I chanced upon
this article by Dror Feiler about 'Noise Music' (why do I find myself thinking of Radiohead?), and found its reversed metaphors - of 'noise' as a form of exile, and of the place of the exile in a foreign cultural context being akin in some way to 'noise' in an ordered piece of music - most thought-provoking, in addition to its hypotheses on noise and its relation to modernity.
Of especial resonance (pun semi-intended) were these lines:
"Noise music generates straightaway auditory disturbance, panic and fear, we hear something like the squeal of a dentist's suction straw, the collision of helicopters, or the thermonuclear roar of the sun's core. It sounds as if the machines of music have begun to digest the earth, and we listen to the garbage disposal run as nature is ground in technology's gizzard. And this fear is similar to the usual reaction to the "other", to the immigrant."
"The metaphor, 'all modern thinkers are exiles', might tend rather to conceal the brute fact of bodies not only psychically but physically in exile, and the new ways of feeling, thinking, and living that this brings; to elide the experience of working and downtrodden people. The metaphor is of Jewish/Christian origin, evoking the expulsion from Eden; but "what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings". Edward Said, 'Reflections on Exile', Granta 13, 1984, p. 160; reprinted in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, ma 2000.
"The most disturbing aspect of noise music must be its technical perfection. Despite the prima facie appearance of chaos, noise music abides by the strictest ordering principles. When a noise music fragment takes hold of musical form or trope, it is compulsively consistent. With the amplifiers whole power and register, noise music pieces fit together like a massive mechanical contraption that does not accomplish anything. " We have an exactly calculated and efficient piece serving no end, and thus we see the image of modern life: the increasing efficiency of instrumental rationality without a meaningful end in sight. Thus noise music exemplifies Thoreau's description of the industrial revolution as "an improved means to an unimproved ends."
"The "critical power of art" (in this case, noise music) is a somatic experience that "hits you in the gut" and "resists predatory reason, precisely because it can't be stomached, gobbled up by the mind." "If experience leaves a non-digestible residue that won't go away," "that is food for critical cognition." Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics After the End of Art: Interview with Grant Kester," Art Journal 56 (1997): 38.
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