Audiences, public, experience.

Beskrivning

Abstract:

Sonic activism: Equivocating noise and politics through aesthetic-anthropological fieldwork in Java
By Nils Bubandt and Sanne Krogh Groth

Based on fieldwork over a seven-year period with Indonesian noise and experimental musicians at performances both in Java and at European music festivals, we study what we call their sonic activism. With the term sonic activism, we challenge ourselves to move beyond universal ideas about noise and politics, respectively. In trying to uncover how noise and politics are entangled in and beyond the Global South, we suggest the need to be equivocal, in the sense of Viveiros de Castro (2004), about what “noise” and “politics” are in the first place. Our first controlled equivocation is therefore about “noise”. If noise music on the North Atlantic Rim emerged as a negation of the hegemony of diatonic music and a protest against an aesthetics of silence, what, we ask, is the aesthetic appeal of noise music in Indonesia, a place where microtonal and polyrhythmic music is considered high taste and where noise - in its broadest sense - is rarely considered disruptive? In short, what is noise music, if it is not a negation? Our second equivocation is about “politics”. How, we ask, can we understand noise music as political, when many of the musicians we work with see themselves as social activists and yet deny they are political? In the term “Java-futurism” we find the beginning of an answer. The paper seeks to understand these equivocations of noise and politics through an approach we call aesthetic-anthropological, an approach which straddles musicology, sound studies, and anthropology in ways that are at once methodological, analytical, and theoretical.

Period	2025 mars 6 → 2025 mars 7
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	London, StorbritannienVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell