Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.

Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires and reflections. As readers we are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings, and appear as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code included in the book.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a contemporary artist, researcher, writer and theorist. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing urgent issues such as the climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, migration, race, and decolonization.

published September 2020.