BAND OF THE WEEK: WHITE NOISE SOUND

BAND OF THE WEEK: WHITE NOISE SOUND

Spawn of Swansea, Wales, the self-titled album from WHITE NOISE SOUND plays like the antithesis of a swansong – rather, it’s an introduction, an overture, an origin tale born of fuzz, grace and drums that pound with the gravity of Jupiter … and Saturn … Oberon, Miranda and Titania … Neptune, Titan … stars can frighten …

Whoops. The mind went into space there – it’s an activity that the music of White Noise Sound provides for, which is not to indicate that your attention span will be challenged. Rather, there is space in this White Noise Sound, built in by design. Indeed, the official creation story has it that, after forming in 2006, the band “immediately made the conscious decision to shut themselves off from all around them in favour of conjuring their own particular wall-of-sound – at once relentlessly pulsating and blissed-out.”

Mission accomplished. The conjuring is the successful result of focused study on a variety of textbooks, with titles like “The Curious Science of Spacemen 3,” “Stable Isotope Techniques of the Velvet Underground,” and “Ethoexperimental Approaches to the Study of Really Killer Feedback-Fueled Doomy Love Songs.”

Study hard.

Download “(In Both) Dreams and Ecstasies” by WHITE NOISE SOUND

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. ‘Higher Purpose’ is a pretty vague term, and you can imagine it being imparted by something quite different than a god as gods are traditionally conceived.

… On balance, notwithstanding bursts of backsliding, human conceptions of the divine do get morally richer – that ‘god’ tends tends to grow morally because humankind is itself growing morally. And the reason, I’ll argue, is that circumstances conducive to moral growth – the breadth and density of non-zero-sum dynamics – intensify as time goes by. Technological evolution (wheels, roads, cuneiform, alphabets, trains, microscopes) puts more and more people in non-zero-sum relationship with more and more other people at greater and greater distances, often across ethnic, national or religious bounds. That doesn’t guarantee moral progress, but it shifts the odds in that direction, and in the long run, the odds tend to win out.”
– Robert Wright, “The Evolution of God”