Grounds for Possible Music – On Gender, Voice, Language, and Identity

The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity.

The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.

Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.

Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.

Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In the long interview that forms the body of this publication, Éliane Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research, as well as her historical context. The publication also contains a commented list of works and Radigue's programmatic text on The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal.

New expanded edition of the book first published in 2019.

Éliane Radigue (born 1932 in Paris) is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers, from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last fifteen years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States, where she discovered analogue synthesisers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sound arts. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists, and extensively with Eliane Radigue. She has performed internationally, and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, Conversation on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and The Middle Matter, Sound as Interstice.

Edited by Julia Eckhardt.
Texts by Éliane Radigue and Julia Eckhardt.

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

Handmade artist's book combining drawings, photographs, and archival materials. This publication reflects on the YouYou Group's ten-year journey and its evolving relationship with space. It marks a transitional moment from the group's long-term engagement with public space toward a growing understanding of spatiality and collective presence.

YouYou Group is a Belgian choir that specializes in what is known in Arabic as zaghareed. This trilling cry is used by women at weddings and festive occasions, but also at funerals. Youyou is the French name for zaghareed. Depending on the regional origin, it is also called kululu, tsahalulim, or irrintzi. It is a long, shrill tone that is modulated (by the throat, glottis, or rapid tongue movements) and can be heard from far away. Brussels artist Myriam Van Imschoot was one of the founders of this singing group.

The Second Sound is an imaginary conversation based on the testimonies of musicians and sound artists on the role of gender and sex within their field.

Gathering anonymous testimonies from artists of different backgrounds into a single stream of (often contrary) opinions, the book addresses discrimination as a paradigm of otherness, the possibility of gendered music and sound art, and how sound artists and musicians navigate the field.

The Second Sound raises questions such as: How do life circumstances find their way into music and sound art? How does music reflect historical and social structures? What does discrimination do, and how can we navigate around it? Is the under-representation of women and LGBTQ people in the field a symptom or a cause? Is art itself gendered? And can it reflect the gender of its maker? Is a different way of listening needed to more accurately understand those voices from outside the historical canon?

Although this book raises more questions than it answers, it came to be a pledge for embracing artistic differences, for the richness of contextual listening, and for honesty in the expression of concerns and doubts. The responses seem to suggest that understanding differences by theme and not as predetermination is a way to provide freedom in a field of seemingly abstract art.

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.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.