foreshadowing merzbow

"We are living in an age which has created new sounds of unimaginable variety: jet planes and atomic explosions, the noises of oscillation and the ghostly crackling in the assembly buildings of the precision industry. Big city dwellers are subject to a barrage of decibels which men of former times not only would have been unable to withstand physically, but which would have cast them into paroxysms of psychological confusion. Scientists have amplified the sounds of plant growth by millions of strengths so that they become a deafening roar. We know now that fish, deemed to be the quietest of all creatures by the romantics of the last century, exist in an environment of continual sounds. Every human being alive today is affected by this expansion of the realm of the audible. Are musicians supposed to be unaffected?"

-Joachim Berendt, from The Jazz Book, (c)1975

(from the same book: "...it was observed in the U.S. that children could be enraptured by Free Jazz. [...] They demand nothing, and so get everything.")