Thomas Bey William Bailey: Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music & Sound Art in the 21st Century, 2nd ed (2009/2012)

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, the author charts an ongoing trend in electronic music: an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of noise, to the establishment of micro-nations populated largely by sound artists, 21st century sound culture is expanding in its scope and popularity even as it shrinks in other respects. Numerous exclusive interviews with leading lights of the field were also conducted for this book: William Bennett (Whitehouse), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle / Coil), Peter Rehberg (Mego), John Duncan, Francisco López, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bob Ostertag and many others weigh in with a diversity of thoughts and opinions that underscores the incredible diversity to be found within new electronic music itself.

First published by Creation Books in 2009
Publisher Belsona Books
ISBN 0615736629, 9780615736624
417 pages

author
google books (1st edition)

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Andrei Smirnov, Liubov Pchelkina: Generation Z: Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in 1910-1930 (2011) [English/Hungarian]

Variophone, theremin terpsitone, rhythmicon, emiriton, ekvodin, graphical sound – just to mention a few of the amazing innovations of the beginning of the 20th century in Soviet Russia, a country and time turbulent with revolutions, wars and totalitarian dictatorship.

While the history of Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde art and music is fairly well documented, the inventions and discoveries, names and fates of researchers of sound, creators of musical machines and noise orchestras, founders of new musical technologies have been largely forgotten except, perhaps, Leon Theremin, inventor of the first electronic musical instrument, the theremin.

This community of creators, however, was inherently incompatible with the totalitarian state. By the late 1930s it became effectively written out of histories, wiped out from text books.

Many of their ideas and inventions, considered as utopian at that time, were decades later rein¬vented abroad. We still use them today not knowing their origin.

This booklet was produced for the Budapest edition of a traveling exhibition curated by Andrei Smirnov of the Theremin Center and Liubov Pchelkina of the State Tretyakov Gallery.

Publisher OSA Archivum, Budapest, 2011
ISBN 9789638853820
20 pages

exhibition (from the curators)
exhibition (gallery website)

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Seth Kim-Cohen: In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (2009)

An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present.

Marcel Duchamp famously championed a “non-retinal” visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp’s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself—or as the unwanted child of music—artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts. Applying key ideas from poststructuralism, deconstruction, and art history, In the Blink of an Ear suggests that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation, and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed – or, in many cases, completely rejected – the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm.

Starting in 1948, the simultaneous examples of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer initiated a sonic theory-in-practice, fusing clement Greenberg’s media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception. Subsequently, the “sound-in-itself” tendency has become the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. Engaged with critical texts by Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Friedrich Kittler, Jean François Lyotard, and Jacques Attali, among others, Seth Kim-Cohen convincingly argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting sound-in-itself in favor of a reading of sound’s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality. At the same time, this important book establishes the principles for a nascent non-cochlear sonic practice, embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political, and the technological.

Artists discussed include: George Brecht, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Valie Export, Luc Ferrari, Jarrod Fowler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Robert Morris, Muddy Waters, John Oswald, Marina Rosenfeld, Pierre Schaeffer, Stephen Vitiello, La Monte Young

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, New York/London, 2009
ISBN 082642970X, 9780826429704
296 pages

review (Laura Paolini, MusicWorks)
review (Brian Kane, NonSite)

publisher
google books

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Craig Dworkin: Unheard Music (2010)

American critic Craig Dworkin reviews almost one hundred compositions and performances of silent music — from Cage’s 4’33” to Büchler’s 3’34” — in a comprehensive survey of the best music you’ll never hear.

Published to accompany a film by Simon Morris: Pavel Büchler: Making Nothing Happen.

Publisher information as material, 2010
30 pages

publisher (incl. DVD)

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Yolande Harris: Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness (2011)

“Scorescapes investigates how sound mediates our relationship to the environment, and how contemporary multidisciplinary art practices can articulate this relationship. It joins my own artistic practice with a theoretical analysis of the field, highlighting how relationships to the environment drawn through sound are profoundly bound up with technology. Key concepts include: making the inaudible audible; underwater sound and cetacean communication; field recordings and the contextual basis of sound; typologies of listening; the score as relationship; and techno-intuition.

Scorescapes negotiates a role for the artist and composer as a researcher, creating hybrid methods and developing alternative forms of knowledge that heighten personal awareness through direct engagement with sonic environments. Working closely with composers David Dunn, Alvin Lucier and Pauline Oliveros, and with bio-acoustic scientist Michel André, I tested and applied theoretical ideas, generating unexpected artistic research questions and methods. These included the need to distinguish between audification, sonification and visualization processes, the paucity of research on underwater sonic environments and the anthropocentric bias towards environmental sound.” (from the Abstract)

PhD thesis
Academy for Creative and Performing Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
Supervisors: Frans de Ruiter, David Dunn, Bob Gilmore
146 pages
via leidenuniv.nl

author

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Craig Dworkin: A Handbook of Protocols for Literary Listening (2012)

A survey of listening in literature, from Affinity to Ventriloquism, from Judith Goldman to Charles Berstein.

Published for Arika’s A survey as a process of listening programme as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

From the preface: “Some of the most innovative listening has been done by poets. The following handbook catalogues a repertoire of techniques for literary listening. It seeks to identify some of the specific tools with which poets have gauged and transformed the sonic effects of their linguistic environment. Suggestive rather than exhaustive, this guide is not an encyclopedia of practices. Indeed, the hope is that it will serve as a reminder of other examples, an inspiration for further writing, a provocation to further listening, and a locus of surprise (a word which derives in turn from the French surprendre: to overhear).”

Publisher Arika
38 pages

event

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Journal of Sonic Studies, Vol. 1-2 (2011-2012)

The Journal of Sonic Studies is a peer-reviewed, online, open access journal providing a platform for theorists and artists who would like to present relevant work regarding auditory cultures, to further our collective understanding of the impact and importance of sound for our cultures.

Founding editors: Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg
Associate editors: Jan Nieuwenhuis, Sharon Stewart
Publisher Leiden University Press

View online (Vol. 2, HTML articles)
View online (Vol. 1, HTML articles)
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