Noise, Water, Meat

Noise, Water, Meat

2001 • 467 pages

I come back to this book from time to time whenever I get interested in sound art, but it's never as juicy as I think it should be. I don't mind dense theory, but Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts is too vague and too opaque to hold my interest for long. There are very good chapters such as “The Parameters of All Sound”, which touches on inaudible Fluxus work, but others have little to do with auditory phenomena at all. Paint dripping on canvas? Language virus? I don't think so. There's the obligatory discussions of Cage, Black Mountain College, musique concrète, futurism, and experimental soundtracks, but little to do with actual Sound Art from artists coming out of a visual arts tradition who collage and arrange audio as their primary medium. Too much Wagner and not enough Whitehead for my taste.