Annihilating Noise. By Paul Hegarty. New York: Bloomsbury, 2021. 288 pp. ISBN 978-1-5013-3544-0

Paul Hegarty’s new book, Annihilating Noise, is a noisy text. Over the course of the 16 essays that make up its four parts, noise is observed as existing almost everywhere, discussed in the context of ecology, materiality, economics, politics, and music. The scope of this text is important. It is not easy to say something interesting about noise anymore, nor is it easy to make interesting noises. In both theory and practice, noise has been frenziedly mined leaving very little of worth left.1 However, despite this, Hegarty makes an important contribution to the field, and this is largely thanks to his generative understanding of noise, which allows him to hear and observe noises where others might not. In his 2007 book Noise/Music: A History, Hegarty developed an idea of noise based on the interwoven notions of negativity and failure. Noise, Hegarty told us, ‘can never be positively, definitively and timelessly located’ (2007, p. ix), which is to say, wherever noise is, it is always in opposition to what is acceptable and wanted; this is the basis of negativity. The notion of failure captures the dialectical dynamics of noise – where what was once unwanted becomes, over time, wanted – as well as a Bataillean dualism – where the transgressive potential of noise is perpetually conditioned and frustrated by its dependence on the limit. These two ideas are retained, and are central, in Annihilating Noise. At one point, Hegarty clarifies the notion of negativity as a response to previous criticisms of it: ‘Noise is a negativity [. . .] and people are uncertain about this, because they say they like noise’ (p. 63). Hegarty goes on to explain how the meaning of negativity is not about badness, but instead the way in which noise, firstly, does not exist independently but only in comparison with a generally ordered thing (‘meaning, or music, or normativity’, p. 63), and secondly, how noise has to be thought of as the ‘negative thing we (some we that represents us all, and with the power to define the we that is us all) sought to exclude’ (p. 63). Negativity and failure, then, give noise its generative potential in this text: ‘[i]t never attributes thingness to noise, outside of an instant that will inevitably be subsumed, so that noise is always happening as potential, but almost never there’ (p. 241). These notions thus give noise a cultural, political and historical shape in Hegarty’s conceptualisation, making noise and its manifestations diffuse. Throughout Annihilating Noise, Hegarty makes a consistent effort to think beyond marginal spaces that have already been recognised by theory, to give voice to a more radical noise. He does this in ‘Part One: Ungrounding’ by drawing on Georges Bataille’s dark ecology and ‘extreme metaphysics’ (p. 24) to counter ideas of a harmonious nature that he feels have run rampant in sound studies. However, the most interesting discussion of these outside spaces is when he addresses what he calls black noise and the gendered avant-garde in ‘Part Two: