(edited by) Julia Eckhardt ­– Grounds for Possible Music: On Gender, Voice, Language, and Identity

grounds_for_possible_music_on_gender_voice_language_and_identity

Errant Bodies Press, ISBN-13: 978-0997874426, English, 144 pages, 2019, Germany

One of the characteristics of experimental music and even more of sound art, is that they have allowed musicians to permeate their work with specific subjects and values outside the compositional ream. This characteristic historically expands the notion of “music” towards art, and enabling a different connotation of their practices. This book explores music in a combination to four subjects critically chosen: gender, voice, language, and identity. Technically it is the result of a two year research project, “the other the self” involving artists and theorists, asking them about the role they attributed to gender and sexuality in their music practice. It’s a heterogeneous selection of works, involving almost twenty artists, very carefully assembled, including a few translations, and in quite varied formats. Beyond essays, both academic or less formal, there are interviews, visual interventions, personal accounts and artwork-based accounts. The form well reflects the topics and the four core elements in their possible combinations (as a “set of lenses”). Music, as an artist’s medium, becomes an expressive force around which these political discourses can revolve, instigating a distinct way of producing, performing and listening, and eventually producing a language for an unconventional discourse about sound.