Brandon Labelle – Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art

Brandon Labelle

book – Continuum International Publishing Group – ISBN13: 9780826418456
One of the finest and not yet celebrated sound art artist and writer, Brandon Labelle is also a prolific producer with his own label Errant Bodies. But this is a comprehensive essay written for Continuum publishing, where he compiles a chronologically structured path nourishing the reader with an articulated argumentation of spatial thinking. With an understandable yet sometimes very poetic language he opens the windows of sound unavoidable presence in life (from beginning to end) and how artists push us to relate with it, more than just let it perennially flow. The very sound nature (instantaneous and always travelling) and its dynamics are unveiled through a progressive history of art and sound affinities. So sound can be observed in architectural ambivalent relationships, in (intrinsically) interactive installations, in its disclosure through the use of contact microphones, as a conceptual founding element in fluxus performances, etc. Contextualizing artists and works in a historical perspective. A comprehensive accounting, especially regarding the last decade, that should be read by the upcoming new sound experimenters generation.