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)

Edward T. Hall: Beyond Culture (1976)

“Edward Hall’s fifth book is both a summary of many themes first raised in his volume on proxemics in 1959 and a fresh insight more reminiscent of a psychologist than an anthropologist. The psychological flavor appears epigramatically in a double index to the book. First there is the ‘Index of IDEAS and techniques of TRANSCENDENCE’. Immediately following is an ‘Index of Themes’ in addition to the normal index one finds in most textbooks. The indexes signal a selfconsciousness of the main proposition advanced by Hall, viz., ‘What is called for is a massive cultural literacy movement that is not imposed but springs from within.’ This movement of the collective individual would begin to relieve the two cultural crises in the contemporary world of human experience. One crisis is the population/environment connection and the other, ‘equally lethal’, is man himself.

The analysis offered by Hall covers 15 chapters beginning with the paradoxical nature of culture, where persons and their mechanical/technological extensions are confused. In a populist flourish, Hall labels this tendency the ‘E.T. screen’. An Extension Transference emerges where one intellectually confuses an extension with the process extended. Hall readily admits this issue is not new, being the focus of the Korzybski heritage of General Semantics. Yet, Hall does make the heuristic point that culture per se is now a prime, systematic example of ET.” (from a review by Richard L. Lanigan, American Anthropologist, 1978)

Publisher Anchor Books, 1976
ISBN 0385124740, 9780385124744
320 pages

Review (Marc R. Tool, Journal of Economic Issues, 1977)

PDF (29 MB, no OCR)
See also his monograph The Silent Language, 1959.