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"Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented - their intensity, volume, texture and shape - and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises. Musician and composer David Toop looks at The Art of Noise"

"Dell Glover manufactured CDs for a living, but he began to wonder: if the MP3 was just as good, why bother with the CD?"

As you're tuning your speakers in preparation for Live in Concert, listen to "RAGE (After Tokyo 2020)," DJ Mars89's new mix in response to the Tokyo Olympics-and in opposition to hollow celebrations of national identity and false displays of unity. Moving between speeches, industrial noise, deconstructions of traditional Japanese instruments, and protest music, Mars89 channels the widespread anger at the Olympics: a self-aggrandizing indulgence pushed through by the country's elites during a pandemic, at incredible cost to the people. The mix is published as part of Unknown States, an issue devoted to the fictions that give rise to nations and nationalities.

"Psycho-Acoustics: Sound Control, Emotional Control, and Sonic Warfare" explores the work of former Stevens professor Harold Burris-Meyer whose research in the mid-twentieth century investigated the use of sound as a tool for emotional and physiological control and played a critical role in the emerging fields of sound design for theater, music for industry, and applied psychoacoustics for warfare."

"In his 1967 address "The Eco-Logic of Muzak," for Muzak's Scientific Board of Advisers, Dr. James Keenan, an industrial psychologist from Stanford University, spoke of Muzak as being "synomorphic with the modern world and interrelated with all matters of time and place: Muzak helps human communities because it is a nonverbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village."1 Keenan characterizes Muzak not merely as background music, but as a "language" that builds utopias through sweet and soothing harmonies. "

"Passarello's essays dissect the whys and hows of popular voices, making them hum with significance and emotion. There's Dean's scream, Brando's "Stella," and a yawp that has made cameos in movies from A Star is Born to Spaceballs. The voice is thought's incarnating instrument and Let Me Clear My Throat is the annotated soundtrack of us giving voice to ourselves."