What if we listened not merely with our ears, but with the entirety of our being – allowing sound to inhabit us, reverberate within our bones, and alter the very rhythms by which we measure our lives?
This compilation excavates the evocative terrain of ‘audible matter’, gathering a carefully curated array of writings, installations, albums and more that explore the profound and intricate intersections between sound, the body and the fluid currents of time. Central to this exploration is an acknowledgment of sound’s ability to blur distinctions between the audible and visual, revealing hidden atmospheres and invisible presences often overlooked by visual dominance. Sound here acts as a subtle disruptor, bringing to the surface phenomena that visuality alone fails to capture, from electromagnetic waves to the hidden acoustic ecologies shaping our urban and natural environments. Attuned to contemporary exhibition histories and artistic dialogues, these selections highlight sonic experiences as culturally embedded phenomena, shaping everyday life and restructuring our interactions with environments, identities and collective memory. This collection advocates for an enriched sensory awareness, inviting us to attune to the sonic textures and rhythms that animate and transform our cultural imaginaries and embodied temporalities – bridging the gap between the visible and invisible realms of perception.
As we both have practices in DJ-ing, we thought it would be an interesting experiment to organise the readings and sound pieces like the tracklist of a set. Each ‘track’ is composed of an article from Afterall’s archive, an external reading or two, and music from a list of sound projects, concept albums or other sonic experiments that we selected to accompany the reading list. Think of it as a listening list. The ‘track’ compositions mimic the EQ knobs of a mixer. The Afterall texts are the bass or low end: their contents and framing provide foundational beats that keep the list pumping. External texts or additional readings serve as the mids: their frequency is the bridge between the Afterall texts and the highs or tops, the sound works, which serve to add texture and clarity to the track. Whilst each ‘track’ is named, it is a loose titling to provide structure and narrative to the list. Like tracks in a DJ mix they can be broken apart, looped, synced and mixed however one feels fit by playing around with the EQ knobs.
Opening, Track I: Beneath the Surface or Sound in the In-betweens
Foreword, Afterall Journal issue 39
Sound is discussed as an ‘artefact’. With writers and artists with sonic backgrounds, whether writing on sound directly or not, we begin. Sound will find itself somewhere within the process of written word.
Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics, Christopher Cox
Cox unfurls a philosophy of sound as movement, transformation and becoming – a realm in which resonance operates as a metaphysical principle. In this flux, sound is not content to represent; it acts, unsettles and enfolds the listener in temporal drift and sensory destabilisation.
Earwitness Inventory, Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Earwitness Inventory unfolds as a forensic theatre of listening, where objects become unreliable narrators and silence carries the weight of testimony. Abu Hamdan assembles a haunted index of sonic proxies – the creak of a chair, the crackle of a wrapper, the slam of a boot – each bearing witness to acts of violence remembered through sound. Staged within the fraught terrains of legal memory and state surveillance, this work blurs the boundary between evidence and affect, drawing us into the fragile, often contested space of the ear. Abu Hamdan’s inventory does not seek clarity; it thrives in ambiguity, in the grain of recollection where truth stammers and fragments. Listening becomes an ethical act – not passive reception, but an embodied form of sensing that resists visual certainties. In this spectral archive, the sonic residue of trauma reverberates beyond its original moment, asking us to feel what cannot be seen, to carry what was once overheard – to listen not just for what is there, but for what lingers.
Track II: Body Talk
‘Like Waves in my Body’: On Tarek Atoui’s Sonic Practice, Rayya Badran
The body absorbs. Atoui’s waves don’t pass through you; they stay, rearranging how nearness feels.
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear, Sarah Shin and Irene Revell
This collection reclaims the body as an instrument of listening – an archive of vibrations, intensities and interruptions. It insists that to hear is also to feel, and that through cultivating a feminist ear, we come to understand how sound moves through us unevenly, politically, historically – amplifying what dominant systems strive to silence or erase.
im hole, aya
A deconstructed club classic with pop sensibilities and spoken word reflections on trans identity. With beeps, breaks and bass listeners are cornered into sensations of both pleasure and exhaustion. aya uses iPhone recordings and vocal experimentations in addition to a skipping experimental club production to lure listeners into her personal thoughts and experience.
The Sacrificial Code, Kali Malone
Malone’s extended organ work unfolds with mathematical clarity and devotional stillness, where every sustained chord feels like a held threshold. Rejecting climactic resolution, the piece stretches duration until the body syncs with its slow, exacting pulse.
Track III: Sound Unseen/Unheard
Inaudible and Invisible Matters: Sound and Light in Christina Kubisch’s Sonic Practice, Anne Zeitz
Kubisch’s work reveals the sonic infrastructures we’ve been conditioned to ignore – electromagnetic fields, vibrations, light. Across her practice, the body becomes both antenna and archive, attuned to architectures of control made audible.
