WHAT'S NOISE FOR YOU? (featuring Geoff Walker - Gravitar)

What's noise for me?

It's the place where I can relax and bring out all my ideas. It's a place of what, in Expressive Arts Therapy, is called "low skill, high sensitivity." In other words, as long as you feel what you're doing, it's legitimate, regardless of your technical prowess with a certain instrument. It's a place where I can go pahououououuouuooouougahoooouuugaahoooug into a microphone and make that into a highly textured sound collage. That's not to say that anyone blowing into a mic makes high art, but that anyone can make noise, and certainly, with some effort (and or luck), that noise can become extremely artful and intentional.

I like the balance of freedom and fear that comes with the unknown. Playing music in this paradigm often has a large element of unknown, and that can be uncomfortable, but it's also an inherently open-ended horn-of-plenty in terms of opportunities for growth.

At the same time, it seems there is almost never anything new in noise. Some records or performances are surprising or startling, but looking backward we can almost always find someone that's done it before. That knowledge helps me let go of my self-consciousness. My concern about whether or not someone else thinks what I'm doing is cool has increasingly dropped away, allowing me to truly use noise, or sound collage, or sonic creation, as a palate for self-expression. My exploration of sound both as a listener and a performer, has helped free me to follow my own internal rhythms in both music and life (is there a difference? Music is the best).

p.s. "What's noise for you?" è una rubrica, ovviamente a scadenza irregolare, e che non ha bisogno di spiegazioni. Ci è solo sembrato utile, curioso e opportuno, in un momento in cui il noise diventa sempre più trasversale, sentire dalla voce dei suoi protagonisti che significato attribuiscono al "rumore". Si comincia con Geoff Walker, che abbiamo già incontrato su queste pagine, figura storica del noise americano già negli anni '90 coi Gravitar...