• Issue #01
  • Issue #02
  • Issue #03
  • Issue #04
  • Issue #05
  • Issue #06
  • Issue #07
  • Issue #08
Issue #08
Contents
editorial
KOFI AGAWU
African Art Music and the Challenge of Postcolonial Composition
PAUL ZILUNGISELE TEMBE
China’s Effective Anti-Corruption Campaign
DILIP M. MENON
Changing Theory: Thinking Concepts from the Global South
BEN WATSON
Talking about music
Theme AI in Africa
blk banaana
An (Other) Intelligence
VULANE MTHEMBU
Umshini Uyakhuluma (The Machine Speaks) – Africa and the AI Revolution: Exploring the Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence on the Continent.
OLORI LOLADE SIYONBOLA
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
CHRIS EMEZUE & IYANUOLUWA SHODE
AI and African Languages: Empowering Cultures and Communities
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
Toward Misrecognition. | Project notes for a haunting-ting
SLINDILE MTHEMBU
AI and documenting black women's lived experiences: Creating future awareness through AI-generated sonics and interpretive movement for the future of freeing suffering caused on black bodies.
ALEXANDRA STANG
Artificially Correct? How to combat bias and inequality in language use with AI
BAKARY DIARRASSOUBA
Bambara: The Jeli (Griot) Project
ROY BLUMENTHAL
Artificial Intelligence and the Arcane Art of the Prompt
AI GENERATED
"AI on Artificial Intelligence in Africa" and "Exploring its impact on Art and Creativity"
JULIA SCHNEIDER
AI in a biased world
MBANGISO MABASO
Bana Ba Dinaledi: Telling African Stories using Generative AI Art.
ALEX TSADO & BETTY WAIREGI
African AI today
BOBBY SHABANGU
Using Artificial Intelligence to expand coverage of African content on Wikipedia
DARRYL ACCONE
Welcome to The End of Beauty: AI Rips the Soul Out of Chess
VULANE MTHEMBU & ChatGPT
Hello ChatGPT - A conversation with OpenAI's Assistant
DIMITRI VOUDOURIS
Evolution of Sιήκ
STEFANIE KASTNER
Beyond the fact that most robots are white: Challenges of AI in Africa
MARTIJN PANTLIN
Some notes from herri’s full stack web developer on the AI phenomenon
galleri
THANDIWE MURIU
4 Universal Truths and selected Camo
ZENZI MDA
Four Portals
TIISETSO CLIFFORD MPHUTHI
Litema
NESA FRÖHLICH
Agapanthus artificialis: Biodiversität im digitalen Raum. Vierteilige Serie, Johannesburg 2022.
STEVEN J FOWLER
2 AI collaborations and 9 asemic scribbles
PATRICIA ANN REPAR
Integrating Healing Arts and Health Care
SHERRY MILNER
Fetus & Host
borborygmus
JANNIKE BERGH
BCUC = BANTU CONTINUA UHURU CONSCIOUSNESS
GWEN ANSELL
Jill Richards: Try, try, try...
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
Nguni Machina remixed
AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION
Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).
RAJAT NEOGY
Do Magazines Culture?
NDUMISO MDAYI
Biko and the Hegelian dialectic
LEHLOHONOLO MAKHELE
The Big Other
frictions
KHAHLISO MATELA
At Virtue’s Zone
DIANA FERRUS
In memory of “Lily” who will never be nameless again
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Six Poems from the Shadows
SIHLE NTULI
3 Durban Poems
SIBONELO SOLWAZI KA NDLOVU
I’m Writing You A Letter You Will Never read
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships episode 3
claque
SIMON GIKANDI
Introducing Pelong Ya Ka (excerpt)
UNATHI SLASHA
"TO WALK IS TO SEE": Looking Inside the Heart - Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka
VANGILE GANTSHO
Ilifa lothando – a Review of Ilifa by Athambile Masola
ZIZIPHO BAM
Barbara Boswell found in The Art of Waiting for Tales
WAMUWI MBAO
Hauntings: the public appearance of what is hidden
CHARL-PIERRE NAUDÉ
Dekonstruksie as gebundelde terrorisme
VUYOKAZI NGEMNTU
Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili - A Review
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Taking radical optimism beyond hope - Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South Africa’s Shack Settlements
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
WHITE MISCHIEF – Our past (again) filtered through the lens of coloniality: Andrew Smith’s First People – The lost history of the Khoisan
CHANTAL WILLIE-PETERSEN
BHEKI MSELEKU: an infinite source of knowledge to draw from
JEAN MEIRING
SULKE VRIENDE IS SKAARS - a clarion call for the importance of the old and out-of-fashion
GEORGE KING
Kristian Blak String Quartets Neoquartet
ekaya
PAKAMA NCUME
A Conversation with Mantombi Matotiyana 9 April 2019
KYLE SHEPHERD
An Auto-Ethnographic Reflection on Process
PAULA FOURIE
Ghoema
DENIS-CONSTANT MARTIN
The Art of Cape Town Singing: Anwar Gambeno (1949-2022)
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Something in Return, Act II: The Blavet-Varèse project
STEPHANUS MULLER
Afrikosmos: the keyboard as a Turing machine
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Ubizo and Mental Illness: A Personal Reflection
off the record
FRANK MEINTJIES
James Matthews: dissident writer
SABATA-MPHO MOKAE
Platfontein, a place the !Xun and Khwe call home
NEO LEKGOTLA LAGA RAMOUPI
A Culture of Black Consciousness on Robben Island, 1970 - 1980
NELSON MALDONADO-TORRES
Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality*
ARYAN KAGANOF
An interview with Don Laka: Monday 10 February 2003
JONATHAN EATO
Recording and Listening to Jazz and Improvised Music in South Africa
MARKO PHIRI
Bulawayo’s movement of Jah People
STEVEN BROWN
Anger and me
feedback
MUSA NGQUNGWANA
15 May 2020
ARYAN KAGANOF / PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Tuesday 21 July 2020, Monday 27 July, 2020
MARIA HELLSTRÖM REIMER
Monday 26 July 2021
SHANNON LANDERS
22 December 2022
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
the selektah
CHRIS ALBERTYN
Lost, unknown and forgotten: 24 classic South African 78rpm discs from 1951-1965.
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
CHRIS BRINK
Reflections on Transformation at Stellenbosch University
MARK WIGLEY
Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
    • Issue #01
    • Issue #02
    • Issue #03
    • Issue #04
    • Issue #05
    • Issue #06
    • Issue #07
    • Issue #08
    #08
  • borborygmus

