Tiny Mix Tapes

Guitar Center - “Live @Times Square, August 2014” “Live @Times Square, August 2014”

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What is cacophony?

What sounds define a level of inane madness in which the appellation “noise” would no longer be useful? No, I’m not talking about something that necessarily breaks the mind, but rather something that dulls the mind to the point of being unable to accept anything reasonable. At what point does something become so chaotic that it stops being a source of horror or terror, but a miasma of sound from which you can’t make out anything whole, just fragments of what has already been done? And if anyone were in the middle of it all, would they be crushed by its sheer desolation?

It all seems so meaningless. If there is anything that can destroy the relevance of an instrument, it is too much of it at once. So what keeps a certain middle-aged man intent on playing on like a teenager, and what makes him think that he is any different from the various men of his age who are doing the exact same thing at stacks near by?

I speak nonsense, but then so is this video. In theory, one could get away with calling this “noise music,” but only if they were trolling certain music publications. For really, what we are witnessing is a moment that still occurs too often: the decayed myopic dreams of a dozen man-children converging in the basement of a massive tourist trap to create cacophony. You simply cannot get more dissonant and bleak at once.

• Cacophony: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cacophony