Love and Noise

For the longest time, I’ve loved free, atonal, experimental, noise music, whatever you want to call it. What’s taken longer to figure out is why I find beauty in bedlam. After all, where exactly is the fun in throwing a piano down the stairs and listening intently? It was at a recent Stone show featuring Ikue Mori on electronics and drummer Joey Baron that the answer started to become clearer.

Amidst Ikue’s stark beep click grind and Joey’s endlessly creative rhythms, I started to be reminded of the ambient music we all encounter every day; from the jackhammers and clangs of construction sites to an errant fan and leaky faucet falling momentarily into sync in a quiet kitchen to the deep static of a radio long after the station signed off. So spontaneous, emergent, fleeting. Always reminding to feel this very moment, now this moment, now this moment.

It’s really the music of the street and the silence that seems closest to the playful atonalities of free improvisation. Grooves appearing out of cacophony and disappearing back into it. Never hearing the same sounds twice. The quiet (and incredibly loud) beauty of found music.