Dworkin. 2013. Signal to Noise -- Zen for Record

Punk and Post-Punk, 2019

A caveat; I have to acknowledge my personal bias in suggesting that Mute was one of the most important independent labels to emerge over the last forty years, a label that in my view helped sculpt the synthetic sonic sound landscape of our time. Mute was important for a variety of reasons, its roster of artist and repertoire, publishing and business model, artwork and its less than seamless integration and subsequent separation from the 'mainstream' industry. In short Mute is a story that needs to be told. This, then is a timely scholarly publication written, as it is, on the occasion of the label's fortieth anniversary.

2007

Noise/Music looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can become acceptable as music, and that in many ways the idea of noise is similar to the idea of the avant-garde. While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book's main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect prim...

2021

from book, Zen Questions: Zazen, Dōgen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry (Wisdom Publications), 2011

Bob Dylan's song "Visions of Johanna" can be interpreted as commentary on Zen awareness and sesshin retreat specifically.

The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (London & New York: Routledge, 2018), , 2018

Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." (Cage, 1961: 8) "For to break the silence is to venture into the incomprehensible" (Rawson, 2017: 37) John Cage made this observation after visiting an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Inside, where he would find silence if ever he could anywhere, he heard his nervous system and the circulation of his blood for the first time. The experience of sensory deprivation is so disturbingly loud inside that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States uses it as a method of torture. (Benjamin, n.d.) Sound, it seems, is an unavoidable part of life. Cage's experience in the anechoic chamber was one of the inspirations for his famous composition 4'33''. In it, Cage sets the listener the task of hearing the music in the constructed silence, which turns out to be the noise of coughs and the rustling of programs. Silence, it seems, is what we make of it. Coming at the subject digitally, Raven Chacon, a composer and member of the artist collective Postcommodity, recorded silence at some of the quietest places in North America (Window Rock, Arizona, the Sandia Mountains, New Mexico, and Canyon de Chelly, Arizona). When edited to maximum volume, each has its own noise signature that can be clearly heard as different from the others (Chacon, 1999). Beneath silence, it seems, lies noise in its infinite variety. Noise can be defined in many ways: as the non-signal component of information, as that which is outside of sound, as dissonant but valued music, as an integral component of timbre, as any unwanted, distracting thing, or sound that has not or is incapable of taking on meaning-yet. It seems to have an intrinsic tendency toward unresolved failure because as soon as it becomes valued or meaningful in itself, it ceases to be noise. (Hegarty, 2007: 147, 181, 191-92) Intriguingly, noise can be soothing, and by blocking out more identifiable sounds, it can create the conditions for approaching something like silence, as when urban sleepers put on wave machines to block out traffic noise. And in perhaps the greatest irony, noise can be set against itself as in the case of noise-canceling headphones, to create something approaching silence. Noise is an integral part of many musics, and a powerful metaphor that can be deployed both positively and negatively. What all of these have in common is that they are socially, culturally, and historically defined. One person's noise can be another person's music or silence.

Western music reached a rapid development since the revolution of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) in twentieth century. Beside the innovation of composing technique the composers of “new music” pursued also the different understandings into music. John Cage (1912-1992), one of the most important avant-garde composers in U.S.A., made several experiments in his compositions to try to find out the new margin of music. Well educated with western tradition, he was also greatly influenced by Eastern culture, especially by Zen Buddhism, for example in his notorious work 4’33’’ (1952), a landmark of the new music of the twentieth century. This essay will try to analyze the Zen Buddhist Spirit in this Cage’s well-known work.

From A to Zen – Exploring the Wisdom of China; This series was originally published in 2009 in the Kelton Times Magazine in Dalian, People’s Republic of China, and came to an abrupt halt when the publishers discontinued the publication.

Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound, 2018

In concert music John Cage’s 4’33” has overshadowed all other silent compositions, but within sound recording there is a wide range of silent records. It is the purpose of this piece to chart the uses to which silent record production has been put. Some artists have used silence to illustrate the nuances of recording formats (Christian Marclay has made ‘silent’ vinyl records to note the noise of analogue grooves; in contrast, the Melvins have used silence to highlight the dead spaces of CDs). Others have used silence to comment on the music industries’ monetary policies (Vulfpeck have issued silent streams as a way of earning money for nothing, while Michelle Shocked has released silent streams to protest that this format has paid her little for her music). Silent records have been produced in the name of conceptual art: there are musicians who have covered 4’33” (Frank Zappa), who have edited it (Sonic Youth), and remixed it (Adam F, Mr Scruff). Silence has been used to register political protest (Sly and the Family Stone, John Lennon, John Denver) or to make comment upon censorship (Crass, Orbital). It has also been used as an act of remembrance (West Coast Art Pop Experimental Band, Mike Batt). When silence moved away from the concert hall and onto the record it had a new range of stories to tell. It can make us think again about record production, record formats, royalties, copyright, audience expectations and even music itself.