Social Music II
2021
The series of radio broadcasts produced for Kunstradio, Vienna, is concerned with sound as a social material and the ways in which listening may enable dynamic forms of relationality. From voice and speech to the consonant and dissonant flows that punctuate being-together, the series explores how sound contributes to the shaping of collectivity and community in diverse ways. In particular, participating artists and theorists focus on elaborating sociality beyond the human world, to develop approaches to the more-than-human, ecologies of matter, and symbiotic assemblages and entanglements across bodies and things. By way of a range of experimental methods, from biohacking and experimental choreographies to sonic fictioning and acoustic fieldwork, understandings of embodiment and relationality are extended and problematized, allowing for other expressions of action and agency. What we understand as relationality gravitates less toward recognition and the pronouncement of identity; rather, forms of active and speculative listening support proximity and being-alongside, allowing for unrecognizability, the sonic figuring of alter-ontologies and more-than-acoustic ecologies.
The series is connected to the artistic research project Communities in Movement, which focuses on questions of listening and the poetics of community. Each broadcast is developed and produced by a collective of participating artists and theorists. The series marks the 20th anniversary of the first edition of Social Music produced by Kunstradio and curated by artist Brandon LaBelle.
Broadcast 1 (March 28, 2021): Bio_Sonic_Agencies / with Laura Benítez Valero, Brandon LaBelle, Vanessa Lorenzo, Óscar Martín, Robertina Šebjanič
In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? What is the materiality of sound? How does the materiality of sound affect listening? What resistances can be configured from working with biomaterials and sound? Do these bio_sonic_agencies open up other possible spaces that do not exist in the visual regime? The radio work Bio_Sonic_Agencies follows such questioning through a focus on matters of air. Air is highlighted as an elemental force that moves across human and more-than-human bodies, and that enfolds in its rather invisible and light presence a range of material expressions and dynamics. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, air is radically invasive, affirming, influential; it is profoundly internal, filling the lungs with its molecular support while passing across the planet in atmospheres and weather streams. It transitions through states of materialization and imaginaries, from gaseous ethers and contagions to radiophonic signaling and aerial poetics – air is a deep and dangerous carrier. Bio_Sonic_Agencies is the result of a collaboration between a group of artists and philosophers who work with biomaterials, ontological entanglements, sound and speculative listening. Through a process of shared discussion and sonic experimentation, the work captures a series of encounters with matters of air.
Broadcast 2 (July 4, 2021): Alien Phenomenology / with Catalina Tello, Kailin Badal Thomas, Lily Errant, Brandon LaBelle, Pamela Moraga
Are we not moved by the things we hear? These energetic intrusions and ambiences that touch the skin, vibrate the air, evoke relations. Is there an alien force intrinsic to sonic experience and the currents of sound? Currents that pass across subjects and objects, and that give way to a multiplicity of rhythms, vocalities, gestures, scrapings. The work circles around listening as the basis for movement and transformation, and that incites a mutational process in bodily, cellular, social and passionate ways. The effects of listening – of what we listen to, or what demands to be heard, what touches and resounds – come to shape something of the body, orienting habits, defining rhythms, interrupting views, vibrating the heart, putting us somewhere between ourselves and others. Such perspectives find echo in Catherine Clément’s meditation on “syncope”, which she utilizes as a theoretical framework in approaching questions of subjectivity. Drawing from the musical concept, Clément poses syncope as a process of delay, a type of fainting or form of loss, as well as recovery and renewal: to fall or lag behind, then to recover the tempo. Never back to oneself entirely, but rather, placed somewhere else, syncope is suggestive for appreciating “life’s nocturnal dimension”. A trembling, a sensitivity, a sympathy, or what Clément describes as an eclipse of individuality. Following these perspectives, the work is developed through a set of physical actions with objects, materials, surfaces, elements, attuning to those things that support, touch, pressure, sustain and influence the body: alien things, nonhuman things, elemental things. Performed and improvised by a group of participating artists, the work listens by way of the hand, the knee, the tongue, listening across and through things so as to collaborate with all these forms and forces that surround, and that make of the body a partner, an enemy, a substance, a host.
Broadcast 3 (March 14, 2022): Radical Sympathy / with Luis Guerra, Brandon LaBelle, Gentian Meikleham, James Webb (with input from Vicente Colomar, Fátima Cué, María Escobar, Antonio Gómez, Annie Pui Ling Lok,Catalina Mahecha, África Clúa Nieto)
Sound is often embraced as a force for making connections. From resonant bonding to rhythmic synchronization, vibrational linking to sonic attunement, sound leads to a range of relational intensities. Working collaboratively amongst friends, the series of three audio pieces considers sound as a relational force by focusing on the experience of sonic intimacy, and the ways in which sound draws us into proximity (with things, with others, with the missing and the not-yet). Intimacy and the sympathetic nurturance sound provides become reference points, leading to experiments in knowing by way of sound. For intimacy is not only to come close to things, but to know of others in ways that profoundly shape one’s disposition and sensibility. As such, the work considers a radicalization of sympathy by giving expression to an aesthetics of contact through performing gestures of care and recollection, attunement and speech, and composing situations of coming-close. From a focus on the home as an environment of intimacy and love, as well as the material things that lend support and that enable remembrance, to the passing of spoken words between two triggered by unconscious associations, and to the rhythmic acts that punctuate being in a certain time and place, and that aid in resituating the orientation of things, the work figures sonic intimacy in emotional and physical ways. The three audio pieces can be heard as love poems composed by way of currents of sympathy.