PRESENTATION: FOX ON ATTALI: CHANNELLING VIOLENCE AND THE DIVINE

Robin Fox is an Australian audio-visual artist well known to Unsound audiences for his work with lasers and sound. Today he gives a presentation that is part memoir and part dissection of Jacques Attali’s classic book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which argues that music plays a prophetic function, presaging future configurations of social organisation. Fox says, “My own life in sound has travelled in counterpoint to the idea that noise is unwanted – an interference or disruption. Noise is, to me, a utopian ideal that holds within it all possible sounds and combinations of sounds. A blast of electromagnetic energy so broad in its spectrum it can only be experienced as a totality.” From such a position, Fox will question how we understand noise in relation to music today and what, if any, prophetic value this may have.