Like any music scene, noise can be understood as a social activity shaped by its practitioners’ organizational practices and political expressions. Not Your World Music provides us with illuminating details about the demographics, physical locations, visual imagery, and political expressions of scenes across the region. For example, it is noted that within Indonesia there is a sense of “unity against common enemies: poverty, corruption, police abuse, dictatorship and capitalism praised by the regime” (Fermont & Della Faille, 2016, 86). We also learn about how urban patterns shape the practice of noise, entrenching it in networks of underground venues found in industrial areas of both urban and suburban neighborhoods.

Throughout the book, an anti-colonial and anti-sexist position is taken towards the act of documenting these new terrains of noise. Fermont and Della Faille point out that many contributions by women as well as artists outside the West are often missing from discourses surrounding noise. It is particularly noteworthy that Not Your World Music recently won the prestigious Golden Nica award at the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica festival in the Digital Music & Sound Art category. The award vindicated the authors’ stated goal of leveraging their privilege to elevate the voices of those without the means to challenge conventional understandings of these scenes alone. As the first book-length publication that covers noise in South East Asia, NYWM allows the names and stories of these artists to circulate in more valorized domains, and to therefore be recognized and legitimized in narratives that once ignored them. The book also successfully destabilizes the centrality of Western artists in the contemporary practice of noise by revealing the sheer volume of activity around the world. Admittedly, the authors’ ambition to document such a vast region creates a problem as they are forced into the position of highlighting some voices at the expense of others. The noise scene in Indonesia alone is described as being “so vast that it is, at present hard if not impossible, to include all the artists, collectives, fanzines, labels and people who are active” (Fermont & Della Faille, 2016, 93). This balancing act is a delicate one, as Fermont and Della Faille cannot escape their position as gatekeepers for readers unfamiliar with the region. They are highly aware of this predicament and to their credit have made efforts to make the book accessible in multiple languages and to offer a free digital PDF version online.

The last two chapters are comprised of lists of selected scholarly texts on the subject of experimental South East Asian music and a discography of physical and digital noise releases with the names of artists and label entities. To many readers it might seem to be extraneous information, but there is a political goal in its reproduction and circulation. This content offers access to these scenes that are otherwise limited by their own DIY communication channels. Fermont and Della Faille’s use of an online crowdfunding campaign to fund the book is a testament to the strong sense of community that plays a vital role sustaining each noise scene. With the book, Fermont and Della Faille extend an invitation to connect with these scenes, in the hope that they may grow and become more vital and disruptive in the process.