Hacking out the Noise of Global Asia: Experimental Music as Regional Cultural Policy

This paper considers the rise of experimental music networks - from the longterm circulations of Noise music to recent booms in circuit-bending and analog synthesis - as a focal point for neoliberal subjectivity in the recent geopolitical "pivot to Asia." The recent emergence of local entrepreneurial "maker spaces" across East and Southeast Asia might challenge views of Asian popular culture as purely imitative of Western forms (e.g. K-pop, J-pop), perhaps even "recentering" historical processes of globalization (Iwabuchi 2002) through techno-creative practices that collectively improvise a new cosmopolitan trans-Asian art world.

David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliations in Anthropology, Film and Media Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies. He is the author of the award-winning Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke, 2013) and the co-editor of Keywords in Sound (Duke, 2015), as well as recent essays and sound recordings in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Popular Music, Sensory Studies, and The Wire. He is the founder of the Music and Sound Interest Group in the American Anthropological Association, and co-director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music.