The Life Issue contributors include
Claire Rousay, who writes about the many cuts accumulated while learning something new; pedal steel superhero Susan Alcorn recounts a battle with injury; composer Jack Langdon offers
Sound American's second fiction offering, a story of how the pandemic affects a fictional musician, presenter, and listener; composer Lea Bertucci interviews improvising vocalist
Audrey Chen about identity, commitment to music, and motherhood; bass clarinetist Katie Porter lets us in on a quarantine's worth of deep-questioning and the looping beauty of banality.
Sound American's ongoing series, "Sites of Formation", celebrates the piano, featuring writing by pianists Pat Thomas (on Ahmed Abdul-Malik) and Cory Smythe (on
Henri Pousseur), as well as Dr. Douglas Rust on the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata and
Sound American's editor, Nate Wooley on the Vangelis's keyboard-heavy soundtrack to
Chariots of Fire. This issue also includes writing by saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos on NYC guerilla concerts during lockdown and a roundtable discussion from members of the Catalytic Sound collective—Ken Vandermark, Luke Stewart, and Bonnie Jones led by Brock Stuessi—on their work to create a streaming platform as an alternative to Spotify.
This issue's
Exquisite Corpse is an elegant, nostalgic site-specific work by composer, flutist, vocalist Ka Baird.
The Life Issue also features a world-premiere, sixteen-page set of drawings with introduction by Lebanese-born, Berlin-based artist Mazen Kerbaj. The drawings feature his intimate, aching, everyday trek through multiple shutdowns.
As we move on from a generation-defining year-and-a-half,
The Life Issue allows some of the artists we love to speak intimately as people: people who happen to make art. Without requiring responses to the great traumas of the last eighteen months, the issues allows them to reaffirm their everyday humanity through the small injuries and victories, the days of nothing happening, and the ways that they try to fit in as small parts of a huge world. A unique issue of
Sound American, it reaffirms the journal's mission of making music for everyone in new and unexpected ways.
A journal founded in 2012 by Nate Wooley, providing in-depth interviews and essays, Sound American starts from a simple desire to open the doors of
experimental music to a wider audience. Sound American believes that music is for everyone and should be shared on the most basic human level. Sound American aims to accomplish this by creating a direct intellectual, social, and emotional bridge that links audiences and artists.
Advisory board:
David Grubbs,
Rebekah Heller,
Taylor Ho Bynum,
Zeena Parkins,
Matana Roberts, and Ken Vandermark.
