Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts [Hardcover]

Ignore, for a start, the subtitle. Noise Water Meat would be a thorough failure as a history of sound in the arts, if that were what it really tried to be. It's primarily a history of the modernist avant-garde, up to the end of the 1950s. As such, it reflects a period where, with the exception of cinema, sound art had yet to become distinguishable from music, and still awaited release from the fourth dimension into the first three.

It's difficult at times not to become impatient with a book that, for example, considers John Cage's water music to be more interesting than (say) that of Annea Lockwood, or for which the boundaries of a discussion on 'impossible inaudible' sounds are essentially limited to Cage's early years. Kahn, a professor of media arts in Australia, acts here primarily as a historian, so his focus on dead white males is perhaps inevitable. Nonetheless, the whole book is tremendously relevant to more recent developments, and it's regrettable that connections with the last few decades are never really made.

There's one other obstacle to negotiate. Kahn's fellow academics may well feel that his prose is a "delight to read", but I imagine that most readers will find his ongoing desire to break the three-digit word count in his sentences more of a turn off. One day, we can hope, post-modernists, post-structuralists and all the other cultural studies post-literates, will summon up the energy to actually learn how to write in an accessible, intelligible way. In the mean time, Kahn's prose remains unnecessarily obtuse.

The book's limitations are unfortunate, because Noise Water Meat is a provocative, enlightening and expansive foray into an arena that demands better than many writers have previously offered. He slips into cracks that others often paper over, steps beyond the clichés of parrot history, and offers plenty that should leave the attentive reader with a veritable banquet for thought.

Kahn's central idea is the need to approach modernism as a listener, not as reader or viewer. Whether discussing Luigi Russolo, William Burroughs or Antonin Artaud, he focuses attention throughout on sound and aurality, bringing to the fore aspects of their writings that are sometimes surprisingly ignored. As he says, "modernism has been read and looked at in details but rarely heard".

More significantly, he has an ear for issues that others often pretend deafness to. Writing about Russolo, the often-cited forefather of everything that is noisy in modern music, he homes in on the Futurist's enchantment with the noises of war. Russolo's infatuation with the spectacular sounds of the ordnance of the First World War, and consistent avoidance of the sounds of pain, death or any human effect, are brought to the fore in Kahn's recounting of the birth of noise music. Kahn's keen historical eye also highlights neglected figures such as the French composer Carol-Bérard, who used motors, sirens, and electric bells in the pre-Russolo 'Symphony of Mechanical Forces' (1908).

Kahn sidesteps the few existing noise theoreticians in favour of a polydisciplinary cake-and-eating approach. Noise as a presence in Jack Kerouac's writing jostles for space alongside Dadaist bruitism; Russolo's dizzy-eyed descriptions of war noise are sharply contrasted against the horrific sounds of death recounted in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front. Kahn goes on to trace the line in all its forms as boundary between signal and noise, as the agent of scientific reduction which acts to abate noise, and as the medium through which phonography inscribes the world. For Russolo, Edgard Varèse or Percy Grainger, the line was the glissando, an attempt to break free of intervallic melody in favour of the infinite parameters of nature.

Elsewhere, Kahn discusses at length synesthesia, the phonographic revolution, and the remarkable resistance of the avant-garde to imitative sound. Musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer preferred abstraction, and only film animators such as Disney or innovators such as Eisenstein produced sound art that escaped music's oppressive paradigm. A particularly good chapter on John Cage's adoption of silence as a motif or emblem sheds welcome light on the American composer's fantasies of silencing society, of putting a stop to social noise, of silencing the performer.

Cage is, inevitably, a central figure in the book. The central third of Noise Water Meat is a lengthy investigation of an increasing fluidity in the post-war avant-garde, made evident through the aqueous tropes of the likes of George Brecht's 'Drip Event'. Kahn homes in on the perceived gulf between Cage's egoless objectivity and Jackson Pollock's intuitive expressionism. Kahn argues against this oft-observed viewpoint by citing instead the things the two artists had in common: art as the performance instant; environmental immersion; the indeterminate resultants of chance operations. If at times Kahn's central arguments can be reduced to matters of trivial academic debate (always a hazard in the field of Cage studies in particular), the level of historical detail he amasses remains fascinating. His scope is also wide-ranging, bringing in a whole circus of poets, painters and musicians to illustrate every theme.

Kahn sets up Cage's 'Water Music' and Pollock's painting as key moments where aqueous flux replaced mere watery undercurrents in the modernist story. Even his introduction to this, a polydisciplinary, polyfaceted swim through the work of Henry Cowell, Raymond Roussel, Aldous Huxley, André Breton and others, offers a jumping off point for a possible dozen further books. The Cage/Pollock section is also every bit as illuminating about their contemporaries Allan Kaprow and George Brecht, two of the major contributors to Happenings and Fluxus, as it is about the two principals.

The final section of the book deals with "meat voices", the presence of viral strains in the works of William Burroughs, and the voiced scream in Antonin Artaud, Michael McClure and others. Although similar concerns have been traced elsewhere, any discussion of Artaud's theatre, the scientological engram, or Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory takes on strange shapes when the sound of the voice is placed firmly in the foreground.

It's difficult to briefly summarise the scope of Kahn's achievement. His chapters are filled with digressions, unusual juxtapositions, unexpected interludes. La Monte Young is discussed alongside excerpts from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, while the sound of Rumour in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer provides a frame for Konstantin Raudive's experiments in recording the absent voices of the dead. Kahn evidently has a taste for contradicting received wisdom, but his willingness to hear his subjects from unconventional positions is ultimately more rewarding. Perhaps it's unfair to ask the book to live up to its title. Noise Water Meat is a compendium rather than an encyclopaedia, a prestidigitator's array of assaults and niggles. If it's often obscure and seemingly irrelevant, it's also refreshing and throught-provoking. All we need now is for someone to repeat the exercise with the still-living sound artists.

[review originally published in The Wire, April 2000]