20-odd years after its original publication, Jacques Attali revised his book Noise in an attempt to retro-fit recent developments to his original predictions about the future of music and the political economy. Here, Paul Helliwell considers the critical reception of Noise version 2.0

In early 1977 PUF published Jacques Attali's Bruits: Essai sur l'economie politique de la musique. Nearly a decade later, in 1985, it appeared in English as Noise, translated by Brian Massumi and bookended with essays by cultural studies and musicology heavyweights Frederic Jameson and Susan McClary. Its central thesis is that the form of music prefigures the future form of the political economy: superstructure prefigures base. Music, then, is not a mere superstructural distraction or mass produced bauble, it matters.

Eddie Prévost, percussionist and pioneer of improvised music – notably as co-founder of the seminal ’60s band, AMM – takes aim at the increasingly ubiquitous practice of sampling

I’m sitting there on stage with my drum kit, barrel drum, cymbals, gong and bits and pieces. Beating and bowing. I’m listening to the other musicians. Then I hear a sound that is familiar yet wrong. I’ve heard it before but it’s out of phase, out of joint, displaced, dislocated. It’s me but I’m not doing it. The phantom sampler has struck.

Howard Slater on Walter Marchetti's De Musicorum Infelicitate.

Radical 70s music theorist Jacques Attali came to London looking to reinvigorate debate around his theory of ‘composition’. Flint Michigan thinks it’s more debatable than ever.

>> Illustration by Luise Vormittag

Reviews by Hari Kunzru

:Music for Films:

The word 'soundscape' has been a cliche ever since a generation of student hippies lay between the speakers and smoked bongs listening to 'Dark Side of the Moon'. But in 1997 many (most?) music makers and listeners seem to be experiencing not just a sense of spatiality, but of scope, of travel and exoticism. Music as armchair tourism, associative, allusive, hinting at narratives. Music as cinema. Bricolage by Amon Tobin (Ntone ZenCD 29) is an excellent example. It sounds amazing, like Lift to the Scaffold, The Bluebird of Happiness, The Aristocats, Kwaidan, La JetŽe and some of those sixties comedy thrillers where everyone drives around the alps in sportscars. But none of this is because of straight steals or samples. It just sounds like watching a film. Synaesthesia.

:International Language of Electronics
New York-Tokyo-Detroit-London: