The city is not the festival it used to be. Not if festival gives occasion for individual voices to rise above the din of official power. Has the avant-garde succeeded in producing an appreciation of noise or has it only contributed to the society of the Spectacle's sonic counterpart? Some music critics, and social critics for that matter, would echo Jacques Attali's suspicion that the aesthetic inventiveness brought on by the musical avant-garde has failed to affect "a real rupture in the existing networks" governing the production of our acoustic culture (136). For Attali, the art of noise celebrated in the avant-garde from Luigi Russolo through to John Cage is "only a spectacle of noise" (137). For the contemporary musician of ambiance, such a criticism poses a fundamental challenge. Perhaps it is in deference to this challenge that so many artists producing "ambiant music" have abandoned the city opting for an idealized natural soundscape. Indeed, can any audio artist use the city's material ambiance as a means to transform the busyness and banality of everyday life when its characteristic feature is its spectacular noise?

We offer these questions partly in the spirit of yesterday/s revolutionaries: an homage to the notion of transformation. It is a romantic yearning for practices of art which inquire upon the conditions of their production while simultaneously intervening upon those same conditions. Such was the avowed endeavor of those avant-garde artists who forty years ago came together as the situationist international, or SI. Composed of artists from a variety of late-50s European avant-garde groups, the situationists sought to "realize" art as a social practice (Knabb, 145).

From the Dadaist vanguard of the teens and twenties [the situationists] took an urge to destroy art; from the surrealists, an aim to reconstitute it at the level of everyday life. From modernism in architecture they developed a utopian urbanism, in part derived from Bauhaus, but superseding it in a effort to widen its formalist and populist tendencies into a general political study of urban space (Ball, 24).

Central to the analysis of the SI was an inquiry into the conditions of modern life as organized by late capitalism. Under the rubric of the Spectacle, the SI charged that modern capital had permeated the entirety of everyday life reducing all social relations to commodity relations to be bought and sold in the free market. Through this reification, the Spectacle alienated women and men from their lived relations by insisting upon their objectification as consumable goods. The artist within such a regime both fabricates those objects and continually pushes the threshold of innovation for the continued proliferation of Spectacle culture.

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Idea. Idea. Idea.
Knowledge. Knowledge. Knowledge.
Boomboom. Boomboom. Boomboom.
(You cant go home.)