{"id":3788,"date":"2026-07-29T18:22:47","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/?page_id=3788"},"modified":"2026-07-29T18:23:03","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:23:03","slug":"noise-uprising","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/noise-uprising\/","title":{"rendered":"Noise Uprising"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"container\">\n<h2 style=\"padding-left: 40px; text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\"><strong>Noise Uprising (2024)<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4 style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">for two singers, four multi-instrumentalist guitarists, and electronics [92:00]<\/h4>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/composersedition.com\/christopher-trapani-noise-uprising\/\">SCORE<\/a> at COMPOSERS EDITION<\/em><\/h3>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 530px; height: 472px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=3523336928\/size=large\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=small\/transparent=true\/\" seamless=\"\"><a href=\"https:\/\/newworldrecords.bandcamp.com\/album\/christopher-trapani-noise-uprising\">Christopher Trapani: Noise Uprising by Christopher Trapani, ZWERM<\/a><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 11px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; text-align: left;\">\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ffffff;\">It started from a standpoint of solidarity: My hometown, New Orleans, the city whose native music arguably changed the global soundscape more than any other in the 20th century. One outpost in a constellation of subjugated, dirty, vibrant ports, with a street-level heritage that outshone the capitals of high art. Horn riffs, backbeats, and changes, etched into shellac and spread across the world.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Noise Uprising<\/i> presents itself in the familiar mold of an anthology (The Secret History of Mankind, Excavated Shellac), a collection of vignettes from all over the map. It is a 90-minute B-side: a people\u2019s history of music-making, where the motors of artistic change are not the cultural capitals, but the bustling ports and marketplaces instead\u2014an underground cross-cultural network of liminal, transient zones with greater reach than the concert hall circuit.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>From a narrow window of time\u2014at the cusp of the postcolonial era, before mass commodification turned recording expeditions into a codified industry\u2014we have inherited firsthand documentation of an incubator environment that prefigures the boundless reach of today\u2019s internet culture, in which availability seems to have again outpaced the profit motive; after surpassing the time limitations imposed by 78s and jukeboxes in favor of longer-playing media, we have paradoxically returned to a point where we again encounter new work primarily in small snippets, through YouTube videos and shuffled playlists.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There was a long preparation phase: immersing myself in the stylistic vocabulary of far-flung genres, listening to digitized recordings, selecting song texts from primary sources. Like a novelist doing background research for a particular historical era, I wanted a degree of accuracy that I could later challenge and transgress, creating a world that is anchored in a vintage atmosphere, but also tinged with the contemporary, freely interpolating interim developments (\u00e0 la Thomas Pynchon: \u201cIf it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.\u201d). The tracks could sometimes, almost, pass for \u201cstylistically authentic\u201d\u2014until a closer listen reveals a warped dimension\u2014usually some altered microtonal scale, redistributed rhythmic pattern, or updated timbral shading: a Hindustani Alap with a quarter-tone raag and modulating drone, a Palm-Wine guitar riff in an asymmetric additive aksak meter, a Smyrneitiko drenched in a shoegaze haze of distortion\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Denning delineates three arcs of influence: \u201cthe black Atlantic, the gypsy Mediterranean, and the Polynesian Pacific.\u201d The musical focus shifts accordingly: timeline patterns and tonal harmonies for the transatlantic sounds of West Africa, Atlantic ports, and the Caribbean; modal structures and directed improvisations for North Africa and the Aegean; a focus on stylized gestures in the Indian\/Pacific zone: the scoops and slides of dhrupad and the Hawaiian guitar, underpinned by drones from the subcontinent or strummed triads dropped off by the Dutch and the Portuguese.