Notes - 'Merzbow, Spiral Blast and the Ecstasy of Sound Itself' by John Latartara

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  1. Edwin Pouncy, "Consumed by Noise," The Wire 198 (2000).
  2. Ibid.
  3. In addition, noise in music is a constant element, from attack noise, to bow noise, to interference phenomenon such as beats and chorus effect.
  4. Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises." Strunk's Source Readings in Music History Ed. Leo Treitler (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998): 1328 - 1334.
  5. David Revil, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992).
  6. One of the more popular music history books, Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) clearly illustrates this influence/evolution approach.
  7. This "mixing" of genre could be viewed as less homogeneous and more heterogeneous. As the literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin has stated in his essay "Discourse on the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination Ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996): 415., "...for in the novel there is no single language; there are rather languages, linked up with each other in a purely stylistic unity - not at all the same thing as a linguistic unity..." (Italics by Bakhtin).
  8. John Backus, The Acoustical Foundations of Music (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977). Backus uses the term "inharmonic" instead of "complex" for noise.
  9. Pouncy, op. cit.
  10. For an essay which deals specifically with theoretical issues related to the concept of noise see Paul Hegarty, Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music (ctheory.net).
  11. This type of analysis is what most new music (The Wire) and pop music (Rolling Stone, Vibe) magazines focus on.
  12. The following color images use Fourier analysis to represent the entire sound signal, including all sine-tones, harmonic and complex sounds. The horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents frequency. A color chart on the right shows the intensity level for each sound, with dark blue showing less intense sounds and red showing more intense sounds. These images were created using Sound Technology software.
  13. For evidence on the way humans group musical material based on, among many other factors, frequency see Diana Deutsch, "Grouping Mechanisms in Music.", The Psychology of Music Ed. Diana Deutsch (San Diego: Academic Press, 1999).
  14. Chad Hensley, The Beauty of Noise: An interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow, (Esoterra.com).
  15. The appearance of M4 which initiates this merger of M4 and M3 occurs at the positive golden section of Spiral Blast (2'48").
  16. Georges Bataille Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986): 38-39.
  17. Bataille disagrees with the "scientific" approach which categorizes taboos as pathological neurotic states, thereby diminishing the power of transgression. As he states in Eroticism on p. 37, "This way [scientific] of looking at it does not do away with the experience but it does minimize its significance."
  18. A paradox, therefore, emerges. The more one objectifies and accepts noise, the less powerful the infringement. Has the above acoustic definition of noise and the analysis of Spiral Blast diminished the power of the work?
  19. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros (Hong Kong: City Lights Books, 1989): 19.
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