adocs, ISBN 978-3943253641, English, 300 pages, 2023, Germany

In his work as a sound artist and researcher, Gilles Aubry has a unique and critical perspective in assembling field recordings and historical sources through documentation that extends aural knowledge to power structures and ideologies. He has already explored a number of African territories acoustically, as in the album ‘Les Écoutis Le Caire’ together with Stéphane Montavon, where he made environmental recordings in Cairo, Egypt, or in the book and CD ‘The Amplification Of Souls’, which he co-edited with Kathrin Wildner, in which he conducted extensive research on Charismatic Christian churches in Kinshasa, D.R. Congo. In this book, he extensively explores acoustic practices and ’sonic materiality’ in Morocco expressed through primary environmental sources as well as technological infrastructures and ritual practices, having established close collaboration with local artists and scholars. A whole microcosm of insightful phenomena and their aural dimension is revealed through detailed personal stories as a medium of storytelling, with all the well-presented values associated with them. The book is also accompanied by numerous QR codes that refer to the author’s video and sound works, and is enhanced by a series of responses, video essays and sound pieces on the Norient website. The book is freely downloadable as a PDF.