Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. x, 292 pp. (B&W illus.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5392-8.
Engaging and lucidly written, ethnomusicologist David Novak’s Japanoise offers a dynamic analysis of Noise: an underground experimental music formed through transnational circulation of recordings, discourses, cultural imaginaries and creative agents, ranging from listeners to cassette tape collectors, record shop owners, and performers. The book’s title refers to the common view that Noise hails from Japan—an origin myth the book complicates through a series of incisive cultural analyses. Based on extensive fieldwork in Japan and North America spanning the past two decades, Novak weaves lively ethnographic narratives with archival, discursive and sonic analyses to provide innovative theoretical insights into global media circulation.
At first glance, the focus of Novak’s study seems dauntingly elusive. As an aesthetic practice, Noise is characterized by its ambiguity as neither genre nor music; it is defined by its “antisocial, antihistorical, antimusical obscurity” (15). Furthermore, the Noisicians and Noise fans who comprise the “scene” often lack self-identification, social cohesion or geographical foundation. This poses the methodological challenge of tracing the global movement of the loose assemblages of Noise fans and Noisicians, musical media and meanings. Rather than proposing an explanatory model for capturing this moving target in transnational circulation, Novak calls for an open-ended analysis that takes into account unanticipated consequences, productive misunderstandings, and new possibilities.
Despite these challenges, Japanoise maintains coherence through the notion of “feedback”: the conceptual anchor and the most innovative and productive contribution of the book. At once an ethnopoetic lens into the aesthetic principles of Noise and an analytic for describing social processes of cultural exchange and reciprocity, feedback foregrounds how circulation is not simply a movement or process but rather an inherent constituent of creative cultural formation. In Noise performance, feedback is generated by overloading a circuit, often made with guitar effect pedals, microphones and other electronics, by feeding output back into input. The result is an increasing intensification and distortion of sound that reaches the threshold of disintegration. This acoustic principle works as an effective metaphor as a “critique of cultural globalization, a process of social interpretation, a practice of musical performance and listening, and a condition of subjectivity” (17). Rather than conceiving circulation as a passive background against which cultural exchange happens, this powerful concept puts relational analysis of global circulation into constant movement, enabling us to see the productive forces of the messiness of circulation.
The impact of this innovative conceptualization of “feedback” spans various fields, including cybernetics, anthropology, economics, media studies, and popular music studies. Two areas of debate where Novak’s notion of feedback makes a significant contribution are highlighted here. First, while the notion of feedback has already been in use in various social scientific fields to analyze cultural circulation as a mechanism for social equilibrium, Japanoise animates this self-contained notion of feedback by highlighting inherent dynamisms and their potential for producing new possibilities, as well as failures. Secondly, Novak’s notion of feedback challenges Jacques Attali’s canonic work on noise by complicating his mutually exclusive formulation of music and noise, and showing the limitations of his monolithic conception of noise as a totalizing category of difference. Feedback, dynamically conceived, generates differences as it spins out of control; Novak’s insistence on ethnographic attention to the micropractices and individualized embodiments of Noise is a valuable reminder of the importance of recognizing differences within Attali’s “noise.”
Japanoise also challenges the presumed binary between recorded music and live performance, between musicians and audience—analytical variables that are, despite some critical misgivings, still pervasive in scholarship on popular music. Rather than simply assigning agency to consumers, as many cultural studies scholars have done, Novak shows how participatory listening is constitutive of Noise performance, and how the circulation of musical media is a productive culture-making practice. Whereas creative repurposing of technology has been examined in popular music studies, Novak’s take on the agentful role that technologically mediated listening plays in the formation of Noise is a fresh perspective, one sure to impact how creative agency is conceptualized in popular music studies and ethnomusicology.
Echoing the acoustic principle of feedback, the well-crafted book’s key themes loop back to reveal layers of meaning—a case in point being the way the aesthetic description of Noise in the earlier chapters leads to a nuanced analysis of the political potential of the practice in the later chapters. Chapter 1 establishes the idiosyncratic aesthetic principle of Noise, which is based on producing feedback until reaching a breaking point; Noisicians seek to be subsumed by technology, rather than to exercise control over technology. The next three chapters familiarize the reader with the esoteric Noise scene by locating the subterranean distribution networks of Noise recordings (chapter 2), examining the recursivity of listening and playing among Noise fans (chapter 3), and providing a nuanced account of the paradoxically constitutive politics of genre-labeling (chapter 4). In turn, the aesthetic logic of Noise lends itself as a metaphor for the political possibilities of revealing the human confrontation against an overwhelmingly technologized society (chapter 5), a critique of the self-destructive trajectory of technocultural capitalism in Japan (chapter 6), and a form of resistance against the anonymity of online culture and excessive consumerism (chapter 7).
One question remained unanswered for me: precisely what kind of concretely situated social “differences” are embodied and experienced by Japanese Noisicians in contemporary Japan? With a few exceptions, Noisicians portrayed in the book are primarily middle class and male. The lived differences of Noise fans and Noisicians within Japanese society are somewhat obscured by the radically individualized and gender-ambiguous notion of “technocultural subjectivity.” In what ways might social unevenness and difference be implicated in the Noisician’s radical cultural politics? By tenaciously staying underground, what kinds of exclusionary politics might the Noise scene produce, and how does this exclusivity—in terms of access to technology or cultural capital—play into one’s ability to critically engage with/against Japan’s capitalist technoculture? In light of the author’s commitment to the embodied differences among creative subjects of Noise, readers might benefit even more if Japanoise pushed its analytical insistence on differences further to show how the individual embodiment of Noise articulates with social differences in everyday lived experience.
A remarkable display of scholarly integrity, Japanoise is grounded in deep commitment to the aesthetic drive of an expressive culture, locally grounded intellectual insights, and theoretical interventions with broad interdisciplinary implications. As Novak recuperates the productive culture of Noise from—or rather, through—obscurity, he offers significant cross-disciplinary analytical contributions. It won’t be long before we start to hear the amplified echoes of Novak’s analytical insights, resonating in the feedback loops of future scholarship on global media circulation, underground cultural movements, critiques of technocultural subjectivities, and other aesthetic forms of creative destruction.
Marié Abe
Boston University, Boston, USA
pp. 867-870