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In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobili... more In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobilized in threatened urban neighborhoods, where neoliberal forms of creativity are invoked to mitigate social and economic displacement. Gentrification is recognizable across contemporary urban societies, but its practices are contingent on representa-tions of local cultural expression, which have particular ramifications in postindustrial centers of urban Japan. In this paper, I focus on a working-class district of South Osaka known as Kamagasaki, infamous for its longstanding population of day labor-ers and homeless, in which gentrification has taken a complex route through various projects of cultural representation. Through an ethnographic history of the nonprofit arts space Cocoroom, I contribute to the anthropology of gentrification by focusing on entrepreneurial forms of creativity in local arts organizations, which reveal historical transformations of public space in Japanese urban policy, and highlight the symbolic performances of marginal communities.

Profile of the Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa in Wire Magazine June 2018

Discussion of Boredoms/Japanoise circulation for Introducing Japanese Popular Culture textbook

This article describes the political performances of the annual Project Fukushima! festival that—... more This article describes the political performances of the annual Project Fukushima! festival that—only a few months after the earthquake, tsu-nami, and nuclear disaster on 3/11/11, and each summer since—has brought thousands to sing, dance, and make music in Fukushima City. Why celebrate Fukushima in the midst of a meltdown? I argue that performance has taken on a vital critical dimension in the ambivalent pluralism that drives contemporary public protest movements. Music and dance— particularly in the festivals that have become deeply integrated into social activism in post-3/11 Japan—have become particularly expedient ways to enable broad critiques of technocultural capitalism and its silencing of marginal populations. The performativity of festival connotes but does not necessarily constitute public dialogue. Rather, it makes audible the dis-sonance of diverse political assemblies, who respond with ambivalence to demands to speak with a singular voice. I examine the ways in which the anthropology of social movements can attend to new performative assemblies that reframe narratives of disaster and displacement to describe emergent scenes of embodied interdependence in a global politics of survival. By blurring the lines between social expression and the disrup-tive noise of collective spectacle, Project Fukushima! builds the ambivalence of regional culture into a platform for amplifying the noise of political community in the disaster zone.

In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound pres... more In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history; outlines its role in cultural, social, and political discourses; and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying, and conceptualizing sound and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies.

Contributors. Andrew Eisenberg, Veit Erlmann, Patrick Feaster, Steven Feld, Daniel Fisher, Stefan Helmreich, Charles Hirschkind, Deborah Kapchan, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, David Novak, Ana Mária Ochoa Gautier, Thomas Porcello, Tom Rice, Tara Rodgers, Matt Sakakeeny, David Samuels, Mark M. Smith, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Amanda Weidman

To See Once More the Stars: Living in a Post-Fukushima World, 2014

Multimedia by David Novak

Page of supplemental media links for essay "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," published ... more Page of supplemental media links for essay "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," published in Public Culture 23:3 (2011) and Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars listen to Sublime Frequencies (Wesleyan UP, 2016).

Sensory Studies, 2014

This mix draws from a field recording project undertaken in July 2007 with several collaborators ... more This mix draws from a field recording project undertaken in July 2007 with several collaborators from around the city of Osaka, in the Kansai region of western Honshu, Japan. I asked my friends and colleagues to bring me to places that sounded most like Osaka and the experience of living there. Each led me to different sites, where I made recordings of the sounds they identified as most important in each soundscape; the results ranged from iconic and famous sounds of downtown Osaka, to heightened contexts of focused sonic attention, to the distracted experiences and overlapping spaces of everyday life. Using a multitrack DAW to organize the files, I composed the final mix of “Osaka Inside Out” by arranging the recordings to give a sense of movement and contrasting spaces and points of audition across the city.

Website by David Novak

Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa creates some of the most exciting experimental music anywhere... more Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa creates some of the most exciting experimental music anywhere on the planet, pairing the extreme vocal techniques of Rully Shabara with the intense virtuosity of Wukir Suryardi on his unique instrument and namesake, the bambu wukir [bamboo spear]. While Shabara originally hails from the island of Sulawesi and Wukir from Malang in East Java, the group formed in the cultural and artistic center of Jogjakarta, where the two fused hardcore metal, traditional folk culture, and free improvisation into a powerful sound that somehow echoes (and distorts) the gritty populist spectacle of Javanese village ritual, the confrontational intensity of punk, and the edginess of avant-garde performance. The exploratory, challenging energy of Senyawa bursts off the screen in videos of their live appearances, including itinerant director Vincent Moon’s Calling the New Gods, which captures the duo roaming the streets of Jogjakarta for impromptu guerrilla performances around the city. Since their formation six years ago, Senyawa has emerged in various global experimental music networks, with appearances in Australia, Denmark, Holland, Scotland, and Japan, and released several original recordings and collaborations with international artists. I caught up with Rully Shabara at the start of Senyawa’s first tour of the United States in August 2016.

In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobili... more In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobilized in threatened urban neighborhoods, where neoliberal forms of creativity are invoked to mitigate social and economic displacement. Gentrification is recognizable across contemporary urban societies, but its practices are contingent on representa-tions of local cultural expression, which have particular ramifications in postindustrial centers of urban Japan. In this paper, I focus on a working-class district of South Osaka known as Kamagasaki, infamous for its longstanding population of day labor-ers and homeless, in which gentrification has taken a complex route through various projects of cultural representation. Through an ethnographic history of the nonprofit arts space Cocoroom, I contribute to the anthropology of gentrification by focusing on entrepreneurial forms of creativity in local arts organizations, which reveal historical transformations of public space in Japanese urban policy, and highlight the symbolic performances of marginal communities.