AFRICAN NOISE FOUNDATION

Perennial fashion – noise (After Adorno).

For more than 40 years, since 1979 when the contagious enthusiasm for it broke out in Japan, noise has maintained its place as a mass phenomenon. Its method, all declarations of propagandistic historians notwithstanding, has remained essentially unchanged. Yet none of this alters the fact that noise has in its essence remained static, nor does it explain the resulting enigma that millions of people seem never to tire of its monotonous attraction. Endo Masami, internationally known today as the art editor of Dice magazine, is responsible for the best, most reliable and most sensible book on the subject; 18 years ago he wrote that noise was in no way a new musical idiom but rather, “even in its most complex manifestations a very elementary matter of incessantly repeated formulae”. This kind of unbiased observation seems possible only in Japan; in Africa, where noise has not yet become an everyday phenomenon, there is a tendency, especially among those devotees who have adopted it as a Weltanschauung, to regard it falsely as a break-through of original, untrammelled nature, as a triumph over the musty museum-culture.

However little doubt there can be regarding the Shamanistic elements in noise, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology, the person who chafes against the father-figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests. This propensity accelerates the standardization, commercialization and rigidification of the medium.

The range of the permissible in noise is as narrowly circumscribed as in any particular cut of clothes. In view of the wealth of available possibilities for discovering and treating musical material, noise has shown itself to be utterly impoverished. Its use of the existing musical techniques seems to be entirely arbitrary. Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of noise consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhibition, as within an inarticulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas and clichés to the exclusion of everything else.

In order to understand how an entire sphere can be described by a few simple recipes as though nothing else existed, one must first free oneself of the clichés, “vitality” and “groove of the time”, which are glorified by advertising, by its journalistic appendage and in the end, by the victims themselves. The fact is that what noise has to offer rhythmically is extremely limited. The most striking traits in noise were all independently produced, developed and surpassed by serious music since Xenakis. And its “vitality” is difficult to take seriously in the face of an assembly-line procedure that is standardized down to its most minute deviations. The noise ideologists, especially in the USA, mistakenly regard the sum of psycho-technically calculated and tested effects as the expression of an emotional state, the illusion of which noise evokes in the listener.

