musicians,vibrating tautly in place.

Mikawa is crushing a contact mic under a bent square of steel, tilting itback and forth to shift the oscillating loops of feedback emerging from hissystem. Kosakai shakes the mic in his hand in front of his Marshall amp,his entire body rattling and jerking as if he is holding onto part of somepowerful being that is trying to escape his grip, as a quaking stream ofhigh-pitched noise spins out of the speakers. Mikawa leans over in frontof a smaller Roland amp, each of their heads down on either side of thestage, faces to their tables now, leaning on them, shaking them—or arethey being shaken? Kosakai crashes to the floor in a jumble of electronicparts as his table collapses—the lights come up harsh and bright, shiningright at us. Suddenly the sound is cut, the lights switch off a second later,and we are left in a strange void of darkness and silence, soon broken bysporadic applause and shouts of approval, as the performers shut off theiramps and abruptly stumble off stage, exhausted, tripping over the morassof wires on the floor.

* * *

Noise is about liveness and deadness, both in performance and in the technologicallymediated sound of recordings. Live Noise performances canproduce extraordinarily powerful embodiments of sound that help audiencesimagine a community of Noise listeners, both locally and as a global"scene." How can we understand these experiences of sound as part ofNoise's circulatory context? Listeners most often encounter Noise throughindividual experiences with recordings, and even the liveness of Noise concertsis geared toward isolated receptions of sound. The feedback loop betweenliveness and deadness, then, is about the co-constitutive relationshipbetween performance and media in the lives of listeners. But this loopruns parallel to another kind of feedback—between making sound andfeeling its effects. Liveness is about the connections between performanceand embodiment, which transform passing moments into repeatable encountersof listening. Deadness, in turn, helps remote listeners recognizetheir affective experiences with recordings as a new aesthetics of soundand listening in the reception of Noise.

In this chapter, I illustrate Noise's liveness and deadness in several differentcontexts of experience. I describe liveness in the places of Noiseperformance, in the embodied practices of Japanese Noisicians—particularlythe legendary Incapacitants—and in the affective experiences of individuallisteners. Liveness is further embedded in Noise through the productionand circulation of media. Noise recordings were foundational inthe growth of performance networks, especially in North America. Noiseis embedded in techniques of production that aestheticize its overwhelmingsound into recorded qualities of loudness and harshness. Finally—although,of course, there is no end to this loop—the sonic values of deadnessin Japanese "harsh" Noise recordings become a poetic resource forlisteners, who reanimate the scene of live Noise performance. The densityof the experiential relationship between recordings and live performancein Noise follows from the displacement of musical communitiesand scenes in circulation. Where is the real place of Noise? What do thesensations of liveness and deadness mean to different Noisicians and listeners?What kinds of emotions are produced in the sensational livenessof Noise? How are recordings woven into translocal receptions, especiallyfor those far from any accessible live scene? How does recorded media helplisteners connect their isolated listening to social performance?

Ethnographers often privilege live performance in narratives of musicalculture. For many researchers, live music is where authentic musicalexperiences happen, and performances represent sites of dialogueand interactivity that stand in stark contrast to the displacements of recordedmedia. Thomas Turino attributes an especially heightened musicalsociality to "participatory performances," especially flexible, improvisedgatherings (jam sessions, sing-alongs, etc.) where the collective "doing"of music is stressed over the "end product that results from the activity"(Turino 2008:28). Live music evokes an immediate—and apparently unmediated—experiencethat is musically authentic, culturally distinct, andsometimes politically resistant. Amateur performance is the foundationalsource of continuous, collective sociomusical knowledge, and its transmissionsmay contain the remnants of a traditional oral "music culture."Recordings, on the other hand, rationalize music beyond the productivespace of social relations into separate forms of "studio art" that are passivelyconsumed.

The experiential binaries of this scenario do not offer much to redeemthe participatory experience of mediated listening or justify the centralityof recordings in everyday musical life. Musical circulation becomes a mediatedkulturkreis: live performance stands at the bull's-eye of creative production,but its social force is gradually diffused through waves of technologicalmediation. At best, recordings become disembodied placeholdersfor authentic culture. At worst, they are a virtual dead end that dislocatespeople from the living realities of music. Certainly, the physically and temporallyimmediate context of performance gives live music a deep socialpresence and a sense of "here and now" in face-to-face interaction. Butsocial experiences of live music can be profoundly individuated and oftendepend on embodied knowledge acquired through personal experienceswith recordings. Just as performance is not always productive of social co-presence,"dead" recordings do not necessarily separate listening communitiesinto atomized consumers.

Recordings and performances constantly overlap in perceptual spacebut spin out into different contexts. In his influential book Liveness: Performancein a Mediatized Society (1999), Philip Auslander showed that contemporarylive performance depends on the integration of technological media tocreate its cultural presence. Meanwhile, liveness is inscribed in studio productiontechniques that sonically represent the copresent space of musicalcommunities in recordings (Meintjes 2003; Porcello 2005). Media, then,are not just the remote end product reflecting the original context of musicalproduction. Recordings make sense of music for listeners, and constitutedifferent socialities of performance and musical community. And justas online virtual worlds do not need to correlate to offline contexts to becomereal places, recordings do not have to connect "back" to performancepractices to actualize musical experiences (Boellstorff 2008).

