Errant Bodies Press, ISBN-13: 9780988937567, English, 64 pages, 2016, Germany

How do you document a collective workshop made by sound artists and theorists with quite different backgrounds? Various attempts to translate scattered notes and scribbles into printed notebooks have been made over time, but they often look more like compulsory documentation than conceived publications. The exquisite production level taken up by Errant Bodies, instead, won’t disappoint the reader. This second volume in the Dirty Ear series is a slim one, but integrates into a unifying and clear design contributions which are almost all in different styles. From manifesto to concrete poetry, essay, structured notes or scores, the involved authors contribute to a readable and useful publication investigating sound as a basis for a “new discursive paradigm”. This publication documents the experimental forum for sonic research held at Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway and its design and content are indeed consistent with the main aim of the series: “pose sound as a material that allows us to rethink modes of collective work”. Here the sonic gestures and space (physical and social) which hosts them are emerging through different discussed or documented artistic practices. Reading them (or about them) gives a new sense of “listening” to the respective authors, and in turn learning from multiple and original perspectives. Some ideas are definitely political, like the “sonic agent” described by LaBelle, but the shared horizon is summarised by Ana Pais’s definition “to perform the act of listening”.

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