You could be a lot colder than you are now. Or you could be hungrier, or both. Yet you exist as you are now, always to the east of somewhere. A part of your own cylindrical time space, yet full of potentiality to change everything, to watch the donut, in its tangent torus turning, turn to crumbs on the paper with which you hold it. Or not. Our understanding of the edges of existence remain amorphous thoughts not yet formed. Are these reflections purposeful?

The actionable enterprise of capitalist activity struggles too with definable borders. The restaurant may only make sales inside the establishment though we allow its sign high above our landscape as extension of the physical place, its teal [name of font] spilling glow like a tanker of light in the sky. The public transit in our cities extends the walls of movie studios, lawyers and health plans through paid advertising, though a well placed felt tip or sprayed paint can change that significantly, exposing these broadsides arrestable flimsiness. The audience expands from passerby to stationary gaze as trains carrying names and new forms remove capital from the equation of art creation. Its teal, ochre, and maroon are more electric and alive. The nuisance and legality of which call to mind that fast food sign forty feet high.

Other forms of negation that challenge use of space include the civil disobedience of non-action (striking as an absence of labor) or non-attendance, hunger strikes, sit-ins, voids that draw out the attackers into full-display. Non-production and non-consumption are radical acts of removal, negations that refuse assimilation. Rebellion can be addition or subtraction in an effort to multiply within a divided landscape. By most strict measures, anything short of refusal becomes a complicit perpetuation of the system. In sound we seek something different. A reflection then.

Extracting minerals in poor conditions at high volume to produce greatest hits cassette tapes that now forty years later can still be found unopened shows the power of “music capitalism” unleashed. Gamma ferric oxide leaching into the airwaves. To create in a deeply destructive environment forces the focus toward music as a destructive force itself, a noise and pollutant as it relates to its reproduction and  distribution. Broadcast pervasively, the same damn song may follow you from mall to mall.

[clink link for downloadable pdf] How to Talk to Your Child about Merzbow (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Throbbing Gristle)

Pinned down perhaps all noise is just sound, and all sound is just noise. The arrangement matters, though one might suggest colorful splatters, one might hear instead, firecrackers. The space given so freely to your hearing in public settings may experience readjustments. Clunky thud bunk. Or perhaps more effective yet, a silence and call for oppositional listening.