Paul Hegarty's new book, Annihilating Noise, is a noisy text. Over the course of the 16 essays that make up its four parts, noise is observed as existing almost everywhere, discussed in the context of ecology, materiality, economics, politics, and music. The scope of this text is important. It is not easy to say something interesting about noise anymore, nor is it easy to make interesting noises. In both theory and practice, noise has been frenziedly mined leaving very little of worth left.Footnote ¹ However, despite this, Hegarty makes an important contribution to the field, and this is largely thanks to his generative understanding of noise, which allows him to hear and observe noises where others might not.

In his 2007 book Noise/Music: A History, Hegarty developed an idea of noise based on the interwoven notions of negativity and failure. Noise, Hegarty told us, ‘can never be positively, definitively and timelessly located’ (Reference Hegarty2007, p. ix), which is to say, wherever noise is, it is always in opposition to what is acceptable and wanted; this is the basis of negativity. The notion of failure captures the dialectical dynamics of noise – where what was once unwanted becomes, over time, wanted – as well as a Bataillean dualism – where the transgressive potential of noise is perpetually conditioned and frustrated by its dependence on the limit. These two ideas are retained, and are central, in Annihilating Noise. At one point, Hegarty clarifies the notion of negativity as a response to previous criticisms of it: ‘Noise is a negativity […] and people are uncertain about this, because they say they like noise’ (p. 63). Hegarty goes on to explain how the meaning of negativity is not about badness, but instead the way in which noise, firstly, does not exist independently but only in comparison with a generally ordered thing (‘meaning, or music, or normativity’, p. 63), and secondly, how noise has to be thought of as the ‘negative thing we (some we that represents us all, and with the power to define the we that is us all) sought to exclude’ (p. 63). Negativity and failure, then, give noise its generative potential in this text: ‘[i]t never attributes thingness to noise, outside of an instant that will inevitably be subsumed, so that noise is always happening as potential, but almost never there’ (p. 241). These notions thus give noise a cultural, political and historical shape in Hegarty's conceptualisation, making noise and its manifestations diffuse.

Throughout Annihilating Noise, Hegarty makes a consistent effort to think beyond marginal spaces that have already been recognised by theory, to give voice to a more radical noise. He does this in ‘Part One: Ungrounding’ by drawing on Georges Bataille's dark ecology and ‘extreme metaphysics’ (p. 24) to counter ideas of a harmonious nature that he feels have run rampant in sound studies. However, the most interesting discussion of these outside spaces is when he addresses what he calls black noise and the gendered avant-garde in ‘Part Two: Unsettled’. While some of the examples and topics in Annihilating Noise will be familiar to readers of Hegarty (there are references to the likes of John Cage, Whitehouse and Merzbow), the discussion of race and gender is new territory for him.

In both discussions, Hegarty does not simply try to reconfigure avant-garde histories in a more diverse way. Instead, he is interested in the spaces of exclusion that certain people have been forced to occupy. In terms of women in experimental music, Hegarty explains how ‘as experimental sound-makers, [women] have found it difficult to receive recognition’ (p. 101). When thinking about women in experimental music it is not enough, then, to think about the margin, but ‘in the context of not even being in the margin’, Hegarty asks ‘what could the place be that opens for noise performers such as Pharmakon and Puce Mary’ (p. 101). In other words, there are multiple noises in this chapter, including the dissonant sounds of the artists and the noise of a socio-professional exclusion. In the case of Pharmakon, this manifests as a collision of voice, body and machine interfaces where notions of subjectivity and place are contested.

Similarly, when discussing race in his chapter ‘Is there Black noise?’, Hegarty is not interested in describing something like a counter-canon of African American culture. Inspired instead by Fred Moten's idea that ‘blackness is the outside of the outside of the avant-garde’ (cited p. 86), Hegarty looks at spaces of exclusion and the way in which some Black artists embrace and embody this unsettled position in their music. He looks at the music of Flying Lotus and explains how this Black American producer ‘creates massively complex soundworlds that do not settle internally let alone generically’ (p. 87). He also looks at punk-hip-hop-noise experimenters Death Grips, and what he describes as their ‘collision genre’ that ‘combines and throws together (throws against) multiple genres to finally emerge as a para-industrial sound’ (p. 89). In both examples, Hegarty explores an idea of Black noise that is not simply Black by ‘virtue of some inherent characteristic’ but where blackness, as a racial exclusion, is embodied in the ‘form and content of the work’ (p. 97) as music that is unsettled, antagonistic and always on the move.

These are the most interesting moments in Annihilating Noise, where Hegarty configures noise in proximity to the sonic, but also as something ultimately more expansive. While this can lead to some conceptual knots – like when he likens his understanding of noise to Jacques Derrida's différance (p. 44) despite différance being irreducible to the kinds of oppositions and cultural framing that Hegarty commits to – essentially it makes Annihilating Noise generative in the way that Hegarty hopes noise itself can be.