Christof Migone: Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body (2012)

“This book delineates a territory of investigation for sound art and its various manifestations through historical, theoretical, polemical and critical analyses of artistic, musical and literary works. In doing so, Migone gives radical definition to an auditory study that includes the complexity of silence and mutism, identity and abjecthood, and language and its stutterances. The recurring site of these stagings is the somatic under all its forms: embodied and disembodied, fragmented and amplified, vocal and mute.

Concrete sites that are investigated include: Antonin Artaud’s writings, Alvin Lucier’s recording I am sitting in a room, Erik Satie’s composition Vexations, Marina Abramovic’s performance “Rhythm 0”, Adrian Piper’s Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s documentary film First Contact, and John Cage’s 4’33.”

Publisher Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles & Berlin, 2012
Audio Issues series, 5
ISBN 9780982743942, 0982743947
296 pages
via author

Reviews: Daniela Cascella (The Wire, 2012), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Chris Kennedy (MusicWorks, 2013), Silvana Fiorese (Domus, 2013).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

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Hijokaidan: Music For Psychological Liberation (1994)

With hosts Alice Sailor and David Hopkins, from Kansai TV 1994. Supplemental media for the 2013 book Japanoise.

Posted on Jul 23, 2013 by distortculture on YouTube.

Commentary: Four Three (2018).

Download MP4 (23 MB), subtitles.

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David Novak: Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (2013)

“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.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2013
Sign, Storage, Transmission series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9780822353799, 0822353792
x+292 pages
via author

Reviews: Shaun McKenna (Japan Times, 2013), Scott McLemee (Inside Higher Ed, 2013), Nana Kaneko (Ethnomusicology Rev, 2014), Andrés García Molina (Current Musicology, 2014), Max Ritts (Society+Space, 2014), Jonathan Service (Japan Forum, 2014), Rosemary Overell (Perfect Beat, 2014), Patrick Valiquet (Popular Musicology, 2014), Owen Coggins (Harts & Minds, 2014), Seth Mulliken (Sounding Out!, 2014), E. Taylor Atkins (Asian Music, 2015), Shelina Brown (Notes, 2015), Jennifer Milioto Matsue (Am Anthropologist, 2015), Carolyn S. Stevens (Am Ethnologist, 2015), Christopher Tonelli (Sound Studies, 2016), Benjamin Harley (Enculturation, 2016), Etienne RP (2017).

Book website, with supplemental media
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (4 MB)