Notes on noise

This text is deliberately long and purely textual. It serves two purposes: to set down a few ideas about my practice, and to be a page tall enough that reveal-on-scroll is clearly visible. Headings, quotes and blocks appear as you move down the page.

Start from silence

We tend to think noise is the opposite of silence. It is the reverse: noise contains silence, it makes it audible. When a texture saturates the space, it is its cracks, its breaths, its sudden collapses that become the real material. Silence is not the absence of sound; it is a decision.

To listen is already to compose. The rest is only organisation.

I rarely start from an idea. I start from a found sound — a field recording, feedback, the grain of an old loudspeaker — and I listen to it until it tells me what to do. It is slow. It is the opposite of efficiency. That is exactly why I hold on to it.

Low-tech as an ethic

Making electroacoustic music with as few dependencies as possible is not an affectation. It is a position. Every added layer of technology is a layer of dependency, of planned obsolescence, of ecological and cognitive debt.

I prefer a piezo microphone taped to a metal plate over a plugin that simulates that same contact. I prefer a synthesis program I can read in full, understand, and run on a ten-year-old machine.

Recycling matter

Amplified objects have a history. A bed spring, a tin can, a dead fan: these materials carry their wear, and that wear can be heard. Recycling is not only ecological — it is aesthetic. Damaged matter has a voice that the new does not.

Keeping a hold

Technology should be a tool, not an environment.

When software decides for me, I replace it or rewrite it. That is why my computer-music projects are free/libre: not out of abstract ideology, but because I want to be able to open the hood, understand, modify. F/LOSS is not a label — it is a working condition.

Poetry is not an add-on

A radical music without poetry is only an exercise. Radicality alone exhausts itself quickly; it becomes a pose. What holds me is the tension between the violence of a texture and the fragility of a detail piercing through it.

The poetry I mean is not textual. It is made of proportions, durations, the way a resonance dies, the exact point where you cut. It cannot be explained; it is placed.

On duration

A long piece teaches patience to whoever listens to it. Rare events take on a weight there that they would never have in a short format. Duration is a space, not a constraint.

On failure

The best sound is often the one you did not plan.

I love accidents. A crackling cable, a drifting clock, a badly tuned algorithm: these are collaborators. Composition then becomes knowing how to recognise, among the accidents, the ones that are right.

Passing it on

Teaching and outreach are not the top-down broadcast of knowledge. They are the sharing of gestures: taping a mic, listening to an object, daring the noise. The wild-lutherie workshops I run all start from the same premise: anyone can build their instrument, and therefore their sound.

What is passed on then is not a technique, it is a permission.

Provisional end

None of this is fixed. These notes will change, as the pieces change, as the ear changes. If you have scrolled this far, you have seen each heading and each quote appear in turn — the page developed under your scroll, like a print in the developing tray.