Profile of the Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa in Wire Magazine June 2018

Discussion of Boredoms/Japanoise circulation for Introducing Japanese Popular Culture textbook

This article describes the political performances of the annual Project Fukushima! festival that—... more This article describes the political performances of the annual Project Fukushima! festival that—only a few months after the earthquake, tsu-nami, and nuclear disaster on 3/11/11, and each summer since—has brought thousands to sing, dance, and make music in Fukushima City. Why celebrate Fukushima in the midst of a meltdown? I argue that performance has taken on a vital critical dimension in the ambivalent pluralism that drives contemporary public protest movements. Music and dance— particularly in the festivals that have become deeply integrated into social activism in post-3/11 Japan—have become particularly expedient ways to enable broad critiques of technocultural capitalism and its silencing of marginal populations. The performativity of festival connotes but does not necessarily constitute public dialogue. Rather, it makes audible the dis-sonance of diverse political assemblies, who respond with ambivalence to demands to speak with a singular voice. I examine the ways in which the anthropology of social movements can attend to new performative assemblies that reframe narratives of disaster and displacement to describe emergent scenes of embodied interdependence in a global politics of survival. By blurring the lines between social expression and the disrup-tive noise of collective spectacle, Project Fukushima! builds the ambivalence of regional culture into a platform for amplifying the noise of political community in the disaster zone.

In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound pres... more In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history; outlines its role in cultural, social, and political discourses; and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying, and conceptualizing sound and sets new challenges for the development of sound studies.

Contributors. Andrew Eisenberg, Veit Erlmann, Patrick Feaster, Steven Feld, Daniel Fisher, Stefan Helmreich, Charles Hirschkind, Deborah Kapchan, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, David Novak, Ana Mária Ochoa Gautier, Thomas Porcello, Tom Rice, Tara Rodgers, Matt Sakakeeny, David Samuels, Mark M. Smith, Benjamin Steege, Jonathan Sterne, Amanda Weidman

To See Once More the Stars: Living in a Post-Fukushima World, 2014

Page of supplemental media links for essay "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," published ... more Page of supplemental media links for essay "The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media," published in Public Culture 23:3 (2011) and Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars listen to Sublime Frequencies (Wesleyan UP, 2016).

Sensory Studies, 2014

This mix draws from a field recording project undertaken in July 2007 with several collaborators ... more This mix draws from a field recording project undertaken in July 2007 with several collaborators from around the city of Osaka, in the Kansai region of western Honshu, Japan. I asked my friends and colleagues to bring me to places that sounded most like Osaka and the experience of living there. Each led me to different sites, where I made recordings of the sounds they identified as most important in each soundscape; the results ranged from iconic and famous sounds of downtown Osaka, to heightened contexts of focused sonic attention, to the distracted experiences and overlapping spaces of everyday life. Using a multitrack DAW to organize the files, I composed the final mix of “Osaka Inside Out” by arranging the recordings to give a sense of movement and contrasting spaces and points of audition across the city.

Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa creates some of the most exciting experimental music anywhere... more Indonesian experimental duo Senyawa creates some of the most exciting experimental music anywhere on the planet, pairing the extreme vocal techniques of Rully Shabara with the intense virtuosity of Wukir Suryardi on his unique instrument and namesake, the bambu wukir [bamboo spear]. While Shabara originally hails from the island of Sulawesi and Wukir from Malang in East Java, the group formed in the cultural and artistic center of Jogjakarta, where the two fused hardcore metal, traditional folk culture, and free improvisation into a powerful sound that somehow echoes (and distorts) the gritty populist spectacle of Javanese village ritual, the confrontational intensity of punk, and the edginess of avant-garde performance. The exploratory, challenging energy of Senyawa bursts off the screen in videos of their live appearances, including itinerant director Vincent Moon’s Calling the New Gods, which captures the duo roaming the streets of Jogjakarta for impromptu guerrilla performances around the city. Since their formation six years ago, Senyawa has emerged in various global experimental music networks, with appearances in Australia, Denmark, Holland, Scotland, and Japan, and released several original recordings and collaborations with international artists. I caught up with Rully Shabara at the start of Senyawa’s first tour of the United States in August 2016.

Film International website http://filmint.nu/?p=17171 Carnival Folklore 2045 is perhaps the firs... more Film International website http://filmint.nu/?p=17171

Carnival Folklore 2045 is perhaps the first true Noise film; its development is driven by the Noise that bursts out of the narrative, dominating the landscape of the film and binding the characters together in a mysterious world of sound. Combining the audacious absurdity of B-movie science-fiction kitsch with the swirling rage and confusion of Japan’s anxious response to the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, Carnival Folklore 2045 is at once brutal and raw, silly and bizarre, and strangely resonant with the complex political landscape of post-3.11 Japan. In the interview below, filmmaker Naoki Kato discusses the aesthetic of such a unique film experience.

Film Review in Pacific Affairs 89:2

Volume ! The French journal of popular music studies, 2018

https://www.cairn.info/revue-volume-2018-2.htm Ce numéro éclectique de Volume ! propose des arti... more https://www.cairn.info/revue-volume-2018-2.htm

Ce numéro éclectique de Volume ! propose des articles traitant de l'italo-disco, d’Olivia Ruiz, des fanzines punk russes, d'Ornette Coleman et des nouvelles formes de médiatisation des tubes en ligne, ainsi que deux entretiens avec David Novak sur la japanoise et Simon Frith sur le prog rock, et nos habituels comptes-rendus et recensions.

This latest issue of Volume! proposes an eclectic array of papers dealing with italo disco, French singer Olivia Ruiz, Russian punk fanzines, Ornette Coleman and contemporary online marketing strategies for its, not to mention a couple of interviews with David Novak on japanoise and SImon Frith on prog rock - plus our usual reports and book reviews.