NOUMENOISE

photo by Mark Duggan via Mark Kedzierski “BUFFALO -- It is a crime that has ripped two communities apart in very little time. Angela M. Conte and Mark P Kedzierski were found brutally murdered late Friday night on the property of the historical Abdell Farmhouse located in the small town of Cazenovia - nearly 173 miles from their hometown of Buffalo, NY.” Setting the scene for what Conte describes as the “best set of my entire life,” this faux news article, taken from Conte’s “Sparklebomb” Instagram account, created the premise for a legendary collaborative performance between upstate, NY noise giants God of Gaps (Mark Kedzierski) and Sparklebomb (Angela Conte). On July 31, 2015, the two performed together at Black Dots, a Buffalo record store, under the premise that they had been brutally murdered, falling victim to “extreme blunt force trauma to the head caused by a hammer.” Kedzierski and Conte gave candles to each of the audience members at the beginning of the set, and Conte

Like an ear-shattering car bomb on acres of desolation, the room fills with static and feedback. Onlookers watch silently, wading through an all-but-tangible cesspool of sound. Don’t make eye contact.        Though often perceived as a child of the futurist art movement, “noise music” has possibly existed for as long “music”. More akin to primal spiritual sound than classical and popular genres, perhaps humans basked in noise before they resonated with music. Shrouded in mystery and nonentity, noise has wormed its way through culture since it began. An abstraction, an antithesis, an exorcism, noise unspools chaos from order.        As the genre finds its way to more ears than ever before, the ultimate question remains: Can anti-music usurp mainstream attention in an organized society? If so, what sort of world is left in its wake? We’ve observed countless times that “life imitates art.” In his 1985 work, “Noise: The Political Economy of Music,” social theorist Jacques Attali writes: