Artist's Notebook: TOHU BOHU: Considerations on the nature of noise, in 78 fragments

Tohu va-bohu in the Torah is usually translated as "empty and shapeless," but in Hebrew tohu means "ruin," and bohu, "desolation"; for French speakers today, tohu-bohu means chaos, mess, hubbub.

Noise—a set of unharmonious sounds.

This sends us back to the definition of harmony—but harmony in a specific historical context. We see at once how difficult it is to speak simply and plainly about such familiar concepts. By noise is meant essentially our perception of it. In a sense, there is no adequate definition of noise.

Noise usually implies loud or unpleasant sounds—we tell kids to stop making a noise. It's contrasted with silence, which is supposed to be golden, enlightening.

John Coltrane's Ascension [1], in 1965 dismissed as undifferentiated noise, is now seen as a more subtle form of harmony that combines chaotic material and an ascending movement. Ascension broke with the old view of noise.

When I first heard the 30-minute A Little Noise in the System (Moog System, 1966) by Pauline Oliveros [2], the power of its development seemed clear. Others who have heard this piece recently all had the same impression. On reflection, this listenability seemed puzzling to me, till I realized that our listening habits—familiarity with Oval, Fennesz and Aphex Twin—have done the trick. With our ear conditioned, we could enjoy all those early subtleties.

Ars Nova. When audiences of the 1950s and 1960s first heard Varèse, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Berio, Ussachevsky, Yuasa, Dockstader and Mumma, what did they feel? Perhaps a sort of break, an epistemological break, like it must have been for the first audience of Monteverdi's Orfeo (in Mantua, Italy on 24 February 1607). They left the auditorium completely stunned, because they had never heard anything like it.

Noise—an undesirable disturbance additional to the signal and useful data, in the transmission channel of a data processing system.

Dionysian celebrations—sound and fury. The sacred aspect of the fear that anything might happen.

An indefinable noise in a small readymade by Marcel Duchamp [3]—paradox of an infinitely small noise.

Tired of centuries of silence, today's art galleries and museums are beginning to accept sound installations. Artists, including sculptors, are making a noise. Sounds repeated all day long, traversing corridors and rooms, so that sitting or standing the attendants wear earplugs. Videos rewind and restart, sounds and images go on endlessly, there are loops everywhere.

In his most famous installation Vinyl Requiem, Philip Jeck employs no fewer than 180 turntables. His material is the vinyl disc. Most are cheap junk-shop finds. It all started by chance, when he came across an old turntable. The discs are left out of their sleeves to accumulate their own personality of crackles and scratches. The progressive degeneration of original sound material through successive re-recordings is celebrated in Jeck's textural aesthetic. He works with accumulation and stratification, and also with memory, and so combines recycling with the love of vinyl records [4].

You might not actually recognize the records I'm using but I think they do stimulate some memory of some sound in some subconscious way. They're all like little stored pieces of memory. What's in those records is just so endless."

—Philip Jeck

In the dying fall of a sound, someone thinks he hears the silent voice of Brian Wilson.

Cross-reference: Broken Music by Milan Knizak—a sculpture made of old vinyl discs, the gallery paved with Christian Marclay LPs [5].

Before tackling music, we should record the sounds of nature—rustling leaves, thunder, earthquakes, landslides—and the electrical sounds, telephone, shortwave radio. All those sounds of the late 19th century, the noise of the city, all those new sounds. The noises of the industrial revolution, of turbines and locomotives—and those of war, at the front, in a hail of bullets, or cowering in basements, waiting.

Orchestral clash. Military strategy (victory) revisited, with the battle played by musicians. Clément Janequin's Bataille de Marignan (1515). Spanish baroque organ music in Ataun, the Basque country: horizontal pipes...