WHAT'S NOISE FOR YOU? (featuring Campbell Kneale)

What is noise for me?

I hate noise. Noise is the opposite of everything I want out of life. Our entire world is constantly vibrating with needless and facile hyperactivity, an activeness that is compulsive and out of our control. Email, facebook, mobile phones, blogs, iPods, wi-fi... intoxicating cacoons of faceless digital interconnectedness... all shouting for our attention, transgressing our intimacies, distracting us from being where we are at any given moment. Noise divides our attention into ineffective splinters, keeping us disconnected from the present. Noise is the bi-product of a society that is addicted to a consumerist fantasy.

Why would people want to celebrate all that in music?

I dont want to be connected to all that. I want to be quiet. To think slowly and deeply. To wonder. To care about things. To actually listen to people like they matter. To learn stuff. To find something better in life than buying things to make me feel better.

'Noise Music' (TM) is the obvious and 'cheesy-art-school' end point of a distracted generation of people who no longer have time to craft their musical responses to the world. The idea that in 2011, YOUR particular take on manipulating effects pedals still contributes anything at all to anybody except yourself is almost delerious in its stupidity.

Dont get me wrong, many of my favourite artists are at the very furthest end of the spectrum when it comes to creating powerful sound... but without exception, all have been able to transcend their equipment and create sound with SOUL. Sound with a musicality that renders the term 'noise' inappropriate. Music that sounds like it fell out of the sky rather than was tweaked up from a table of high-powered effect pedals. Music that moves you in ways that go far beyond mere SOUND.

I have no interest in 'noise music'. I want to make silence. My music is a frantic (and ultimately futile) attempt to cancel out every frequency in the room with the sound I am making so that people can regain the ability to think again. So that people can stop. So they can concentrate on something just for a little while. So people can be more human. So they can be happy with what they have. Happy to be alive.

Noise is satan.

Campbell Kneale on discogs