Sound American #26 – The OCCAM Issue

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

Au début des années 1990, des groupes inspirés du new jack swing états-unien comme N’Groove, Tribal Jam, et les artistes du label Sensitive marquent les premiers pas du R&B français.

Avec le succès des Poetic Lover et des refrains du rap français, dont certains des plus connus ont été chantés par des artistes R&B, il s’impose peu à peu dans le paysage. Une série d’excellents premiers albums voit alors le jour (K-Reen, Vibe, Matt Houston ou Wallen) avant qu’une seconde génération ne s’impose au tournant du millénaire, avec les tubes et albums de chanteuses de R&B variété. De leur côté, les médias et la critique ont souvent multiplié les malentendus et les marques de mépris face à ces différents artistes, réduisant leur musique à une version édulcorée du rap, une «revanche des filles de cité», ou en la rejetant comme une importation étrangère. Dans ce premier livre à lui être consacré, Rhoda Tchokokam montre la richesse non seulement d’un R&B en français, mais du R&B français comme genre à part entière.

En s’appuyant sur la parole des principales actrices et acteurs de ce mouvement, Rhoda Tchokokam en propose une histoire culturelle ambitieuse. Sa passion pour les chansons de R&B français croise en permanence l’analyse de leur dimension politique : elle examine aussi bien leur manière d’assumer la sexualité que leurs injonctions à la pudeur, les stratégies de formatage commercial que l’affirmation d’une sororité noire dans les clips.

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance. 

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

Published by Xing & Varamo Press
XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)
First edition, September 2023
Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen
Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve
Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists

A punk rock anti-memoir told through the eyes of a biracial Afrolatino punk academic. 

¡PÓNK! follows Moose, an alienated academic and lead guitarist for Pipebomb!, as he navigates through spaces in and out of South East Los Angeles: punk clubs, college classrooms, family gatherings, street protests, and euphoric backyard shows.Oscillating between autofiction, memoir, and lyric, Clayton blurs genres while articulating the layered effects of racism, trauma, immigration, policing, Black hair, performance, and toxic academic language to uncover how one truly becomes an "ally." Borrowing from the spatial lyricism of Claudia Rankine, the genre-bending storytelling of Alexander Chee, and the racial musings of James Baldwin, ¡PÓNK!'s narrative takes back punk rock and finds safe space in the mosh pit.

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 first book dedicated exclusively to the female protagonists of Latin American electronic music.

The book has been edited by independent curator, researcher and label head of Buh Records, Luis Alvarado, and experimental musician, multimedia artist and researcher Alejandra Cárdenas (also known as Ale Hop).

Composers and sound artists featured in this historical account include: Alicia Urreta, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elsa Justel, Eulalia Bernard, Graciela Castillo, Hilda Dianda, Ileana Pérez Velázquez, Irina Escalante Chernova, Iris Sangüesa, Jacqueline Nova, Jocy de Oliveira, Leni Alexander, Margarita Paksa, Marietta Veulens, Mónica O'Reilly Viamontes, Nelly Moretto, Oksana Linde, Patricia Belli, Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet, Rocío Sanz Quirós, Teresa Burga, Vania Dantas Leite, among others.

The official history of 20th-century avant-garde electronic music has been predominantly narrated from the point of view of Anglo-American and Western European experiences and largely remained focused on its male protagonists. To destabilize this history, this editorial project presents a collection of perspectives, essays, interviews, archival photos, and work reviews centered on the early electronic music production by Latin American female creators, who were active from the 1960s to the 1980s. The book also brings us closer to the work of a new generation of researchers who have focused on offering a non-canonical reading of the history of music and technology in Latin America. The publication is the record of a new vision, an account of the condition of being a woman in the field of music technology at a time when this was a predominantly masculine domain. The decision to take electronic technologies for sound creation as the backbone of this history is related to the intention of broadening our focus of interest outside the spectrum of institutional electroacoustic music to include other experimental, interdisciplinary and sonic arts practices involving new technologies, beyond the circuits of academic avant-garde music.

The texts that make up this publication are organized spatially and conceptually, rather than following a chronology. The selection of female composers profiled sheds light on a variety of relevant aspects: key musical contexts, experiments with technologies (such as tape, electronic synthesis, the first commercial synthesizers), diverse formats (i.e., radio art, electroacoustic pieces, installation, multimedia, theater, film, etc.), intertwined with themes, such as migration, memory, identity, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, social engagement, the acceptance of electronic music, etc. Moreover, the framework of this editorial project opened a space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics, as many of the authors gathered as collaborators are composers and sound artists themselves.