The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk

It’s hard to imagine what your fully paid-up Dadaist would be doing today, noise-wise. Anyone with a computer or iPad and a MIDI keyboard can access and change the parameters of millions of playable noises, melodic or not, from fingernails on a contrabass to underwater trumpets, from Bartók pizzicato to a burnt piano, from German swear words with variable attack and decay to an orchestra of railway station sounds, both ambient and provoked, playable in major, minor and more exotic scales. I suppose they would be doing something else. Words, phrases or syllables can be whispered, screamed or sung … Persian melodies mixed with Hollywood choirs and monks singing backwards in virtual reverberation setups ranging from outer space to Abbey Road Number 1 Studio or an anechoic chamber … poetry is written on substrates of any and all philosophies and atrocities, but this is hardly revolutionary now. The cultural and...