Noise without noise? Art interventions in a Southeast Asian city

Abstract

The experimental music community Jogja Noise Bombing based in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta has for more than a decade experimented with pop-up performances of harsh noise played on DIY instruments in urban spaces. These urban spaces, however, tend themselves to be very "noisy". Since 2018 we have followed these performances online and through fieldwork in Indonesia with an ongoing curiosity that stays with the trouble of noise. We are attracted to the context of these performances because they challenge us to answer a series of paradoxical questions: what is noise aesthetics in a place where everything is "noisy" and where this noisiness, furthermore, does not seem to be experienced as a problem or provocation? Can one even speak of "noise" if it is not unwanted? The social aesthetics of Indonesian harsh noise music in its specific attunement to the soundscapes of the Indonesian city challenges Western conventional ontologies of noise and ideas of the relationship between "objective" noise and aesthetic performances of noise such as noise music in several ways.