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"Jennie C. Jones  practice mines the territory of Modernism-abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts-to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century's social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings. "

"What are the political potentials of listening? How does sound define the crossing of the territories of contemporaneity, of the differences in race, gender, social belonging? How can we, in the invisible depth of sound, define our belonging to the contemporary world, taking an active position in issues that concern ethics, subjectivity, the principles of collective and individual living?"

Samson Young's compositions, drawings, installations, radio broadcasts, and performances touch upon topics such as military conflict, identity, migration, and political frontiers past and present. Sound and its cultural politics are at the heart of a practice that interlays multiple narratives and references. The relationship between violence and sound is a recurrent line of investigation in Young's work, which is often based on extensive research.

Having students understand ideas of expansiveness, asymmetry, and non-linearity as central to black cultural expression and critique-even as artists refuse to sacrifice an expressed political commitment to black resistance-begins to suggest ways for students to contemplate the intersection of identity politics with the unexpected, fantastic elements of expression that lie outside of more recent flattened diagnoses of black nationalism."

"Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organising. Through the performance of a militant sound investigation, the audio collective map contested spaces and histories as an articulation of social relations. Drawing on the formal strategies of early Conceptualism, We Come from Your Future facilitates a particular kind of discursive action whose performance of announcing and denouncing constitute an intervention. We Come from Your Future is comprised of two episodes in which Ultra-red ask, "What are the sounds of anti-racism?" Posing this question in the context of anti-racist and migrant organizing in the UK, the first episode features a set of dispatches that combine audio compositions with accompanying field reports. These online dispatches lead up to and inform an on-site event as part of the Triennial Prologues: Altermodern at Tate Britain on June 28. "

"WV is an ongoing investigation into the politics of human sensuality, by way of commentary, reviews, field recordings, and artwork. Most posts include both text and media. Our emphasis is sonic, but we're not deaf to pictures, tastes, or feelings. The site was created out of a belief that how we sense the world is a crucial political problem. Sense is at the heart of consumption - of media, food, art, material objects - as well as engagements between individuals. Influencing sensual preferences en masse is a key to political and economic power. Consider flavor, cadence, leather interiors. "

"Can we access the plurality of our contemporary world through silence? And to what do the limits of our sonic imagination attest to? Artist and writer Salomé Voegelin re-listens to the body in silence, so as to grant a new agency, whereby she repositions the relationship between the self and others at the edge of the aesthetic and political."

Solo. Based on a recording of a Salvadoran boy burying his father. Bob Ostertag did not simply create a political piece but a musical reality, in which sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. It is this clarity that makes Sooner or Later great music, a music that has something to do with life again. -- Die Zeit

"On Practice: Listening asks: How can listening form a space of political encounter? What is the difference between listening and hearing? How do other people hear? This episode features artist Ain Bailey's collaboration with Micro Rainbow alongside recordings from Pauline Oliveros' tuning meditations, a sound piece from artist collective Ultra-red and a contribution from academic and sound practitioner Ximena Alarcón."

Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

In this podcast, we talk to Antye Greie about language, sound, and the body. At their intersection, the voice emerges, with its multiple resonances and different ways of introducing the voice of others through her own practice and space of visibility. Along the way, we look at her work and methodology, from the deconstruction of texts to the implementation of what she calls "feminist sonic technologies". Permeating everything, we encounter the memory and the experience of having been raised in the values and the political experiment of the former Eastern Bloc and feeling part of a silenced diaspora. Recorded: February 2022.

By examining the materials that produce sound within contemporary art, we can approach sounding works not only from the perspective of "sound as sound" or "sound in itself" but rather as "sound as more than sound." Sound can never be without a history, culture, or political situation, and by approaching sounding practices in the same manner as we critically approach contemporary art practices, we allow matter to matter.

