hashtag_blacknoise

Jacques van Zyl was born in Uitenhage, South Africa in 1963. Under the working name hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e, he performs as a noise musician and sound artist, touching upon the fields of installation sound art, musique concrète, harsh noise wall, and improvisation. His works and performance events unfold according to a scheme that he terms “generalised music”, where the artist or musician is any person who either creates or reproduces an intended gesture using sound, irrespective of either the nature of the sonic material that is being created or reproduced, or whether the instrument that produces the sound is a living or non-living object, a traditional musical instrument, an electronic or mechanical sound generator, or simply a commercial music player, and where any recorded sound becomes the raw, operated-upon material for the creation of a musical or sonic event or mode. His approach therefore skirts authorship and post-human relationality by creating a surplus of uncodifiable, unmediated bidirectional interfaces between the inner workings of human and electrical machines, which are then perceived and interpreted by the human mind through conflating the seemingly antithetical notions of silence and sound.

In a career that spans more than two decades, he has performed alongside and collaborated with a number of artists and musicians. These have at various times included Minnette Vári, Stefanus Rademeyer, Brendon Bussy, Belinda Blignaut, Jason Stapleton, Coffin Soup, Ski Crime, Gwaing, Andrea Dicò, Garth Erasmus, Justin Allart, Aragorn Eloff, Vanessa Lorenzo, Rhéa Dally, Martin Perret, Miranda Moss, Agnes Pe, Mia Thom, Pierre-Henri Wicomb, Esther Marié Pauw and many others.

His conceptual project hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e is a musical exploration of the unsilent silences, whether conceptual or actual, which frame and define our various generalised sonic environments.