Tag: reviews

review of Lives of the Voice

My review of Lives of the Voice: An Essay on Closeness by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is now live on the Leonardo Reviews site.

The book set me thinking about my father’s voice, remembering a mixture of emotions, of expectation and resistance. My father was a farmer, but also a singer, singing at weddings and funerals, at home and to his cows. Known locally as a singer, his reputation generated a mix of embarrassment and pride in me as a child and created expectations that I too might be a singer. Listening to other singers, I sometimes catch echoes of his voice and am drawn into a spatial-temporal relationship of nearness and distance, of connections among material human bodies and the specific sounds they produce. The bittersweet sensation that Gumbrecht highlights as specific to singing and listening to songs (p. 51-52) is wrapped up in a sense of being overwhelmed by some experiences of song, and a paradoxical sensation of proximity with voices of the dead or of artists we have never seen live.

You can read the full review here:

https://leonardo.info/review/2025/06/lives-of-the-voice-an-essay-on-closeness

review of Sonic Faction now online

My review of Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method is now live at Leonardo Reviews. The review will be included in print in Leonardo 58.2 (due for publication in February 2025).

Sonic Faction was a pair of events, one held at Iklectik in London (July 2022) and one at KARST in Plymouth (February 2023), where three works were presented for collective listening, along with a public discussion and an installation of related material. The three pieces were: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land (2006), Steve Goodman’s Astro-Darien (2021) and Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2022). This book takes on several tasks, operating as a catalogue for or record of the events, offering an expanded commentary on the works presented and giving significant detail on the conception, making and presentation of these. The book also functions as a primer or a means toward defining or describing a genre – the audio essay – situating it in historic, artistic, critical, theoretical contexts. In pursuit of this, the book brings together a selection of essays that describe or demonstrate the audio essay as a medium and as an approach to making art. Bringing together writing by artists, theorists, publishers, broadcasters the mix of perspectives and modes of involvement with the audio essay results in an array of textual riches, supplemented by a comprehensive playlist on YouTube.

review of Radio Art Zone book

My review of Radio Art Zone, edited by Sarah Washington (Hatje Cantz, 2023) is now published on Leonardo Reviews. It is a beautiful book, bringing together on its varied pages a wide range of radio responses to the 100 Days of Radio project that was presented as part of the Esch Capital of Culture programme in summer 2022.

https://leonardo.info/review/2023/12/radio-art-zone

review / response to SLANT Voiceworks on Tentacular

My response to the second event in SLANT’s Voiceworks project is one of three now up on Tentacular magazine at https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere-blog/voiceworks-responses. I write briefly about work by Emma Bennett, Anamaria Barduli, and Kinga Tóth. Originally planned as live events at Iklectik in Lambeth, the works were streamed online in September 2020.

review of Christodoulos Makris ‘this is no longer entertainment’

On May 29th my review of Christodoulos Makris’ this is no longer entertainment from Dostoyevsky Wannabe will be published on the Stride magazine site. Makris’ book gathers material from online comment threads on media and news websites across several years and edits these into a poem sequence of seventy-one sections.

The text is organised, shaped, to offer an obviously self-conscious curating of the material, opinions, ideas encountered there. ‘The word curate is not a synonym for “chosen” or “collected”. (119) This is a reading, that is open to other and others’ readings, it frames a view without determining what another will see there.

you could say you are parasitical on their labour (78)

it doesn’t include labels nor pity

it just floats quietly

and serves to begin conversations such as this (103)