What is aJazzNoise?
aJazzNoise is NOT a review site. aJazzNoise is not music criticism.
aJazzNoise is occasional blog posts recommending new improvised music… and noise… sometimes with jazz flavours… and cacophony and other assorted sonic strangeness…
aJazzNoise starts with free jazz and free improvisation and spreads out from there. Where it spreads to depends largely on my own musical tastes, whimsical and inconsistent though they may often be. If aJazzNoise were intended to be in any way authoritative, whimsy and a lack of consistency would probably be terrible flaws. It isn’t and they’re not.
aJazzNoise is… my (and very occasionally others’) bluntly enthusiastic scribblings about music that makes me feel “wow!” (or something like that), hoping that someone might read, then listen, and also feel the “wow!”… and, who knows, maybe even buy an album – thus helping support the fragile existence of an improvising musician somewhere in the world (the price of an album may not be much but it’s more than they’ll get from Sp*tify!)
Every now and then, there’s a non-review that isn’t really any kind of appraisal or critique, more of an enthusiastic recommendation. There’s also a series of ‘Daily Tunes’ posted on Twitter or Facebook, tracks from newly- (or soon-to-be-) released albums of oddness and beauty.
And if you’re wondering (and still here) the name comes from the Frank Zappa album title, “Make a Jazz Noise Here”, because… why not?
Enjoy.
Dave
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Submissions:
I almost never write album reviews these days. I had hoped that I’d get back into it but no… while I still find great joy in listening to these odd sounds, writing about them is a chore, no longer a pleasure, and I find I have nothing original to say. Shame, but that appears to be just how it is.
That said, the Daily Tunes series is still going strong – a track a day on Facebook, Twitter and Bluesky. So, if you have a new album (or a single, or an EP, or a 27-disc life’s work) that you think fits the aJN aesthetic*, feel free to send me an email at ajazznoise@gmail.com with a link – Bandcamp is preferred because it’s just so easy, treats musicians more reasonably than most platforms, and if I’m posting Bandcamp links then any listeners are just a click away from buying your stuff (not to get too capitalistic here but that is the world we’re living in, most of us)… and Soundcloud, YouTube, and any platform you don’t to sign up to listen are all good too. But please don’t send Sp*tify links – they’re exploitative, verging-on-evil tossers and are not welcome in my personal corner of reality.
*Defining the ‘aJN aesthetic’ is probably a thankless, ‘painting-the-Forth-Bridge’ kind of task but as a rough and ready jumping-off point: some element of improvisation, jazz of the free variety, noisy (but rarely pure noise), avant-garde, skronk, drone-y, musique concrète, ambient (but only if it comes with a little blood on the floor), abstract, aleatoric, experimental, progressive, or contains aural ingredients that are just downright weird, would be a good start.