els.wher.

Hello *

Thank you for your message. To offer a short, perhaps pithy, response to begin ... For me, 'pure' noise tends too far toward abstraction, and thus decoration. To continue the analogy, I think noise per se functions best if meaningful degrees of figuration are retained. In other words, references to some kind of narrative content are needed if noise is not to lapse into banal aesthetics. The shock of pure noise relies upon its difference in a certain context - that is, its out-of-contextness, say as a passage in a pop tune. Used thus, expectations are confounded and a kind of Modernist point is made; insofar as formal qualities are changed, challenged, hybridised. There is here, a dialectic at work. The problem for this is that repeated shock ceases to shock; and thus noise - lacking other opportunities to cause narrative to come into being, lacking other means to 'say', that is - instead of maintaining iconoclasm becomes a form of conservatism. In my view, this is because its political power is too dependent upon that initial shock, and once such shocks are themselves normalised they become merely quaint, and thus easily ratified.

Best wishes,

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