You can read a review of Paul Hegarty’s Noise/Music A History by Greg Smith on Serial Consign. Noise/Music, as you may remember from our announcement in October 2007, looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyzes them in terms of cultural aesthetics. It’s a fascinating book.

And now we have a review, which I hope will encourage you to pick up a copy. As Smith writes:

Noise/Music is most easily appreciated as a “disturbingly succinct” history of 20th century music and perhaps the most appropriate text to compare the work to is Michael Nyman’s “Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond”. However, where Nyman’s text is a comprehensive “academy friendly” catalog of sequential progressions and developments, Hegarty’s text covers more ground and wanders into a more diverse and adventurous territory - one characterized by amplitude and excess….. More.