Just as no piece of noise can, in a musical sense, be said to have a history, just as all its components can be moved about at will, just as no single measure follows from the logic of musical progression – so the perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society, not so different from the nightmare vision of Huxley’s Brave New World. Whether what the ideology here expresses – or exposes – is the tendency of an over-accumulating society to regress to the stage of simple reproduction is for economists to decide. The surrealists, who have much in common with noise, have appealed to this level of experience since Apollinaire: “ici même les autmobiles ont l’air d’être anciennes”.

Noise, like everything else in the culture-industry, gratifies desires only to frustrate them at the same time. However much noise-subjects, representing the music listener in general, may play the non-conformist, in truth they are less and less themselves.  Individual features which do not conform to the norm are nevertheless shaped by it, and become marks of mutilation.

Terrified noise fans identitfy with the society they dread for having made them what they are.

 Noise fans can be divided into two clearly distinguishable groups. In the inner circle sit the experts, or those who consider themselves such – for very often the most passionate devotees, those who flaunt the established terminology and differentiate noise styles with ponderous pretention, are hardly able to give an account, in precise, technical musical concepts, of whatever it is that so moves them.

Gathered around the specialists in a field in which there is little to understand besides rules are the vague, inarticulate followers. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence.

Psychoanalytic theory alone can provide an adequate explanation of this phenomenon. The aim of noise is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. “Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,” the eunuchlike sound of the noise band both mocks and proclaims, “and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite”.

If this interpretation of noise – whose sexual implications are better understood by its shocked opponents than by its apologists – appear arbitrary and far-fetched, the fact remains that it can be substantiated in countless details of the music. The entire sphere is saturated with terminology which distinguishes between long and short haired musicians. The latter are noise people who earn money and can afford to appear presentable; the others whose long manes are exemplary, are grouped under the little esteemed stereotype of the artist who is starving and who flaunts the demands of convention. In noise, the Philistines standing over Samson are permanently transfigured.

The castration symbolism, deeply buried in the practices of noise and cut off from consciousness through the institutionalization of perennial sameness, is for that very reason probably all the more potent. And sociologically, noise has the effect of strengthening and extending, down to the very physiology of the subject, the acceptance of a dreamless-realistic world in which all memories of things not wholly integrated have been purged. To comprehend the mass basis of noise one must take full account of the taboo on artistic expression in Japan, a taboo which continues unabated despite the official art industry, and which even affects the expressive impulses of children. Although the artist is partially tolerated, partially integrated into the sphere of consumption as an “entertainer”, a functionary – like the better-paid waiter subject to the demands of “service” – the stereotype of the artist remains the introvert, the egocentric idiot, frequently the incel. While such traits may be tolerated in professional artists – a scandalous private life may even be expected as part of the entertainment – everyone else makes himself immediately suspicious by any spontaneous artistic impulse not ordered in advance by society. Nevertheless the need for expression, which stands in  no necessary relation to the objective quality of art, cannot be entirely eliminated, especially during the years of maturation. Teenagers are not entirely stifled by economic life and its psychological correlative, the reality principle. Their aesthetic impulses are not simply extinguished by suppression but are rather diverted. Noise is the preferred medium of such diversion. Viewed from this standpoint, several unusual features of noise can be more easily understood. The role played by arrangement, for instance, which cannot be adequately explained in terms of a technical division of labour or of the musical illiteracy of the so-called composers.

The achievement of the noise musician and expert adds up to a sequence of successfully surmounted tests. But expression, the true bearer of aesthetic protest, is overtaken by the might against which it protests. Faced by this might it assumes a malicious and miserable tone which barely and momentarily disguises itself as harsh and provocative. The subject which expresses itself expresses precisely this: I am nothing, I am filth, no matter what they do to me, it serves me right.

If the aesthetic realm originally emerged as an autonomous sphere from the magic taboo which distinguished the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure, the profane now takes its revenge on the descendant of magic, on art. Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane which finally took over the taboo. Nothing may exist which is not like the world as it is.

Noise is the false liquidation of art – instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Share
Print PDF
VULANE MTHEMBU & HEIKKI SOINI
RAJAT NEOGY
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute