Noise and Memory: Performance by Maxwell Gong ‘22
The translated poem excerpt featured in Max’s performance, as well as additional acknowledgments, can be found in the concert program below:
Following his senior recital, the Review’s Music Editor Alexander Del Greco ‘23 sat down with Max to discuss his music, artistic process, and sources of inspiration.
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Alexander Del Greco [ADG]: This is clearly a pretty... unorthodox type of music that you’ve made here. What brought you to noise music? Where did you first encounter this type of music and what was the artistic evolution that brought you here?
Maxwell Gong [MG]: I started writing music about two years ago, and all of my music was [composed] for acoustic instruments. One of the major factors was that my teacher didn’t do electronic music... and at some point I found the acoustic instruments limiting, and I couldn’t get enough of the variety and intensity of sounds. At that point I decided to go into electronic music. At first, I wasn’t aware of this more “noisy-ish” type of music and I guess one time I was looking at experimental electronics and there’s this famous Japanoise artist—that’s short for Japanese noise—named Merzbow and I was kind of... blown away by the saturation of sound and the visceral energy of it.
ADG: What was the creative process behind your senior recital and your composition? Where did you draw inspiration? I imagine you can find inspiration from pretty interesting places with this sort of music.
MG: I initially wanted to write a through-composed piece in the traditional sense, like note-by-note—or, in electronic music, sound-by-sound, which is what I was doing and learning at the time. [My senior recital] was very much inspired by the artist’s book The Prose of Trans-Siberia, which features a poem on one side by Blaise Cendrars and, on the other, these color blocks and abstract paintings done by Sonia Delauney. I first encountered this book in my freshman year English class, and, since then, I’ve wanted to do something with this poem, like some mixed media thing. At one point, by chance, I got this instrument, not instrument, equipment, a mixer. My electronics teacher taught me about this “no-input” mixing technique. I tried it out, and it was generating many interesting sounds and noises, and it kind of resembled Japanoise music. I guess that’s the embryo of the composition process.
ADG: Can you tell me more about the no-input mixer, and what that means?
MG: A no-input mixer is usually used as an organizing tool to channel the desired sound from multiple sound sources, such as eclectic guitar, bass, and vocal inputs. It can take these inputs and edit things such as treble, mid, and bass levels, and in turn control the timbre of the sound. In the case of no-input mixing, you plug the output into the input itself and you’ll get a feedback loop that’s generated by the mixer itself, so it’s essentially the sound of the mixer.
Everything is unpredictable because you’re playing with a feedback loop and these loops are encountering and affecting one another in totally unpredictable ways. If you have more complicated patchings like I did, as well as effect pedals, the variety is beyond what you could possibly exhaust. The equalizer and the fader knobs also don’t do what they usually do... the exact mechanism is honestly beyond my comprehension.
ADG: This concept of feedback loops is very important to the written aspect of your work. Could you talk more about Cendrars’ poem in The Prose of Trans-Siberia, what initially inspired you about it, and how it connects to the noise itself?
MG: I think the poem, in a sense, was sort of futurist, even though it was French and futurism was predominantly Italian. There’s this sense of speed and momentum. There’s a train, a railroad, this sense of time that’s inexorably passing. Memory also plays a big role in the poem, as the narrator reminisces on his childhood as well as what happens on his train ride across Siberia. The idea that memory and the present interact the way a feedback loop does is really compelling to me. You have a recollection of the past, which I guess serves as your first signal, and then this influences your present and your future actions. You are what you’ve lived through and what you’ve experienced, and both of these things impact your future, which, like loops, also impact your memory of the past. In a way, memory functions as an infinite feedback loop, creating encounters between past, present, and future all at once.
I see noise coming in transmission of these recollections. Noise is defined by its negativity. It’s not music; it’s not meaningful. When you’re imagining the past and living the present, you really don’t know if something in the present might trigger some thought that you never believed to be significant. In that sense, the act of making noise foregrounds what seems to be insignificant and irrelevant, just like reminiscing about the past might pinpoint new interpretations of mundane experiences.
ADG: You say that noise is sort of negative and devoid of meaning. When I listen to your recital, I feel like the different passages and sections have a different emotional valence to them. Some of them are playful, while others are really loud and aggressive. Is there any effect you’re trying to create there? Do you have any sequence in mind?
MG: What’s precomposed [in my composition] is basically the beginning and the very end. And the film and the music don’t sync. I didn’t know what was going on behind my back [while performing], but that was purposeful. We didn’t plan any ebb and flow, valleys and hills… we sort of just went off with it on our own and we found what was most musically appealing and convincing for us at the time.
What we call noise music is, in and of itself, a contradiction. Because music and noise are often set up as a dichotomy, noise only becomes music when you foreground it and give it the space to gain significance. It is no longer a noise in this context: it’s supposed to carry musical meaning as opposed to noises, which usually just recede into the background. Noises (plural) are what go on in our everyday life, and, if you listen carefully, there are all these noises around us. But once you’ve identified the sources or the relationship between you and the noise, it is no longer a noise but chairs that are squeaking, a kettle hissing, or something that’s unusually loud that signals something threatening and whatnot. And noises become sounds, or music, that can be interpreted and therefore meaningful to us.
To call “noise” music is a contradiction in and of itself since music is usually considered to be intentional, performed, and meaningful. It is essentially a non-genre. But I guess the term noise music is something we had to agree upon in order to talk about it.
ADG: You mention the film that accompanied your composition. It’s super bright, saturated, and kind of blurry. You have these human figures moving around, but it’s never exactly clear what you’re looking at. What is this film?
MG: The film and the poem relate very much to my own reimaginations of the past that I lived, that I spent as a child in Beijing. The film is actually taken from urban street scenes at night time in Beijing, but they were superimposed upon each other at different speeds and with different opacity and blurriness.
ADG: What was the process of adapting this film to your performance? Did you make it, or did you find it?
MG: The original source is very clear footage of street scenes in Beijing. But I made the film myself. I think that the abstraction [of the film] is a characteristic also shared by noise. I don’t think any music can exist by itself in a vacuum, and therefore you’re always making associations with what you hear on a daily basis. But because it’s so distorted and abstracted, I think that noise, like the accompanying film, is about the process of attempting to find your way out of this world of chaos and making sense of what’s going on while your senses are often overloaded and overwhelmed.
ADG: What was the process of collaborating with Guy Berreby ‘23 like? What was your experience while composing on stage together?
MG: Collaborating with him was really fun. He provided a lot of textures and sounds that were, you know, maybe not immediately available to my instrument. And his sounds were a lot more predictable and easier to control. Because of the set up of the concert hall, and the enormous variety of the sounds that we were producing, we couldn’t usually tell what sounds were coming from whose end. I think, for me, that was a very, very frustrating but also interesting performing mentality? Performing condition, maybe? Because usually you’re trying to achieve something [cohesive], but in using a no-input mixer, we are conditioned, more than usual, to deal with the fact that we cannot control what our actions may lead to. In the same way that the audience is trying to make sense of the experience, we are, in producing it, trying to make sense out of this unpredictable sound world as well.
During the performance, we became a medium from which electric signals were materialized in sounds as opposed to the more traditional role of a composer who oftentimes attempts to provide a very particular sonic experience for the audience.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.