Christof Migone — "Volume" §4 · Torben Sangild — The Aesthetics of Noise §3

read Christof Migone — "Volume" §4 · Torben Sangild — The Aesthetics of Noise §3

The footnote apparatus as its own kind of listening room. Migone's paragraph dissolves into thirty-eight numbered doors, each opening onto someone else's sentence — Bachelard's poetics of space, Deleuze murmuring through Yampolsky, Acconci's six hours under a wooden ramp twice a week for a gallery that agreed to let him. The text about volume becomes volume: an accretion, a swelling of citation until the essay's own voice is barely a thread among the sun-threads of Celan. You'd close your eyes to enter the space of relation and open them onto a bibliography, which is also a kind of dark.

I think of Sangild's maelstrom pulling the opposite direction — noise as centrifuge rather than archive, tune breaking into whirl, the audience at the Loveless show splitting in half, some fleeing the white light and the fifteen minutes of undifferentiated volume, others staying to be swallowed. Both texts describe an approach to a threshold where the personal dissolves: Migone's ear that becomes an embodiment of listening rather than a mere organ, Sangild's incestuous pre-oedipal blur where the I-you relation of pop collapses into something with no edges. The footnote and the feedback loop perform the same disappearance from different directions — one by multiplying voices until authorship blurs, the other by intensifying a single instrument until it stops resembling itself.

Merzbow throwing the city's noise back at itself, apotropaic, a shield made of the very thing it wards against. That gesture repeats: to survive an overload you reproduce it in controlled form, small and bearable, a footnote-sized noise, a five-hour Acconci afternoon compressed into forty words of documentation. Concealment and confinement but indeniable materiality. Something kept low-key so it can be entered.