[NetBehaviour] from the Eybeam blog -

[Alan Sondheim]

Thinking about last night, it's the noise in music that's the music. If you're 
playing makamat, you've got history on your side, you've got sequences, 
grace-notes, referencings, dynamics, everything that makes the music; what you 
don't have is automation. Or think of Casals' cello bow sounds, sax/flute 
breathing in; it's everywhere. It's the body among other things. The noise 
isn't noise per se; it's shaped, it's what creates the fractal, chaotic, and 
accumulative aspects of improvisation (forget the reference here, bit blurry at 
the moment). All of these things are connected, interwoven with culture, with 
cultures, and the interweaving is what made me quit for example 'playing the 
blues' early on; there's a kind of inertia in me that believes it's impossible 
to go there, wherever there might be, in a kind of fullness I'd find necessary 
to even make the initial steps. It's the noise on the line that was interpreted 
as the speaking of the dead; it's the noise on the line I try to clear out, in 
order to hear the cosmic noise of aurora, lightning, magnetosphere, particles, 
and so forth. That noise is quieter like the background microwave radiation, 
that RCA engineers first thought was noise on the line as well. Your noise is 
my information; Henri Michaux couldn't hear most of the music he heard in A 
Barbarian in Asia. All of this is an endless pit; the point is, that it isn't a 
pit but literally a playing-field. Think of ragas and their complexity in time 
and space and musical history, even the history of musical instruments. In this 
sense, the subtlety of the digital lies, among other things, in its paring-away 
at culture (think electric fretted guitars and guitar synthesizers, and 
non-western scales), things disappearing before their appearance, new things 
appearing before their disappearance, a kind of hi-jacking of culture occurring 
on a world-wide scale. At this point it's not even necessarily a kind of 
colonialist or post-colonialist leverage; it just is, and appears natural as 
any landscape filled with technological radiations.

I'm blurry, writing this all wrong, but there's a kernel of truth to it, 
something obdurate in the memory of disappearance.