In a society in which power is so abstract that it can no longer be seized, in which the worst threat people feel is solitude and not alienation, conformity to the norm becomes the pleasure of belonging, and the acceptance of powerlessness takes root in the comfort of repetition.

                                                                   

                                                                    - Lucien Sfez, Critique de la decision.

 

 

 

 

The right to make noise is a natural right, an affirmation of each individual’s autonomy. Noise is often posted as the not-­yet-­meaningful or as that which lies beyond or below meaning; a whirlpool of chaos from which sense emerges. Noise exists relationally, relying on an assemblage of perceivers, generators, borders, vibrations, ideas, geographies, spaces and materials. It creates a meaning, first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations frees the listener’s imagination.  Noise is an element in a new network of power creating a form of sociality.

 

In Concerts of Power, the Megaphone- a public announcement system- commonly used in Mumbai becomes an object through which the soundscapes emanate to direct the audience’s attention. Placing these sounds collected from outside, within a museum, which is an instrument of power in itself, on a public announcement system brings into play the political dynamics of sound. The recording consists of ambient sounds of the city traffic, train service announcements and an iconic Bollywood song on loop. Language is a mold, restricted to the words if not the title of the song, and becomes an element in this radical identification. It uses traditional harmonies to induce nostalgia and memories of an era gone by, while the other sounds are inscribed in an abstract search and refuse to accept the dominant trends and cultural codes. They are necessarily linked to one another, if only by virtue of being radical opposites. The interdependence of the political functions of these very different forms of sounds is everywhere to be heard. The technology of repetition makes available to all the use of an essential symbol, of a privileged relation to power. Thus making it a highly political object, exerting its power by its ability to record, amplify and repeating its message in a loop entrapping its social form in exchange and drawing theoretical debate into the mechanism of representation.

 

Recording and replaying messages through a megaphone collapses the classical means of discourse. The recording plays on loop signaling the abstract level of repeated basic elements; these “ready-mades” function as portraits of sound of our iconic city, visualizations of pulses that prescinded from noise. The material used is the message in itself, creating a vertiginous sonic sculpture symbolic of the city.