This issue of textsound assembles works that blur the distinction between performance, poetry, and the sonic arts.
Dialogues, field recordings, talks, electromagnetic arrangements, installations, lyric works, remixes – “Sonic Materialities” explores the fugitive modes of embodiment, inscription, and exchange in phonopoetic practice.
Noise and resonance, tuning and texture inform these compositions. So does the grain and splice of the voice.
Always with recorded sound, the material contexts reverberate. This is to say that the technical and technological mediations – vibrations engineered into script – are elemental to the compositions; as are the locales of their production, the social and physical circumstances of their pulse, polyphony, dissonance, and replay.
They are the substrate we apprehend in listening – the sites, acts, and echoes.
Contributors
Syd Staiti, Amaranth Borsuk + Andy Fitch, M. NourbeSe Philip, Oana Avasilichioaei, the Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization (UNFO), Erín Moure + Lisa Robertson, Julian Hou, Holly Melgard, Stefan Christoff + Kaie Kellough, Eric Schmaltz, Laureen Burlat, Charles Bernstein, Felipe Otondo, José Rivera, Sebastiane Hegarty, Clio Montrey + Klara Du Plessis, Staalplaat Soundsystem, Michael S. Hennessey, Elizabeth Cherniak, Patrick Durgin, Christof Migone, Jordan Scott + Jason Starnes, Jean-Philippe Antoine, Laura Ortman + Tanya Lukin Linklater, Steve Evans, Gary Barwin, Mayakov+sky Platform, and Fred Moten.
Acknowledgments
This issue would not have been possible without Laura Wetherington and Hannah Ensor. Thank you for your editorial efforts, for the exchange in developing this issue, and for the community of listeners you’ve created at textsound.org. Thanks to John Melillo for bringing the three of us together.