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New Books: Sonic Flux, Metaphonics, Writing the Field Recording, K-Punk Collection

Below you find four new books you might find interesting:

Sonic Flux, by Christoph Cox

Available at: The University of Chicaco Press

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.”

Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.

Metaphonics – The Field Works Listener’s Guide, by Stuart Hyatt, Janneane Blevins & Benjamin Blevins (Eds.)

Available at: Jap Sam Books

For Stuart Hyatt, the world itself is a recording studio where people, places, and things become the instruments. Hyatt has spent the last four years collecting these sounds and arranging them into uniquely site-responsive music. Working collaboratively under the name Field Works, musicians from around the world have contributed over 50 new compositions to this massive collection.

In Metaphonics The Field Works Listener’s Guide, Hyatt contributes a complete track-by-track guide to the 7-album Field Works box set, addressing from many angles the interpretation of place through sound. Renowned naturalist Bernie Krause writes the book’s foreword, establishing a taxonomy of the soundscapes explored in the book’s essays: geophony (earth sounds), biophony (animal sounds), anthropophony (human sounds) and cosmophony (sounds from outer space).

Designed by Janneane and Benjamin Blevins of PRINTtEXT, the book features original contributions from Cheryl Tipp, Leah Barclay, Gustavo Valdivia, Enrique Ramirez, Yiorgis Sakellariou, Sarah Laskow, Stuart Fowkes, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Manuja Waldia, and Peter Liversidge.

Writing the Field Recording – Sound, Word, Environment, by Stephen Benson, Will Montgomery

Available at: Edinburgh University Press

A field recording is any audio recording made outside of the studio. Such recordings have lately become important to contemporary musicians, sound artists and environmentalists. However, less attention has been given to the relation of sound, as manifested in the theory and practice of the field recording, to writing. The 11 essays collected here take the recent explosion of interest in field recording as the point of departure for an investigation of the sounded field in music and its relationship to literature and writing. Including seminal pieces on field thinking by John Berger and Lisa Robertson, Writing the Field Recording analyses contemporary text scores, histories, composer statements, critical literature, poetry and nature writing in the context of sound studies. Drawing on expertise from a range of backgrounds, including composers, musicians, poets and critics, the collection presents an inter-disciplinary exploration of the various registers in which the field recording is written, such as the essayistic, the creatively exploratory, the experimental and the philosophical alongside critical reflections on artistic practice.

K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, by Mark Fisher (Author), Darren Ambrose (Editor), Simon Reynolds (Foreword)

Available at: Repeater Books

Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds, this comprehensive collection brings together the very best work of acclaimed blogger, writer, publisher, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) who died in 2017.

Covering the period 2004 – 2016, it includes some of the most incendiary and influential posts from his seminal blog k-punk, as well as a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews, together with his extraordinary writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines. Also included is his final unpublished k-punk post, the unfinished introduction to his planned book on “Acid Communism”, and a number of important interviews from the last decade.