Synopsis: this bitter-sweet comedy tells the story of a man who suffers from hyper-acoustic sensitivity, which makes his life in Tel Aviv, one of the noisiest urban locations on earth, a living hell. His quest to live in peace and quiet by politely asking neighbors for basic consideration, or by addressing the boisterous passing-by to re-consider the mere fact they are 'not alone in the world', or even by trying to plea to the authorities: Police and Municipality - or even worse: talking the law into his own hands: all means have proved nothing but his bitter impotency in the face of the irrepressible Israeli "noise-mania". So he decides to act. He constructs a special surveillance apparatus in order to monitor and control the invading street-neighbor-noise, and with the help of a "God-like" megaphone he takes control over the intruding street noise. His fantasy to silence also the noise within his own family life, turns co-existence with him unbearable. It doesn't take long before it becomes inevitable that he would have to pay the price.

Fantastic Futures is a collaborative group of individuals from Iraq and the United States. Together, we've created this online platform for mixing and sharing of recorded sounds and stories across cultures. Our goal is to connect citizens from nations in conflict in an open dialogue based around the sharing of field recordings, songs, and interviews. Hopefully, this might help to collapse the barriers of physical space that contribute to the misunderstandings between cultures and to emphasize the subversive value of sharing experiences across political borders.

"Jacob Kirkegaard has just come back from a last visit to his first major solo exhibition at Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art, "Earside Out". An exhibition which displayed Kirkegaard's work as a sound artist, although his body of work spreads into field recordings, film sound, photography as well as producing and creating experimental music. "Earside Out" garnered much interest and Kirkegaard's parting gesture was to give a talk in the local library, very much preaching to the unconverted. It sounds like hard work, but Kirkegaard seems to enjoy precisely this, and very much prefers it to being idle."

"The radiofrequency spectrum is at the heart of telecommunications, used by police, emergency personnel and public transport services, as well as the armed forces. Every day, this spectrum ensures the proper functioning of mobile phones and wireless devices. Seen as an essential resource by some and as a health hazard by others, the electromagnetic fields generated by radiofrequency spectrum activity have multiplied exponentially since humans first learned to harness electricity. In his Electrosmog series, Jean-Pierre Aubé searches out ambient radio frequency activity in the urban landscape of Montréal, which for Aubé forms a singular territory, characterized by its density in the city and by the political and economic issues that accompany it. Equipped with a radio, an antenna, and home-made software, the artist sweeps the titular spectrum of radio frequencies. Every tenth of a second, the device takes a snapshot of its readings - a measure of electromagnetic activity on a specific frequency. This information is then paired with images of Montréal, digitally altered by these same measurements, to create a "documentary in sound" of the city's spaces. Montréal, well-known to the artist after years of radiofrequency experiments here, is the eighth city in which Aubé has measured and visually presented this urban Electrosmog. Electrosmog, Montréal, 01.1 MHz - 144 MHz, 2012 Text from the CCA and Elektra - video abstract original length : 11 minutes - built with Processing"

Centuries of Sound is an attempt to produce a set of mixes for every year of recorded sound. Starting in 1860, a mix will be posted every month until we catch up with the present day. So far we are still in the very early days, where a very limited selection of recordings are available, but as we get into the 20th century I hope to include the widest possible spread, both in terms of geography and genre. This will mean that experts will be required. If you are interested in putting yourself forwards as an expert on Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else, then please do drop me a line at centuriesofsoundmail at gmail.

"As Mendi + Keith describe, "For Baldwin sound, music, and the blues in particular were sources of inspiration. The multichannel sound art work meditates on a politics of listening found at the intersection of Baldwinʼs language and the sound worlds invoked in his work. It uses the glass façade of The New School's University Center as delivery system for the sound, turning the building itself into a speaker. The 12-hour piece is created using slow moving harmonies, melodicized language from Baldwinʼs writings, ambient recordings from the streets of Harlem, and an inventory of sounds contained in Baldwin's story 'Sonnyʼs Blues.'""

"While exploring language and its political, social and cultural roots in many of her artworks, artist Inmi Lee became fascinated with the question, What does the pure form of sound look like? For her piece, Mother, she attempted to answer this question: a collaboration with code artist Kyle McDonald, Mother translates sounds into objects. Claims Lee, "It's one thing to hear a sound- it goes into your ear and dissipates." Representations of sound, however, "Reveal certain relationships between sound and shape.""

"Almost 200 recordings of international protests are now archived in an online sound map that spans over two decades."