Sonic Fiction

Description

Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction. In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book "More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction". Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell. This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.

Holger Schulze is Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of numerous books including Sound as Popular Culture (2016) and The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2017).

A rich and timely meditation on a concept central to sonic theory. * The Wire * Sonic Fiction touches on relevant issues concerning contemporary popular culture in a globalized world, while presenting innovative research and fresh theoretical ideas. * Carla J. Maier, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and author of Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation (2020) * The main benefit of Sonic Fiction is to open up the particular approach of Kodwo Eshun's 'Sonic Fiction' to a broader public and outline the several fields of discourse that have built upon his concept. Informed by sound anthropology and the newly emerging transdisciplinary field of sound studies, this volume identifies and explains the specific contribution of the 'Sonic Fiction' approach to an epistemology of sound. * Rolf Grossmann, Professor in Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, University of Luneburg, Germany * A thoughtful introduction to some of the most vital tendencies in 21st-century auditory arts and cultural theory. Sonic fictions are generative systems: synthesizers of ideas, recomposers of politics, collective transducers. Schulze's book offers a timely and a forward-looking appraisal of Kodwo Eshun's work and its proliferating influence. * Paul Jasen, Lecturer in Music, Carleton University, Canada *