More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun
Eshun writes as if possessed by the beat, collapsing theory into rhythm, criticism into vibration. This is not a book about sound, but a book that sounds – pulsing with the futures dreamt through Black music, from Detroit to deep space. History loops, language glitches, and listening becomes a fugitive method – a way of slipping past the known into something more unstable, more alive.
Still Life No. 3, Raven Chacon
Rooted in graphic notation and restraint, Still Life No. 3 unfolds as a study in negative space – string quartet and sine tones rarely overlapping, barely touching. Rather than invoking memory through voice or narrative, the piece carves absence, building pressure through precision and pause.
Echoes+, Beatriz Ferreyra
Echoes+ uses tape manipulation and an electroacoustic composition, merging recordings of her niece, Mercedes Cornu, singing Latin American folk songs. The piece breathes, cracks, snakes and murmurs. A sense of the paranormal is summoned as her niece was killed in a car crash. The cutting and mixing of tapes gives the work a ritualistic feeling. The work sonically explores questions of revival, in memoriam, and care.
Track IV: Experiential Audios
Foreword, Afterall Journal Issue 9
The nature of the word ‘performative’ and the weight it carries in critiquing or classifying art practice and projects.
Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Chapter: ‘The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop’), Krista Thompson
Thompson positions the sonic equivalent of shine as a central feature of hip-hop’s aesthetic strategies, paralleling its visual emphasis on bling, reflectivity and spectacle. These production choices build a multisensory economy of shine, one that asserts value, presence and survival in a visual and cultural landscape historically designed to erase or commodify Black identities. The ‘sound of light’ is, therefore, both a defiant aesthetic and a political act. She argues that hip-hop producers and artists use specific audio production techniques to materialise ‘shine’ in sound, creating a layered sensory experience that asserts Black visibility through both looking and listening.
WITHIN, Tarek Atoui
WITHIN unfolds as a choreography of listening without hearing, where Deaf and hearing participants co-create sonic presence through touch, proximity and breath. Instruments become prosthetic extensions of the body. And the body, in turn, becomes an instrument – tuned not to melody, but to vibration, to shared sensation. Sound loses its hierarchy and becomes a ground, felt before it is known and known before it is named.
Coin Coin Chapter One, Matana Roberts
Voice as rupture. The body doesn’t just listen – it trembles, inhales, remembers. Roberts cracks open the archive, allowing history to stutter, scream and hum. A chorus of ancestors rises – not past, not gone – present in every pulse of sound. You don’t hear this album, rather, you carry it.
Track V: The Choral or Sound as Collective, Music as We
Foreword, Afterall Journal Issue 19, Pablo Lafuente
Ideas that govern the collective production of sound can also relate to the collective production of art.
Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession, Gilbert Rouget
Rouget’s study unfolds slowly, deliberately, like the rhythmic cycles he describes. Across cultures and traditions, he maps how music and trance are bound – not through emotion alone, but through repetition, vibration and ritual timing.
Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Tara Rodgers
Rodgers foregrounds how women not only participate in but actively shape the sonic and technological landscapes of electronic sound. She amplifies the idea that women in electronic music have long used sound as a medium for both personal agency and cultural intervention. Through interviews and critical essays, sound is resistance, embodiment, experimentation, and alternative modes of listening. Whether through hacking circuits, bending voices beyond recognition, or using the body itself as an instrument, these artists expand how we think about the politics of sound production.
Ultra-red (Collective)
Ultra-red is a sound art and political collective that treats listening as a form of organising – a tactical, communal process grounded in collective inquiry and action. Rather than aestheticising resistance, they build sonic frameworks that hold space for struggle – listening not to represent dissent, but to rehearse it.
Closing Track, Track VI: In Space and Time
With time, in time, our time, Jacob Korczynski
In the act of listening, time becomes porous. It seeps, bruises, syncs – refusing the clean cut of chronology.
Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell
Haskell listens with a reverence for the evolutionary intimacy between sound and life, tracing how the pulse of the wild is entangled with our own temporal rhythms. His writing draws the reader into a deep somatic awareness of ecological soundscapes – where every rustle, cry, and echo marks the passage of time through fragile bodies, human and more-than-human alike.
Kotti Island Disc – An Auditive Snapshot, Tresor Sound Project
Kotti Island Disc is a 2023 concept album that accompanied a larger project and exhibition, ‘Kotti Island’. The project explores the East Berlin neighbourhood of Kottbusser Tor. The native curator and musician, Cecelia Tosh, collected field recordings from the neighbourhood and met with nine other DJs in the neighbourhood to feel and embody themselves with its sound and atmosphere. Each then received a sample pack to compose auditory compositions exploring what it is like to be within Kottbusser Tor. It is described as ‘a snapshot of a place in a state of constant flux’.