When the Sound Listens Back

In her work as educator, the artist Antye Greie-Ripatti aka AGF aims to integrate «listening as an art practice» into school curriculums. In this essay, she reflects on teaching children the skill of listening to build environmental sensibility.

Listen to this playlist from Mabe Fratti, who compiles music from Mexico she currently likes.

Voices in crowded urban terrains, the sonic shock of fighter jets. Some music can evoke ideas of the life it is made in – and create relationships. Read an essay by Majd Shidiac.

When talking about listening in the broadest sense, listeners are usually at the center of attention. In this dialogic essay, Rewire Festival’s context curator Katía Truijen and Norient’s editor Philipp Rhensius what happens when the sound listens back.

How does the practice of women walking at midnight shape alternative ways of listening, intimately and associatively? Mallika Taneja shares a durational recording of a recent walk, inviting listeners to sense a night in New Delhi, India, as they journey alongside.

Dawn choruses recorded in different parts of the capital city of Delhi, India, are composed into a soundscape that unravels the contradictions thriving in a city just as it wakes up.

The first form of communication was not language but vibration. Listen to an audio essay featuring the biologist Juan José López and sound artist Ludwig Berger who sonify species that soon threaten to become completely extinct – if we don’t listen.

Field recordings and sampling are at the center of this short essay in which performer and music producer Jana Saleh explains why her inability to use recordings of Beirut’s momentous events has led her to think differently about musical composition.

An experimental podcast full of samples from KMRUs music, and snippets from an interview conducted in his house in 2020, just before the COVID-19 Pandemic. Currently sound artist and experimental ambient musician KMRU lives in Berlin.

In Raquel Castro’s «SOA», Joseph Kamaru, aka sound artist KMRU, finds confirmation that sound affects us more deeply than we realize.

What are the political implications and ethical concerns of sampling sounds of war? This is a critical question raised by «The End of Silence», a 2013 record from the British composer Matthew Herbert based entirely on a six-second field recording of the Libyan civil war. Musicologist Luis Velasco-Pufleau examines this question and argues that sound and music can enable critical examinations of the rationale of war.