Utopia belongs to those concepts that haunt both the history of ideas and the history of artistic practice. In this fourth issue,
Tacetsets off to listen to the sounds of utopia emerging from sound art and experimental music, but also from sound design and our everyday use of sound technology. Mixing
science-fiction short stories, theoretical analysis and artists' writings, this issue addresses utopian and dystopian futures of our sound cultures, the experience of other places at work in the schizophonic listening of recording, social and aesthetic implications of the formal principle of closure that characterizes utopia, the critical positions of some experimental musicians in their relationships to the soundscape and musical cultures, and furthermore the role of technology in the imagination of sounds of utopia.
Issue edited by
Matthieu Saladin, with texts by Cornelius Cardew,
J. G. Ballard,
François J. Bonnet,
Pali Meursault, Em'kal Eyongakpa & Amal Alhaag, Scott Gleason, Andy McGraw, Henry Flynt, Christophe Levaux, Francis Heery, Jonathan Sterne, Filipe Barros Beltrao & Andrew Gray,
Pascal Broccolichi,
Thibault Walter, Anne Zeitz, Loïc Bertrand,
Luc Ferrari, Xavier Hug, G Douglas Barrett.
Tacet is a new research publication dedicated to
sound arts and
experimental music. Published annually and bilingually
(French, English), its ambition is to create an
interdisciplinary and international space of reflection
for this practices, in all its aesthetic diversity.
Tacet, as
John Cage showed so well in
4'33'', designates
a moment of silence observed by an instrumentalist
during the whole period of a movement. By
extension, it becomes, as the title of this publication,
a moment of introspection, of re flectivity and refl ection,
where music interrupts itself to give way to
research and theoretical questioning.
Tacet aims, in this way, on the side of sound arts and experimental
music, to contribute to the renewal of theoretical
research by confronting and intersecting artists and musicians'
speeches, studies coming from aesthetics and philosophy
of art, from the critical renewal of musicology,
from cultural studies and gender studies, from political
thought, from social sciences and geography.
Tacet is part of the
Ohcetecho series, dedicated to sound arts and experimental music, published by Les presses du réel (editorial board:
Matthieu Saladin and
Yvan Etienne).
