The other day I was reading Christopher Haworth’s fantastic interview with Robin Mackay, where he talks about the experimental audio essays they used to experiment with back in the CCRU days. Their “sonic faction” developed a truly visionary idea of sonic theory, not only because the blend of sound experimentation and discourse, but actually how profound they manage to integrate sonic fiction and sonic epistemology in relation to musical-political-technical processes and dimensions of audio, from the ontology of vibratory field to the speculative dimension of time-stretching or mixing.
Urbanomic, directed by Mackay, and house of precious sonic theory such as The Order of Sounds or Audint among contemporary philosophy and art criticism, is releasing a volume fully dedicated to explore these ideas and processes behind audio essays, with 346 pages of material in an compilation called Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method, which, as other releases in their redaction series, is derived from two homonym events which “explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.” Available for pre-order now, and shipping in September this year.
“Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the ‘audio essay’ as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….
Kode9’s Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.
Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists’ discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.”
Contributors: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, S. Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower
Urbanomic is also planning Sonic Faction III event, October 20 at ICA, London.
