The abject pleasures of militarised noise

Since Luigi Russolo first published The Art of Noise in 1913, certain lineages of experimental musicians have iterated on the futurist’s positioning of noise as militarised sound. But the deployment of noise within (ostensibly pleasurable) music sits in contrast to the role of sound within modern warfare, as nation states have produced and deployed sonic weaponry for decades. Drawing on this conceptual difference, I use this paper to explore the relationship between militarism and pleasure within contemporary noise music through Kristeva’s conception of the abject. In doing so, I argue that the politics of noise music trade in the dual nature of abjection, producing a critique of militarism while simultaneously reinscribing its logics. To illustrate this contention, I examine two albums that engage militarism in distinct ways: Author & Punisher’s Beastland and Eric Lunde’s LRAD: Compositions for the Long Range Acoustic Device. Through this comparison, I reveal how noise and noise music can both produce a derealization of violence common to modern militarism (thus reinforcing structural violence) and produce new ways of engaging noise music’s obfuscated critique of militarism through jouissance without absolving the genre of reinforcing military logics through music.