hashtag_blacknoise

bio

Jacques van Zyl was born in Uitenhage, South Africa in 1963. Under the working name hashtag_blacknoise, 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, As Is, nonentia, Coffin Soup, Andrea Dico, Garth Erasmus, and Justin Allart.

His conceptual project “blacknoise” is a musical exploration of the unsilent silences, whether conceptual or actual, which frame and define our various generalised sonic environments.

On Generalised Music - An Interview with Myself

“Maybe I should loosely define a new, more general kind of music – a music that aims to create new vocabularies in order to discover implicate grammars that reassign previously inconclusive narratives by formatively reevaluating the notions of outcome and subject and identity as ambient, non-superintendent process.”

Solo Exhibitions and Performance Events

2019 ToBeContinued 10th edition – Topolò, Italy

2018 “hashtag_khoe” – The Interesting Party – Somerset West

2018 Ectopias – Edge of Wrong – Community House, Salt River, Cape Town

Group Exhibitions and Performance Events

2019 Under the Dome (with Jason Stapleton) – Iziko Planetarium, Cape Town

2019 Under the Dome (with Kali van der Merwe) – Iziko Planetarium, Cape Town

2019 Ski Crime – Glitch Culture, NOISE EX. – EVOL, Cape Town

2019 Ski Crime – Glitch Party II – EVOL, Cape Town

2019 Working from the Inside – Oppland Kunstsenter – Lillehammer, Norway

2019 Working from the Inside – smac, Stellenbosch

2018 Working from the Inside – Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town