This book delineates a territory of investigation for sound art and its various
manifestations through historical, theoretical, polemical and critical analyses of artistic,
musical and literary works. In doing so, Migone gives radical definition to an auditory
study that includes the complexity of silence and mutism, identity and abjecthood, and
language and its stutterances. The recurring site of these stagings is the somatic under all
its forms: embodied and disembodied, fragmented and amplified, vocal and mute.
Concrete sites that are investigated include:
Antonin Artaud's writings,
Alvin Lucier's
recording
I am sitting in a room,
Erik Satie's composition
Vexations,
Marina Abramović's performance
Rhythm 0, Adrian Piper's
Untitled Performance for Max's
Kansas City, Melville's short story
Bartleby, the Scrivener, Bob Connolly and Robin
Anderson's documentary film
First Contact, and
John Cage's composition
4'33''.
“
Sonic Somatic is not only an extensive historical survey and an intensive theoretical analysis, but also a do-it-yourself guide to disarticulation and dissonance, aphasia and schizophrenia, glossolalia and deliria. This book is a must for anybody involved in experimental sound, music, performance.”
Allen S. Weiss, Performance Studies and Cinema Studies, New York University
Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer. Working since the mid-80s, he weaves together a multitude of media, from radio to telephones to digital objects, to form a stunning and highly dynamic practice. Combining an acute sonic sensibility with performative usages of the body, video, and the voice, his work engages corporeal presence with a subtle invasion, unsettling speech and gesture through investigative and theoretical poetics.
Migone is the co-editor, with
Brandon LaBelle, of "
Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language" (
Errant Bodies Press), an anthology and CD on orality, audition, and performance. His writings have been published in Aural Cultures (YYZ), S:ON (Artexte), Experimental Sound & Radio (MIT Press), Radio Rethink (Walter Phillips Gallery) and various catalogs and journals. He has curated a number of events in the sound and radio arts: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002). He has released six solo audio CDs on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral) and has appeared on numerous compilations. He performs extensively in festivals and exhibitions around the world. He has collaborated with choreographers Lynda Gaudreau and Tammy Forsythe, turntablist
Martin Tétreault, performers Claude Wampler and Kim Dawn, and sound artists
Alexandre St-Onge, Michel F. Côté, and Gregory Whitehead.
Christof Migone is the co-founder, with
Alexandre St-Onge, of
Squint.press.
He currently lives in Montréal and teaches at Concordia University.
