I hate the sound of mockingbirds in the morning. Every spring, a new family of passerine pests takes up residence in the trees around my house and their unrelenting noise wrenches me to cursing consciousness far too often.
The kicker is those little bastards are grand pretenders that don’t even sing their own songs — they mimic other birds, not to mention cats, dogs, frogs, crickets, car alarms, chainsaws, squeaky gate hinges… Pretty much anything a mockingbird can imitate is added to its sonic arsenal, and when it “sings,” it repeats each learned chirp in rapid succession until it reaches the end of its chirp library and starts firing ’em off all over again.
I suppose mockingbirds are better than my former roommate’s “dog.” That stubby-legged codependent bitch started making noise as soon as her owner left, waking me up most mornings with the rattling thumps of her snout punching against the child safety gate as she tried to escape her back bedroom jail, failed, then started whining and yipping; then she peed on the floor. I didn’t hear that part but it always happened when she got anxious or distressed. (Read: any time he was gone.)
I made a lot of noise about his lack of concern for his pet, which ultimately prompted him to move out, which he told me about a mere four days before rent was due, which put me in a motherfucking bind.
Enter Jesse Vance. He’s been featured in CL numerous times over the past several years for his work at mixed-use nonprofit art space Venture Compound; he founded it, developed it and continues to serve as an active board member. He was seeking more permanent digs than the couch space he’d been inhabiting due to his own series of unfortunate events, and I didn’t need personal references to give him the go-ahead since we’d been acquainted for awhile and he’s besties with a few of my besties. Thus we embarked on a new experiment in roommate noise, this one featuring his big black mutt Demo, and so far, so good; he has a much noisier bark than his predecessor, but one he uses with restraint and reason.
’Course, Jesse as a roommate meant that eventually we'd talk about another kind of noise: the Pangaea Project, the experimental/noise programming series he founded as a platform for his own work. Its forthcoming sixth anniversary party seemed like the perfect motivation for a home-time hang-time conversation.
He tells me the main distinction between music and noise is mathematical form. In sum, music is organized sound, noise is disorganized sound. Noise artists challenge the traditional distinctions between musical and non-musical sounds, sometimes erasing such distinctions altogether. Theatrical performance, improvisation and extended technique (nontraditional methods of singing or playing to achieve weird sounds or timbres) are usually employed, as are live machine sounds, processed sound recordings, field recordings, live audio and video manipulations, randomly generated electronic signals — feedback, distortion, static, hiss, hum, whine, drone. Sometimes there’s an emphasis on extreme volume and lengthy uninterrupted repetition, cacophony and deconstruction, as the name indicates.
But other times, noise music can be serene, contemplative, atmospheric and minimalist with unexpected uses of melody, harmony, pace, rhythm and pulse, or a lack of it.
Jesse introduces me to a few of his modern noise favorites, like the drone-based electronic recordings of Oneohtrix Point Never, and Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese artist who explores “raw” states of sound (like sine tones and noise), employs barely discernible frequencies, exploits beat patterns and is known for his ambient soundscapes. He shows me part of Ikeda’s live quantum mechanics-inspired video/data project, superposition, which examines the way we understand the reality of nature on an atomic scale. He plays that ubiquitous atmospheric Gymnopédies suite and explains the leading influencer of noise-identifying artists is its composer, 19th-century avant pianist Erik Satie, a pioneer of minimalism, surrealism and repetitive music.
He brings out his own synth-laptop rig, pulls up an old composition, and taps various lighted buttons on the synthpad to engage different sound tracks. He explains that his songs usually start with a simple piano passage that he cuts up and pieces back together into something else, adding different components along the way, mostly drum parts and Moog synths in this composition, a counterbalance of fuzzy static groove and sparkling melodic pulse. He describes the oscilloscope he uses when performing live, his constant efforts to make it react to his experimentations, then tells me about an emerging noise technique called record skipping, literally cutting a record in half, then dropping it onto a turntable while another record is playing to create an entirely new, if broke-down, mash-up.
We discuss other sound artists like longtime associate and accordion slinger Nick Boutwell, who makes noise as Whitey Alabastard and usually incorporates hanging lights and warped video projections, and Miami-based International Noise Conference founder Rat Bastard, who has one rule — no laptops, because he firmly believes in the tangible, theatric quality of noise art.
Somewhere during our long and rambling conversation, he tells me about foundsound.org, a Creative Commons database where he mines free noise. I look up “mockingbird,” curious to see if I’d unearth its original song, but of the 34 mockingbird sounds, no two are alike and every single one repeats through a different cycle of mimicked calls. It’s then I realize the mockingbird is the avian world’s noise artist — it finds and takes sounds (those it can imitate), pieces them all together, and makes a new sound all its own.
Abrasive to me, yes — noise, even — but music to other mockingbirds' ears.
Pangaea Project 6-Year Anniversary features performances by Hell Garbage, Whitey Alabastard, Durastatic, Vasectomy Party, Trisma, Novasak, Nequam Sonitus, Land of NOD, DJ Hollow Life and Mingus Kingus this Sat., May 14, 8 p.m., at The Venture Compound in St. Petersburg; admission is a $5-$10 suggested donation.
This article appears in May 12-19, 2016.