David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2013, 304 pages, 51 ills., $24.95 paperback. ISBN 9780822353928.

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I write these words while listening to Osaka Inside Out, a field recording collection featuring audio contributions from Japanoise's author David Novak. The sounds of Osaka Inside Out—glittery bank machines, zooming cars, pop muzak, food cart operators, birdsong—provide a revealing counterpoint to the infamously extreme Japanese noise music that is the subject of Novak’s book. Indeed, it is probable that no other art-form in history has combined guitar pedals and heavy construction equipment with the brio that Japanese noise music has.

Over the past few years, ‘noise’ has received a great deal of academic attention. Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise (2011), Eldritch Priest’s Boring Formless Nonsense (2013), Greg Hainge’s Noise Matters (2013), and Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise (2011) are just few examples of this emerging literature. Novak’s book is nevertheless distinctive and illuminating. According to Novak, noise is not merely the result of sound’s circulation, but it very much comprises it. Noise is made up of the flows, experiences, and assembled contexts of fragmented exchange. To borrow a line from Anna Tsing, noise reveals the “awkward, unequal, unstable creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing, 2004: 1). Exploring this theme through a variety of case-studies, Japanoise focuses specifically on noise’s musical status (‘noise music’) and develops a nuanced critique of cultural globalization studies and a fascinating account of “an object of transnational musical circulation” (page 7).

Novak begins by considering the rise of noise over the past thirty years and focusing on the initial forays of Japanese experimental musicians in urban centres in the 1980s. According to the author, ‘Japa-Noise' is what results from the mediated feedback between two spaces in particular, Japan and America, the latter being the country where the sub-genre was in fact ‘discovered’. This insight is crucial; alongside circulation, ‘feedback' (the effect produced when the output of a system is fed back into the input) is central to the book’s overall argument. Novak recognizes parallels between the aesthetic logics of Japa-noise and the sometimes harsh economic feedback that defined Japanese-US relations in the 1980s and early 1990s. His book is deeply concerned with questions of cultural, technological and physical displacement. Attending to feedback means not “merely showing how [noise] enters into production in one place and emerges changed in reception somewhere else. Output is always connected back to input in transformative circles of feedback” (page 18). There are echoes here with the underwater field-research of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2007), who suggests that ‘transduction’, the phenomenal effect of energy transfer between airborne and aqueous mediums, is also ethnography in and of itself.

Needless to say, studying noise is not easy. “Noise displaces the home ground of ethnographic research as much as it challenges the representations of musical history”, Novak writes (page 6). The author foregrounds these challenges in Chapters 1 and 2, which consider the ‘live-houses’ where Japa-noise is performed and the record stores where it is circulated. A rich dialectic is introduced as Novak attempts to trouble the ethnographic privileging of live performance. “Deadness makes the scene live”, he writes. “[Noise’s] listeners perform musical worlds through recording” (page 33). What Novak is doing here is foregrounding the environment of sonic re-production over the locus of its production. What the ‘live-house’ does— paradoxically, given its name—is to short-circuit the imprint of human creation and give audiences to the immediacy of the ‘dead’ (because re-produced by non-human controls) technological sound.

Novak moves to consider the agency of collectors and consumers in Chapter 3, where he makes use of critical cartographies literature to consider the circulation of noise recordings. Unfortunately, the discussion here is rather uninspired, and Novak fails to offer anything novel in his account of how cultures of consumption feedback and re-draw their systems of signification (i.e. their maps).

Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the classification and spaces of consumption of Japa-noise, first, through the tradition of the Japanese coffeehouse (jazu-kissa), and then as a genre discourse. According to the author, culture of jazz-listening highlights how consumption became linked to notions of national identity during the country’s post-war geopolitical realignment with the United States. Tracing noise-specific listening in cafes as a reaction to the elite connoisseurship of jazu-kissa, Novak proposes genre ‘noise’ as an expression of antagonistic cultural feedback. But “even as an anti-genre, ideas about Noise generated new experiences of musical sound, definitions of musicianship and musical practice, and performances of musical culture” (page 119). In Chapter 5, Novak uses feedback to highlight the subjectivity of the ‘noisician’. Here, the dependence on self-reinforcing relationships with technology is foregrounded. Noise reveals a complex subjective relation with Japanese modernity (Chapter 6), with its ingrained experiences of trauma, excess, and techno-capitalism. A critical tension emerges between state-fostered policies of consumption-fuelled individualism and widespread concerns about technologically induced de-humanization. Against the powerful questions raised in Chapter 6, Chapter 7’s examination of the mutually-supportive relationship between underground tape-cassette culture and the cultural logics of noise feels underwhelming.

Japanoise is a rich and vivid account of a musical techno-culture. While it tends towards excessive fandom at times, it generally operates on safe grounds. Chapter 6, where Novak traces themes of overload, excess, and implosion across the relation between noise and modernity, is the best part of the book. As a mobile social concept, noise raises provocative questions about the cultural logics of energy transfer, including smog, e-waste, and radiation. While such engagements are not broached in Japanoise, Novak’s seemingly arcane study gestures to these doorways, offering tools for others to forge ahead. 

References

Hainge G (2013) Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Helmreich S (2007) An anthropologist underwater: immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, and transductive ethnography. American Ethnologist 34: 621-41.

Nechvatal J (2011) Immersion into Noise. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities.

Priest E (2013) Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure. New York: Bloomsbury.

Schwartz H (2011) Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone.

Tsing A (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.