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The <i>Noise Uprising<\/i> instrumentarium ranges from nostalgic\u2014parlor guitar, dobro, zither, the one-stringed Strohviol\u2014to customized and contemporary update \u2014a quarter-tone shruti box, retuned melodicas, a homemade omnichord, a Telecaster fitted with microtonal frets and a bowing device called the Gizmotron \u2014along with a gamut of traditional instruments: saz ba\u011flama and c\u00fcmb\u00fc\u015f from Turkey, a Vietnamese dan bau, a guembri from Morocco. I stuck to one selfimposed rule of thumb: no instrument would be brought in purely for a single coloristic effect; at least one reimagined alternate use was compulsory. So the nine-string Algerian mandole, with added microtonal frets, is heard in the role of the Greek bouzouki, the Cuban tres, and the Portuguese guitar. An amplified Zimbabwean mbira, with the addition of a few effects, doubles as Balinese gongs. The dan bau also buzz drones like a tanpura; the aforementioned GizmoTele supplies the gritty timbre of a bowed lyra or a yayl\u0131 tanbur\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As a nod to a century of electrical recording, the piece aims to incorporate a range of devices for recording and amplification, both vintage and contemporary. The two singers perform with microphones, at times crooning close and at other times with a full-throated distance. All the guitarists play through tube amplifiers, with an arsenal of analog and digital effects. Two speakers amplify processed sound from an onstage computer, which both transforms live signals and plays prerecorded sound files. Some of these have been created using an artificial intelligence style transfer technique, whereby an incoming signal is matched with a database, in this case a library of digitized 78s from the 1920s. In this way, a composed passage using gamelan samples is transformed into a deepfake Balinese record, the vocal trill that ends the tango becomes a stretched kaleidoscopic glissando, and the singing sustain of the dan bau becomes an expressive voice. Other effects are achieved using megaphones, low-powered dictaphones (for a broken down tape), and a centrally positioned bakelite radiola horn speaker.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The piece opens with the radiola alone, playing an old record with something that sounds like a solo kemen\u00e7e or sarangi. Listen more closely and you can hear it is actually an AI reconstitution. A live voice enters, distorted by a megaphone, triggering a chain of fragments in the radiola: fragments from old recordings that dovetail into one another via a common pitch in the voice. A line sung in Sanskrit, then the strohviol comes in\u2014a third horn, coloring the building sonority that cascades into the release of a Jakartan kroncong tune.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Above all, <i>Noise Uprising<\/i> is intended as a celebration of the underdog. Not the \u201ctop down\u201d approach of conservatories and concert halls, but a \u201cbottom up\u201d vector, rooted in street-level, waterfront exchange. The guitar is a universal emblem of popular music, along with the cheaply-produced free reeds and improvised percussion\u2014all late entries to classical circuit. \u201cPop\u201d vocal stylings still vie for serious consideration with bel canto. One way of understand the priorities of Noise Uprising is to note the powerful places that are skipped over (New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin) in favor of crumbling Clarksdale, chaotic Mumbai, and dear old, defeated New Orleans\u2014a specter in the cycle, an intended but uncompleted stop on the tour\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In a tangible way, the 78 RPM liberated unfamiliar voices by detaching the musician from the sound, allowing a degree of transgression and intermingling that social mores would never tolerate in the flesh. Discs arrived from abroad with no information aside from the label, often indecipherable. No way even to classify according to skin color, the determinate marketing detail of the era. Disembodied voices, divorced from context, travelled farther than the musicians who owned them ever could. That kind of reversal brings to mind Gerhard Kubik\u2019s observation, in Africa and the Blues, that \u201cin culture contact situations itoften happens that minorities win. Or Denning, again: \u201cThere is no question that recordings, organized as a multinational industry, leads to the expropriation and exploitation of musical labors, as well as the isolated, repetitive, and fetishized consumption of its commodities. But it also makes possible new and unexpected reverberations, new forms of affiliation and solidarity across space and time.\u201c<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s enormously to our advantage that people are still actively learning about, writing about, translating music across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Nothing detracts from the primacy and reverence for the thing itself: that fortuitous treasure trove of century-old shellac records.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/An5viPcApKM?si=7pqFZtoW5VLJidOC\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Noise Uprising (2024) &nbsp; for two singers, four multi-instrumentalist guitarists, and electronics [92:00] &nbsp; SCORE at COMPOSERS EDITION &nbsp; Christopher Trapani: Noise Uprising by Christopher Trapani, ZWERM &nbsp; It started<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/noise-uprising\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Noise Uprising&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3788","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Noise Uprising - CHRISTOPHER TRAPANI<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/christophertrapani.com\/wordpresssite\/noise-uprising\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Noise Uprising - CHRISTOPHER TRAPANI\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Noise Uprising (2024) &nbsp; 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