In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French theorist Jacques Attali wrote that “What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.” It’s Friday night and I’m driving with two film professors and one of their girlfriends through one of the deepest and darkest ghettos I’ve ever been to in North Miami. The nearest exit ramp has been closed so we’re driving through the neighborhood known as Little Haiti, where there are no street lamps and few street lights, long stretches of warehouses and storefronts protected with wrought iron, and the occasional cluster of gangsters lurking ominously on street corners. We arrive at our destination, a punk rock club called Churchill’s, and suddenly there are nothing but white hipsters with chopped hair and tight pants who look like they’ve stepped out of a Hot Topic catalog.
We are here for the International Noise Convention, an annual event at Churchill’s which I have heard much about but never attended. The club is small, dank, and filled with the familiar scent of sweat, spilled beer, and stale cigarette smoke. About 50 kids are standing in a semi-circle around a young woman who’s on a slightly elevated stage and looks to be plugging various chords in and out of some kind of machine while popping cassette tapes in and out of a tape recorder. It’s a surreal, post-apocalyptic scene like something out of Blade Runner or Mad Max, with all these kids attired in tribalist and retro styles hypnotically bobbing their heads to sounds that can’t really be called “music” but are undeniably entrancing. I close my eyes and allow myself to be overwhelmed by the noise, which I can only try to describe as the rhythm of an old dot matrix printer periodically interrupted by the chirping of birds.
She finishes, and almost immediately a band starts playing in the center of the club on a stage that isn’t elevated at all. Churchill’s is so small that I don’t even need to move, I just turn my body to the right and find myself uncomfortably close to the band. A guitar player produces a few solid minutes of feedback, and then the drummer begins pounding out some beats and the place erupts into a mosh pit with bodies flailing and pushing in every direction, including right back into the drumset and amplifiers. It’s one big mess of piercing sounds and pierced bodies, and I’m totally digging it. Some kid next to me is smoking a joint and later in the night he walks by and whispers that he’s selling doses. I shake my head no and then spend the rest of the night debating whether this would be the best or the worst of all possible places to drop acid. Since I wasn’t fortunate enough to be at the Masque in 1978 or Cabaret Voltaire in 1918, this is probably as close as I’m going to get to seeing the decline of western civilization in all its glory.
Some of the performances were unspeakably terrible, like the wannabe Jesus guy who kept chanting and moaning into the microphone or the dorky kids with all the good equipment who thought they were New Order or the drummer who stuck his fingers and his drumstick down his throat to induce vomiting on his cymbal. But on the whole it was so refreshing to see the spirit of anarchy alive and well as a succession of unknown kids took the “stage” with the confidence that the rules don’t matter anymore because any piece of technology can be a musical instrument because any noise can be considered music. Jacques Attali was writing about this sort of noise more than 25 years ago: “Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.” And so on that note we stepped out of the club and back into America’s Third World, a warzone of disorganization in the moment of our global economic meltdown, and I prayed not to get lost on the way back to Interstate 95 (we did get lost for a little while, but obviously did get back safely enough for me to tell you this story).
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