Micro-genres: Underground

Performance Places: Deadness and Liveness
Deadness - musical form that evokes the past, etiher because it was genuinely part of it or because it imitates and uses elements of the musical form to make meaning. 

Liveness - is the truth of music, the seeds of genuine culture

Novak suggests that "deadness, in turn, helps remote listeners recognise their affective experiences with recordings as new aesthetics of sound and listening in the reception of Noise, effectively arging that liveness is not just about the "here and now" and face-to-face interaction of live music, but also a kind of individuation. 
Livehouses (raibuhausu) are small music clubs that are tucked away in basements and higher floors in office buildings and are central sites for Noise performances in Japan. The intensity of these packed, tiny spaces render livehouses as undistinguished (temporary and easily reassembled) sites where liveness is created and people can repeatedly return to embody it and feed it back into their everyday lives as listeners. Noise concerts usually happen about once amonth in Tokyo, in different venues. 
Live Japanese Noise is extreme, radical and overwhelmingly loud in comparison to North American performance. Livehouses are optimal sites of liveness where intensely concentrated circuits of eergy shake through everyone in attendance. 
Japanese Noise audiences vary from around 20-50 attendees. In a Japanese livehouse, even a small audience can occupy the space in a way that feels crowded, creating the feel of the scene, just as the crowd creates the feel of the city. 

The research into the Livehouses in Japan lead to the research into overpopulation in Japan and how this music genre could be reflecting this in the way in which the performance is given.

Sonic maps of the underground
Japanese people navigate and find inconspicuous record stores bearing obscure records that serve as entryways into the underground Noise music scene. "The search for hard-to-get recordingd helped to place Japanese Noise at the furthest edge of underground music". The compilation albums of Japanese underground music represented the Japanese Noise scene in a globally legible way that contradicted local perspectives, angering the Japanese performers. It would be interestng to look into the contradictions between misrepresentations of Japanese Noise and the centrality of these misrepresentations for transnational cartography (science of drawing maps). 

record map

When Noise recordings first began to be circulated in the 1980s, independent record stores were places where listeners took their first steps into the underground. Japanese fans often use 'map books' such as the annual Rekôdo Mappu (record map) to find stores that carry a specific type of music. 

label book

The Reiberubon (label book) was the other way in which the navigation to landscapes of recorded music was found, a type of music resouce commonly used by Japanese music fans. Label books work by compiling lists of recordings on a specific label or grup of labels and display photos of each release's cover along with very brief descriptions of its contents. 
Jimmy Dee says that the Japanese underground culture is disorientating, intense and that "casual involvement is difficult, if not impossible".

Seymour Glass (a self-chosen pseudonym), publisher of the important Noise zine Bananafish, was introduced to Japanese Noise through regular phone conversations with Ron Lessard, owner of RRRecords, a small store with a mail-order catalog in Lowell, Massachusetts. As their relationship progressed, Glass would order a copy of a record on Lessard’s recommendation, knowing that the releases he suggested would be new, strange, different, and rare. To illustrate this, he reenacted a typical phone conversation with Lessard: 
SG “I used to mail order cassettes from him in the mid-’80s, and I’d call him up and say, you know, 
SG ‘Recommend something.’ 
RL ‘Well, I got this really weird band from Japan called Hanatarashi. But it’s kind of expensive, you know, 18 bucks . . .’ 
SG ‘Is it good?’
RL ‘Yeah, yeah! It’s REALLY weird. It’s the most over-the-top shit I’ve ever heard.’ 
SG ‘Oh, yeah, better give me one of those.’ ” 

Compilations
Compilations encourage distant listeners to imagine an unknown musical territory. They are maps within maps, which mediate the sonic landscape of Noise as a collective project of "various artists". Maps guide foreign travellers, compilations represent local musical knowledge for a public of outsiders. Compilations reduce the specific features of the scene in favour of global legibility. 

Sources:

The Digital Evolution of Live Music, By Angela Jones, Rebecca Jane Bennett

Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception, By Paul Sanden

Japanoise: David Novak