The Noise of Art

The Rest is Noise sticks to the narrative of what happened inside the concert hall, but there was an awful lot of music and sound that eschewed formal classical presentation, opting instead for the art gallery, the airwaves, or outdoors in nature. Over the years, various attempts have been made by university or small presses to gather aspects of these scenes between the covers of a book, most notably Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Douglas Kahn's Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Robin James's Cassette Mythos, and Dan Lander and Micah Lexier's Sound By Artists. The number of disciplines that fell under this rubric can get obscure and exhaustive: fluxus, minimalism, futurism, new music, transmission arts, sounds by artists, performance art, sound sculpture, turntablism, various strains of improv, no wave, sound poetry, aleatory works, process works, and cassette networks. Marclay, generally held up as a poster boy for the genre of sound art, refuses to couch his own practice in either discipline: one night he is attending an opening of his sound-invoking objects in a museum, the next he is DJ-ing those same sounds in a nightclub.