The artists of UNSOUND define NOISE
Krakow’s UNSOUND festival kicked off on Sunday. In honor of this year’s NOISE theme, we asked its featured artists a deceptively simple question: What the fuck is noise?
“What the fuck is noise?” asks sound artist and theorist Mattin at the start of his essay “Theses on Noise,” laid out plainly in 11 parts on May 25, 2006. “Precisely because of its indeterminacy, noise is the most sensuous activity / practice. To try to fix it or make it a genre is as fucked up as believing in democracy.”
Mattin will participate in two workshops and a discussion this week at UNSOUND, an annual experimental music festival in Krakow, Poland that The FADER will be covering this year. The weeklong event is always themed, and the announcement of this year’s theme, NOISE, begins with Mattin’s question. The rest of the announcement — written by UNSOUND’s curator/director, Mat Schulz — weaves multiple answers to the question into details of the festival’s 2024 edition. None of them are complete, but each of them is illuminating. “Noise is… an effect of the human condition,” one of them reads. “You can shut your eyes, but you cannot close your ears.
UNSOUND 2024’s lineup is a dream for noise lovers the world across, featuring 20-odd artists The FADER has already covered glowingly. Among these: Actress, Amirtha Kidambi, Bill Callahan, The Body, Chuquimamani-Condori, DJ Anderson do Paraiso, Evian Christ, evilgiane, FUJI||||||||||TA, Heavee, Ka Baird, Kali Malone, Kode9, Laurel Halo, Lord Spikeheart, Mica Levi, ML Buch, Nídia, Rainy Miller, and Raven Chacon. Other standouts include noise titans Keiji Haino, Yellow Swans, and Sunn O))’s Stephen O’Malley, who is unlisted but will join Malone (his wife) during her set.
Supporting this panoply of international talent is a local roster recruited via open call. “You can send us ear-shredding work, sure,” curator/director Mat Shulz explained, “but we’re particularly interested in less literal, perhaps more playful interpretations of NOISE, somehow subverting the word.”
In advance of the festival, we asked the artists of UNSOUND 2024 to respond to the Mattin’s abstract inquiry — “What the fuck is noise?” — however they saw fit.
Chuquimamani-Condori
Noise is the cacophony of our first mother, the water called nowhere or mama cocha, the scream of our queer guardian, chuqi chinchay, emerging from the spring as wound or dehiscence, the first teaching.
Bill Callahan
Noise is just two or more songs playing at the same time. It is efficient this way.
Once you know how to let your brain parse out each song from the conglomerate known as noise, you can appreciate the songs within.
Keiji Haino
I have become what is known as Noise. Other people want to be Noise. I would at least like Noise to be something that is overflowing from something. Just like overflowing glass of water. I hate the word Noise to death. And I love Feodor Chaliapin.
Aleksander Wnuk
Noise begins with the microscopic fluctuation of the body, within the very flesh, or even in the suggestion of it. It does not end in the most severe raging convulsion.
Gabriel Saloman Mindel (of Yellow Swans)
It’s a trap to ask if noise is good or bad, desired or hated. It’s both. It is what demands our attention and overwhelms it. It’s a crack in the everyday, a disruption of the smooth linear operations of time and space. What matters is what gets let in through that crack. Noise is the opening up of other worlds and radical new possibilities into our present. A noise artist doesn’t just create that rupture; they shape what possibilities are able to enter and give those gathered a lived experience of the world being otherwise.
FUJI|||||||||||TA
It can be said that there is no “Noise” in this world.
but, at the same time, it can also be said that all sounds become “Noise.”
It depends on what sound you want to focus on.
When you want to hear the sound of your refrigerator’s motor as clearly as possible, any music playing from the speakers in that room will become Noise.
In other words, there is no distinction in the sound itself.
DJ Anderson do Paraiso
[Translated from Portuguese] Noise refers to the unwanted noises and sounds that appear in the background of a vocal or instrumental recording. Depending on the musical style, some seek to minimize these noises, while others intentionally integrate them into the composition.
2K88
Noise is everywhere. Even in the quietest place on Earth, we can always hear some kind of hum. Its constant presence makes us not notice it, but we feel safe with it, unless it invades our comfort zone, becoming unpleasant or intense — then, emotions arise. Even the most crystal-clear sound gains a unique structure and character in the context of surrounding sounds. That’s why noise is always present in my music. It is my tool, my romance with imperfection.
Piotr Kurek
Noise can sometimes be that little surprise you didn’t plan for. It’s a reminder that even when things seem clear, there’s always something sneaking around. And honestly, I don’t even like noise that much, whether as a sound or a process, but when it’s gone, you realize it was actually helping. Noiseless stuff is kind of weird.
Lyra Pramuk
Noise is everything we are, the erotic pulse of life, the primal urge to see and hear and touch and feel, the ecstasy of communing with others, the chaos of conflicting energies, the swirl of time. Noise is a practice of moving through and with, allowing transformation and transference, succumbing to difference, seeing yourself as part of the sauce, and getting lost in it.