LECTURE: Japanoise and the Cultural Feedback of Global Media

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Guest: David Novak,YIN YI

Date: 2014-08-10  13:30 ~ 2014-08-10  15:30

Address: Chronus Art Center ( Bldg.18,No.50 Moganshan RD., Shanghai)

SPEAKER: David Novak
MODERATOR: YIN YI
LANGUAGE: English (with Chinese translation)

Free for admission. Please make reservation via membership@chronusartcenter.org (please indicate your full name, contact information and the number of reservation)

About Lecture:
What connects distant listeners to far-off worlds of sound? In this talk, David Novak will describe global circulations of experimental music, through his long-term research on an underground genre alternately called "Noise," "Noise Music," and "Japanoise." Noise first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes, and then CDs and digital media traded between fans around the word into the 21st century. With its ear-shattering sound and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience. Noise always seems to be new, and to emerge from somewhere else: in Japan, it was "Noizu," while in North America, it became "Japanoise." Despite its marginality, Noise became a powerful metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media. Global media circulations are grounded in the "cultural feedback" that develops in the overlaps and disconnections between separated groups of listeners and performers. In Noise, feedback is used by musicians to make sound, and becomes a mode of exchange in which scattered audiences distribute media and imagine a global underground scene. But feedback is also part of a creative subjectivity that reveals circulation as a central process of global culture, rather than as a secondary and separated context of transmission that moves culture and art from one place to another. The case of Japanoise reveals how discourses of musical globalization are continually reformed at the edge, through acts of sound-making, performance, and transcultural interpretations of popular media.

About Speaker:

David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work deals with the globalization of popular media, noise, protest culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and The Wire, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke 2013) and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Keywords in Sound (Duke 2015).

About Moderator:

Yin Yi is an Experimental musician, Sound artist, Phonographer, Curator. The music practice mainly focuses on laptop music performance and soundscape based on phonography in recent years. Conceptual sound works of Yin Yi usually center around two issues: listening awareness and the difference between vision/light and audition/sound. In the past two years, Yin Yi has paid close attention to the artistic ecology of the experimental music and sound art in China, his recent curate activity including “2013 SAVAKA: Asia Experimental Music Currents” with Rockbund Art Museum.

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