It is important to recognize that liveness is not a natural by-productof live performance. Liveness is not simply the transcendent feeling of"being there" at an exceptional concert among an appreciative audience.It is an affective relationship between embodied experiences of the "real"world and individual "virtual" encounters with technological media. AsJane Feuer (1983) argues in her work on live television, liveness cultivates afeeling of immediacy and interaction with televisual events. Liveness helpsviewers actualize the extreme fragmentation of space inherent in broadcastingand allows them to share the experience of a media event even asit happens somewhere else. In this, liveness is both a technique of mediaproduction and a social habitus that naturalizes technological mediationthrough embodied practices of reception (Couldry 2004).

In bringing these relationships of musical place, performance, andmedia to the surface, the subjects of Noise put a great deal of stress on"the scene." The context of the local music scene has been central to historicalimaginaries of independent music and exerts a powerful hold onits publics (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Kruse 1993). For scattered listenerswho do not share face-to-face interactions, the idea of the scenecan evoke a "diasporic," even "tribal" network of participants, which canbring musical sociality into a globally mediated context. The notion of thescene was especially useful in complicating earlier notions of musical subculturesthat imagined alternative social identities through art, fashion,and language (Hebdige 1979). Will Straw (1991) used the term to describethe social construction of local communities in decentralizing practices ofcirculation. In his useful formulation, a scene is not a physical site or networkbut a fluid and flexible mode of performance that helps listeners navigatethe industrial contexts of music production. Yet music scenes sometimesboil down the essence of a local community to a singular authenticsite, where unmediated social relations are musically enacted. This is notto deny the symbolic power of the scene. The very idea is deeply motivatingfor fans who imagine, listen for, seek out, read about, talk about, andpoetically conjure an original space of liveness, which appears to somehowtranscend its own mediated networks.

But in Noise, deadness makes the scene live. Its listeners perform musicalworlds through recordings: they repeat their sonic experiences, or putthem on pause; they turn sociality up or down, or shut it off; they triggerindividual memories and imagine impossible continuities between disparateplaces and times. But they also bring a sonic imaginary into culturalcirculations, which extends beyond their own private audition. They conjureplaces across the globe, possibilities buried in the past, and feelingsbeyond social representation. Listeners slowly connect their own privatesensory knowledge to the broader discourses of Noise, and more—theyfeel these sounds and emplace them in their own lives in ways that createnew worlds of experience. And, as I will show, they can use these experiencesof recordings to enliven the place of performance, by feeding theirisolated listening into the scene.

FEELING THE SPACE OF THE LIVEHOUSE

In Japan, a small music club is called a "livehouse" (raibuhausu), a Japaneseneologism that describes a site in which raibu ("live," meaning livemusical performances) take place. In many ways, livehouses set the toneof music scenes in Japanese cities. The spatial fit between a livehouse andan audience is very important to the affect of liveness, because the feel ofany performance is affected by the size of the venue. Noise is almost alwaysperformed in a relatively small livehouse, and occasionally (but rarely) inoutdoor concerts or multipurpose art spaces. Because organizers take apersonal risk in paying the venue for tickets in advance, attendance is importantand carefully managed. In several years of fieldwork, I rarely sawa local Noise "live" sell out, but neither were the tiny places much lessthan full: with occasional exceptions, Japanese Noise audiences vary fromaround twenty to fifty attendees. Most livehouses of this size are not dedicatedto a single kind of music but accommodate many different fringemusic audiences. As a result, Japanese livehouses become "big tents" for adiverse range of overlapping underground scenes.

The energetic, "packed" feeling of public space in Japanese cities createsa famously dense, focused ambience, and this affect follows throughto the feel of its performance sites. In his study of Japanese hip-hop, IanCondry describes the deeply social context of the genba, the "actual place"of live music where cultural production is "made real" in affective experience(Condry 2006). This sense of place is crucial for creating local socialidentifications for global genres like hip-hop, which are often constructedthrough recordings produced elsewhere. The focused attention of listeningin an enclosed space helps construct the boundaries of a local audienceas well as a separation from the general public. In Japanese cities, smalllivehouses sometimes occupy basements or higher floors of office buildingswith little overflow into the outside world, rather than in street-levelzones set aside for entertainment. The "actual place" of local performanceis clearly delineated from ordinary life: you are either in or out.

Foreign performers are often impressed (and sometimes confused) bythe close attention Japanese audiences give to performers. Many have commentedon the intensity of livehouse spaces, despite the fact that audienceswere not necessarily any larger than at home. One Chicago-basedmusician who frequently performs in Japanese venues described this atmospherein terms of the density of feeling in the small rooms: "In a way, playingin Japan feels pretty good as a musician, because the place is alwayspacked—there might only be fifteen people, but it's packed—and you sortof feel like, 'Wow, there's a scene happening here!' I mean, it's not muchwhen you look at how many people live in Tokyo, or when you go to see abasic rock show in a bigger livehouse. But there is a feeling of some sortof connection with a scene, even though it's small ... because everyoneis stuffed into the same place, whether it's a big place or a small place,people are always stuffed in." In a Japanese livehouse, even a small audiencecan occupy the space in a way that feels crowded, creating the feel ofthe scene, just as the crowd creates the feel of the city. The liveness of thesemoments promises the continuity of sociality beyond the walls of the live-house,feeding back into the everyday lives of the listeners. Liveness is createdsimply by being in these special spaces, where people return over andover again to embody the scene. Livehouses conjure and narrate musicalworlds through this experience of repetition, which depends on the longevityof local performance spaces.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from JAPANOISE by David Novak. Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235392X
• ISBN 13: 9780822353928
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304