The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening

Description

The essay is the perfect format for a crisis. Its porous and contingent nature forgives a lack of formality, while its neglect of perfection and virtuosity releases the potential for the incomplete and the unrealizable. These seven essays on The Political Possibility of Sound present a perfectly incomplete form for a discussion on the possibility of the political that includes creativity and invention, and articulates a politics that imagines transformation and the desire to embrace a connected and collaborative world. The themes of these essays emerge from and deepen discussions started in Voegelin's previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence and Sonic Possible Worlds. Continuing the methodological juxtaposition of phenomenology and logic and writing from close sonic encounters each represents a fragment of listening to a variety of sound works, to music, the acoustic environment and to poetry, to hear their possibilities and develop words for what appears impossible. As fragments of writing they respond to ideas on geography and migration, bring into play formless subjectivities and trans-objective identities, and practice collectivity and a sonic cosmopolitanism through the hearing of shared volumes. They involve the unheard and the in-between to contribute to current discussions on new materialism, and perform vertical readings to reach the depth of sound.

Salome Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, UK. An artist and writer, she is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Sonic Possible Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2014).

The book seeks to question the ways we think about the relationship between sound, politics and art. * Ecrit-O (Bloomsbury translation) * Voegelin's texts are supple yet sticky and recursive, they cling and evolve. Reading them is not a process of transmitted insights and straightforward reception. Rather it is an experience of ... shedding preconceptions and encountering within printed language the mobile formlessness and unlimited materiality of sound. Her essays touch on political realities: enforced migration; razor wire in the Golan Heights; Obama's authorisation of drone attacks. Yet the imagined worlds of Sun Ra and Ursula Le Guin's science fiction also have a recurrent role. That such seemingly divergent elements should coincide within the political possibility of sound makes this book a stimulating, important and challenging experience. * The Wire Magazine * This book stems from her [Voegelin's] previous 'Listening to Noise and Silence' and 'Sonic Possible Worlds', both of which significantly contributed to the sound art discourse by opening possible interpretations and possibilities for the soundscape. This book is more adventurous than the previous ones ... There's an abundance of ideas, which the reader can possibly embrace. * Neural Magazine * Salome Voegelin's careful, poetic essays explore what she calls the 'complexity of the ephemeral' in several registers at once - political, personal, philosophical, cultural. Each essay explores the possibility of a politics of sound that emphasizes always the 'incomplete, the unfamiliar, the unrecognizable and the unheard?'. Describing the emergence of a 'sonic cosmopolitanism', Voegelin's text operates both as multiple entryways into various artists and sonic practices, but the essays also work as a united, stirring plea for the polyphony of the present. * Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton, UK * Drifting in and out of physical matter, The Political Possibility of Sound is an in-depth adventure into hearing, listening and cross-referencing the politics of sound and also its making. This is a very slow read in a fast world - it is like a rare intellectual dream world of expanded possibilities of the audio thinking space. A must-read for all musicians! * Antye Greie-Ripatti (aka AGF), sound sculptor, poet, composer, gender activist and new media curator, Germany * Voegelin's writing around and through sound and sonic works [is] both generous and generative ... she enters the listening experience with an expansive curiosity that is willing to ponder the what happened? from multiple entryways and use the writing to think through and with sound, generating a response-ably-worded philosophy of sound, a sonic thinking-with an abundance of other writers and creators as well. -- Sharon Stewart * Journal of Sonic Studies *