First concert since February is coming up – live show plus artist talk with TinTin Patrone at the new Plattenfroster TV by MS Stubnitz in Hamburg, streamed live via twitch/klub_forward on thursday, June 6th at 20:15 (18:15 UTC).

Of course it’s not a real concert. That’s still cancelled. Ambivalent feelings on the whole streaming thing: is noise a good metaphor for social distancing or is it totally pointless to play a noise show without physical presence?

A noise show doesn’t produce a community-vibe like other musical genres do – not much of dancing, sing-along etc. – it tends to isolate the attending persons in their own bodies by excess of volume. Paul Hegarty writes in Noise/Music – A History:

„The listener at a loud noise event is taken out of the subject body to be dumped back into embodiment, lowered into something like ecstatic noise consumption. The mistake would be to imagine any lasting freedom emerging from that ecstasy. It is certainly more ecstatic than pleasant, and closer to the sublime than the beautiful, with which it cannot share anything. Like Kant’s sublime, though, it is also a framing of the moment the self is lost as the rational reflection on the moment the self was lost.“ (p. 147)

But if noise produces this awareness that is centerd on the self in an almost solipsistic way, at the same time it can emphasize that which is the basis of any communal experience: the inbetween, the space of the inter between bodies, persons, individuals. By filling the room with excessive noise, it can create a space where a group can exist without being centered on a sonic or semantic structure like rhythm, melody or lyrics. Imagine a noise show where every single body finds its own rhythm and structure in the chaos – a community without identity.

It could be argued that noise itself creates a paradoxical inter between social distance and community. Watching a live stream of a noise show seems like a metaphorical comment on this paradox.