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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound

Résumé

Japanese Noise music, characterized by a manifest absence of traditional musical architecture and progressing according to frameworks that ignore melodic, rhythmic and harmonic development, is commonly considered as a brutal expression of postmodernity. In some aspects, Noise can effectively be understood as a general ecology of the interference, where, in a violent criticism of structures and exclusive systems, is redesigning by sonic means the articulation between human activity and nature. According to Mikawa Toshiji, one of the historical pioneers of Noise, Noise fails however to escape from order, because in the process of its dissemination at a global scale, it ends up constrained by the organization that stylistic and cultural categorization entail. Therefore, Mikawa says, while Japanese prefer to think about the world in terms of vague and sensitive relations rather than through a system that precisely determinates things, Noise is at the same time inevitably and excessively subject to the supposed extreme strangeness and exoticism of the country it comes from. Mikawa’s statement is important, because it reveals that there is a return of the sound created by men to its cultural origin, as if the properties of this sound could inform us about the character of the society that generates it. As recent Japanese studies and in a more general way postcolonialist studies have shown, in modern times, Japan, as a society at the periphery of the reference center that is Occident, shapes itself in a mirror-play with the latter. Therefore, it seems appropriate to think that in fact, the a priori opposing ideas that Noise is infused with radical strangeness and exoticism or, on the contrary, that it is close to the idiosyncratic emphasis on indeterminacy in Japanese thinking, are but the consequence of strategies of differentiations maintained by both contemporary Japan and the West in their confrontation. Noise music is thus deeply set in the foundation of “Japaneseness” – whatever its nature may be. To look into images developing in the international diffusion process of Noise, and into musicians’ commentaries that allude to the existence of listening modes particular to the Japanese people, may shed light on some of the perceptions that shape it and consequently on the hypothesis of the reality of a “Japanese sound”, contemporarily on the one hand, but also in an ahistorical and essentialized fashion. Noise is only one example among others in the Japanese contemporary music history, but it may constitute a reasonable starting point to understand how the appreciation of sound and its artistic production question the creation and the promotion of cultural features.
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Dates et versions

hal-03919606 , version 1 (03-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03919606 , version 1

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Jeremy Corral. Feel the power of my exoticism: Japanese noise music and claims of a distinct Japanese sound. Sound Culture Studies and Modernity in Asia, Sep 2018, Tokyo, Japan. ⟨hal-03919606⟩
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