Woody Sullender
Beethoven’s deafness designates the lack where all signification is lodged: it appeals to a music not abstract or interior but endowed, one might say, with sensuous intelligibility, with an intelligibility somehow perceivable to the senses. This category is specifically revolutionary, inconceivable in terms of the old aesthetics; the oeuvre which accepts it cannot be received according to pure sensuality, which is always cultural, nor cultural according to an intelligible order which would be that of (rhetorical or thematic) development; without it, neither the modern text nor contemporary music can be accepted.
(Roland Barthes, from “Musica Practica”)
Ear │ Wave │ Event is ...
Ear │ Wave │ Event is tired of hearing that music or sound is beyond language or outside meaning. Ear │ Wave │ Event can’t deal with another hymn to the ethicality of hearing. Ear │ Wave │ Event will scream if another art historian reports “discovering” sound. Ear │ Wave │ Event does not consider the descriptive cataloguing of audio recordings as criticism. Ear │ Wave │ Event was founded because there is a growing community of artistic practitioners and theorists who are eager to come together and address those strains of sonic intelligence (material, intellectual, other) that are ...
While we’ve applauded recent moves in art history and media studies challenging the hegemony of the visual, why does the waxing art world topicality of “listening” seem to be inversely proportional to sound practitioners’ waning interest in it? Does it really have to turn up on e-flux before people pay attention? Haven’t musicians, composers, and sound artists all over the world been thinking listening for centuries?…
The contributors to Issue 2 face the immense material complexity of listening head on – physically, technically, formally, politically, socially. Their contributions continually orbit the question, ‘What is Listening?,’ all the while deftly dodging all ...
Art is, has always been, as Bersani suggests, a kind of alternative to “sex,” another mode of modulating the most intimate relation between soma and psyche. And the stakes of that “other” mode, those “other relational fields,” would be toward the articulation of forms of life divorced from the literal and symbolic traces of white hetero-sexist patriarchy. Our contention is that musicians such as Oliveros, as well as authors featured in this issue, have inherently understood and been working on this all along. The current political moment demands that we not only perpetually recall the radical orientation of “the experimental” ...
Like many musicians, I have been particularly interested in the music recording medium and its relationship to live performance. In its history, the format shifted from a document of an actual event (ie. a ‘record’) into an idealized construction.
Through the usage of various reverbs and spatialization, producers construct an artificial sound stage. Like the films of Georges Méliès, the medium places the listener in an idealized position, front and center before the theatrical stage, without the interference of other audience members, environmental sounds, or any hint of the quotidian function of music. Even in the ‘live recording’ (now a necessary ...
