Open your ears and listen, what do you hear? Can you hear over
all the noise around you at all? The traffic outside, police sirens, people
shouting, tram going by, cars honking blurs through your window no matter how
modern they are. The whirring of the computer’s harddisk and the refridgerator
next door, the thumping and bumping of the people in the flat above or below or
beside yours, doors cracking, furniture being moved, more people shouting at
each other. The constant blaring of the radio or tv brings me to the other
constant in our lives: the workplace. The clutter of people typing on their
computer keyboards, telephone calls, people moving and shouting at each other
(shouting seems to have become the major form of communication in face to face
situations). That’s for the less noisy jobs in offices, but what about people
working in factories, workhalls, public places, and so on.
And what about the stages in between and besides living space
and work space? More noise when using public or private transport, from the
car’s engine to the noise of people around you, their walkmen and ipods, their
ringtones, shouting at each other. Muzak desgning the atmosphere and our
attitude in shopping malls and even open streets. Don’t even mention the third
place, ie. some pub, café or restaurant you got to because you want to get away
from the trouble and noise of daily live. Mistake, because there the stereo is
louder, people talk louder, the noise of tablepieces and glasses. Next time you
are in a crowded restaurant and listen to the noise, it is incredible. In clubs
of course the music is so loud it drowns out any other noise, even that of
people shouting at each other.
It is the so-called “cocktail party effect” of our hearing
that drowns out all the noise around us and makes us concentrate on one single
sound source, like the person in front of us talking to us. If the brain
weren’t such a clever instrument, we’d be drowned in noise with no
possibility to get out alive, unable to talk to someone because we couldn’t
hear him in all that noise.
I like to go out in the country were life is easy and everything
is quiet. Well, unless you go high up on a mountain you’ll always here a car
going by somewhere. Plus it is unfair to call birdsong noise and the sound of
wind in the leaves of trees in the wood can be really loud, but that is nothing
compared to the noise of the city. Only late at night everything gets quiet.
Really quiet. Even Scandinavian black metal bands sleep so late at night.
Obviously way too quiet for our painridden brains so hearings starts to focus on
blood rushing through our ears and every little crackling noise or the
refridgerator starting up two rooms down the hall will be loud as hell (and
frightening if you ain’t used to the silence.)
Our existence is one within noise. We swim in noise as we do in
oxygen. In this our time and age it is impossible to hear any music that is not
loud. The louder the better. Actually we should be lying on the floor cringing
with pain, our ears bleeding and our brains burning from all the noise, but
evolution seems to have come the other way around and we have gotten addicted to
noise. I usually sleep the best when coming home from a show with tinnitus
ringing in my ears.
If music once was meant as a form of art to enlighten and to
introduce people to beauty or even to praise god (whatever god) it has been
changed around completely. Nowadays music is mostly tapestry, either used by
individuals to soundtrack their lives or by companies to influence individuals.
Then it is also important as a lifestyle accessoire (don’t tell me the kid in
the subway with the volume turned up so high on his ipod that even I know he is
listening to Jay-Z doesn’t want me to know what he is listening to, he most
definitely does). It is a product sold to make profits. Music as an artform is
almost extinct, produced only by a few ignorants for even fewer interested in
their ignorance.
Yes, noise could be a way out. Not back, but to somewhere else.
I have no idea where that could be but the way is clear: let’s enhance noise,
let’s give it more power, more charge, more might. Let’s lose control,
wriggle on the floor or be transfixed by the sheer volume of noise. Let’s get
charged up by the intensity of amplified and distorted noise. The Melvins know
the way. The jackhammer on the construction site below my flat knows the way.
The lunatic roaming our main shopping street screaming at the top of his lungs
with his head turned all red knows the way. Everybody has to find his own way.
From circuit bending to white washed noise. From banging the drums to banging
your head against the wall. I call you to arms to raise the noise. I double dare
you. Until we reach the peak and with a soft “ping” everything turns silent.
Forever.
Georg Cracked, May 2006 (rather early in the morning, grumpy and
with red eyes)