Clipping 1: Coming of Age

Clipping 2: Sum, Parts brings together transcripts, commissioned texts, studies, and personal reflections that explore how transformation is central to building archives that remain alive through time. Clipping, in sonic terms, signals distortion—moments when excess pushes beyond clarity and opens new spaces of possibility.

The issue features contributions by Monique Todd, Andrea Zarza Canova, Cleo Tsw, Zahra Malkani, meLê yamomo, Melisa Cenik, Golnoosh Heshmati, Voice as Landscape (Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade Llamas), Atiyyah Khan, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Femke Dekker, and Alice Twemlow. It is edited by Federica Notari and Cleo Tsw, designed by Catherine Hu and Cleo Tsw, and printed and bound by No Kiss.

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.

From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith—English experimental composer and musician, figure of the British minimalist scene, explorer of Javanese and Albanian musical traditions with the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria which he co-founded, and a member of The Scratch Orchestra (with Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, etc.)—, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians.

Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians' interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith's music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK. The book introduces new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew. 

Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.

STW, your favourite station! functioneert als een radioprogramma. Een boek dat lyrisch proza uitzendt van We make stuff up for a living (een CV medley) tot COMPUTER_SONG, een ceremoniële quiz met Adult Hood & Young als protagonisten, een grillige anekdote van iemand die zich ergert aan een Call Service, en meer! Thanks for tuning in!