“The Decade In Noise”

All sound is more or less “noise” until conventions congeal to classify it as “music,” but according to Marc Masters’ “The Decade in Noise”, dozens of bands used the Oughts to reintroduce dissonance and volume to rock and punk audiences. In the process new hybrids were created, more wild polarities explored, and, like so many niche musics over the last decade, it all found larger and more diverse audiences than imaginable before. Marc’s piece is a concise blow-by-blow of the bands who came to prominence over the last 10 years, but it works better as a reaffirmation that the Internet didn’t kill scenes, it just let them speak to each other in ways they’d never done before, noise’s lifeblood in particular being mercurial live performances. I particularly enjoy this line, which (spoiler alert) ends the first 1/3: “Global noise became a local phenomenon, a web of scenes equally devoted to each other and the world around them.”