Noise and Anti-Noise — Evgeny Voronovsky's Lecture, Which Needed Time to Land

You'll have felt it: it's got too loud, inside the window and outside it, from all the rubbish spilling well past its own edges — as though we're being stirred up deliberately so that we won't settle and think for a second. And we don't; the most we manage is to move it online, running endless discussions about nothing and signing off with an emoji.

Time to publish this at last. The lecture was back in January and the wish to write about it has only arrived now — it feels important to understand how much all of that stream is doing to us. What to do about it, and how to protect yourself, is still unclear; everyone works that out alone.

Evgeny Voronovsky went through fairly physical material, the sort of thing from sound-school lessons that some of you will already know. And the whole of it came together into a world and took the form of art: the complicated and the simple fused into something that wasn't a dull monologue on an assigned topic but the pleasure of knowing, and of actually hearing.

All of this came out of an educational project inside the Contemporary Viewer's Laboratory, run by musicAeterna's conductor Teodor Currentzis. Quickly, and with rough edges, Teodor has built somewhere in St. Petersburg for meaning and curiosity and new knowledge — one you have to go and find, through the stern Soviet corridors of Dom Radio. It isn't something you can get by downloading information off a computer, and the only condition for receiving it is to let it in and feel it.

Does that hurt?