Noise, Affect, Politics Conference Screening – Salford University
The Beat is The Law (80′s) is screening as part of the Noise, Affect, Politics Conference at Salford University on 1st July 2010 and will be preceded by a lecture from Stephen Mallinder (Cabaret Voltaire) entitled ‘White Heat, White Noise: Ambient Noise in Pre-Punk and Post-Punk Music‘
“…what exactly is noise and what conditions these relative thresholds in which sound crosses over into noise? Or are these more organised and polite sonic phenomena merely varieties of noise that have been tamed and civilised, and yet still contain kernels of the chaotic, anomalous disturbance of primordial noise? As a radical free agent, how is noise channelled, neutralised or enhanced in emergent cityscapes?
Such questions are particularly applicable to contemporary forms of music which, based as they are on a variety of noise-making technical machines, necessarily exist in the interface between chaotic, unpredictable noise and the organised and blended sounds of music and speech. Does modern noise seek to lead us to new, post-secular inscapes (as with psychedelia and shoegazer), or defy the lulling noisescapes of processed background muzak with punitive blasts of disorientating, disorderly noise? And why the cult of noise – in term of both volume and dissonance – in which low cultural practices (metal, moshing) meet those of the avant-garde (atonalism, transcendentalism)?”
