Experimental / Avant-Garde / Noise
Experimental / Avant-Garde / Noise treats sound itself as a field of discovery: recorded noise, silence, chance, electronics, feedback, extended technique, systems, data errors, nonstandard tuning, invented instruments, radical scores, and anti-commercial performance can all become primary material. The sound ranges from musique concrète tape edits and serial chamber music to walls of distortion, field recordings, drone, free improvisation, glitch, RIO rock, and gallery-based sound installation; it often resists verse/chorus, steady meter, tonal resolution, and conventional virtuosity. Its emotional palette is unusually wide: forensic, violent, meditative, comic, austere, ecstatic, mechanical, ritualistic, architectural, or deliberately alien.
History
The modern history begins with futurist noise manifestos, Dada, early electronic instruments, Schoenbergian atonality, and experimental theater, then accelerates after World War II through Pierre Schaeffer’s Paris musique concrète, Cologne electronic music, John Cage’s chance procedures, serialism, graphic scores, Fluxus, free jazz, minimalism, and tape studios attached to radio and universities. The 1960s and 1970s expanded the field through AACM jazz, AMM-style non-idiomatic improvisation, La Monte Young’s drones, Stockhausen’s electronics, industrial music, sound art, field recording, and the first radical rock collectives; the 1980s and 1990s added Japanoise, power electronics, RIO networks, plunderphonics, lowercase improvisation, glitch, breakcore, and laptop composition. It influenced film sound design, electronic dance music, ambient, post-rock, metal, installation art, sampling culture, academic composition, DIY noise scenes, experimental hip-hop, game audio, and the idea that listening itself can be the artwork.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Grove Music Online
- AllMusic
- UbuWeb
- Discogs