Sensibles : une histoire du R&B français de Rhoda Tchokokam

For their thirtieth anniversary, Ulta-red, the international sound art and popular education collective is releasing the first volume of Ulta-red: A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry, investigating movement-based listening practices that take the forms of militant inquiry and political education.

In the words of Ultra-red, "No movement without listening!"
The initial issue of Ulta-red examines "conjunctural analysis," or "naming the moment," as a practice of collective inquiry. The issue begins with conversations with three popular educators in North America who, in the 1990s, developed a body of literature meant to guide radical groups through an inquiry into what Stuart Hall once called, the history of the present.

It includes a discussion with Toronto-based activist Chris Cavanaugh who participated in numerous conjunctural analysis efforts in political movements across Canada. In 2000, Cavanaugh helped start the Catalyst Project as a center for working-class and leftist education.

The next interview features Mary Zerkel, a Chicago-based organizer and artist who produced the seminal text, Coyuntural Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action in 1997. Zerkel talks about the relationship between her organizing work in local anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles as well as her involvement in numerous political art collectives in Chicago.

The journal also features an extended conversation with Gustavo Castro Soto in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Castro Soto is known internationally as the last person to have been with Honduran indigenous activist Berta Cáceres when she was assassinated by paramilitaries in 2016. Recently known for his anti-extractivist efforts in Central America, Castro Soto was part of a team in the late 1990s that produced a ten-volume series of booklets guiding people through the history and political praxis of conjunctural analysis, Metodología de Análisis de Coyuntura.

The Ulta-red journal connects local struggles across contexts, publishing dispatches from ongoing militant investigations in London, Los Angeles, and in prisons in the U.S. South. The journal also introduces reflections on the problems of militant sound inquiry through poetry, book responses, letters, and visual art.

The journal is edited by Dont Rhine in collaboration with David Albright and Christina Sanchez Juarez. It includes contributions by Tony Carfello, Janna Graham, Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, Chris Jones, Karla, Elliot Perkins, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, and Robert Sember.

Ultra-red is an international sound art and popular education collective with twelve members based in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and multiple locations in the UK.

Activist art has come to signify a particular emphasis on appropriated aesthetic forms whose political content does the work of both cultural analysis and cultural action. The art collaboration Ultra-red propose a political-aesthetic project that reverses this model. If we understand organizing as the formal practices that build relationships out of which people compose an analysis and strategic actions, how might art contribute to and challenge those very processes? How might those processes already constitute aesthetic forms?

In the worlds of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, Ultra-red have over the years expanded to include artists, researchers and organisers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS.

Collectively, the group have produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations, texts and public space actions (ps/o). Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red take up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories utilising sound-based research (termed Militant Sound Investigations) that directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles.

With the vinyl recording of a musical, the artist proposes a new chapter in her project on fermentation as a living, palpable theory that blends body, feminism, and community.

Gut Feelings is a musical sung and performed by giant bacteria. It is a reference to lesbian separatist communities and more specifically to their capacity to create other forms and ways of life, outside of unliveable norms. The motif of fermentation here becomes a metaphor for the activity of a micro-organic and ungendered community, both human and non-human, alive, moving and changing form. In the manner of fermentation, this community in constant activity evolves autonomously, feeding itself and the space around it.

Louise Siffert (born 1988 in Strasbourg, lives and works in Paris) is a French performer. The world of work, alienation, the search for well-being, the place of habits: Louise Siffert's performances question and relate these current themes in theatrical and burlesque settings. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological reflections, she creates characters with exacerbated personalities, overexploiting the codes of language and behavior that are attributed to them.

A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and associative suite of fragments on the evocations of background noise when brought to the fore.

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat is a rich, meditative ecotone of ideas; a nimble and associative work of essayism that aims to map a reticulated cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner, and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari, a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.

Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates' fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE); the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water…

All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.

[ENG]
This book has been conceived as both a prism and a manual. Following the “traditional” arc of electroacoustic composition (listen—record—compose—deploy—feel), each of the contributions collected together here focuses in on a personal aspect, a fragment of that thrilling territory that is sonic and musical experimentation. Although the term “experimental music” may now have be understood as referring to a genre, or even a particular style, we ought to hold on to the original use of this term, which was based more on an approach than on any particular aesthetic line to be followed. The experimental is first and foremost a spirit, the spirit of the exploration of unknown territories, a spirit of invention which sees musical composition more as a voyage into uncertain territories than as a self-assured approach working safe within the bosom of fully mapped out and recognized lands.

Authors: Félicia Atkinson, François Bayle, François J. Bonnet, Drew Daniel. Brunhild Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Eliane, Radigue, Régis Renouard Larivière, Espen Sommer Eide, Daniel Teruggi,
Chris Watson.

[FR]
Le livre qui suit a été pensé comme un prisme et un manuel. Suivant l’arc « traditionnel » de la composition électroacoustique (écouter — enregistrer — composer —déployer — ressentir), chacune des contributions regroupées ici pointe un aspect personnel, fragment de territoire passionnant qu’est celui de l’expérimentation sonore et musicale. Si le terme de musique expérimentale a pu être assimilé à un genre, voir à un style, il ne faut pour autant pas oublier l’usage initial de ce terme, qui était basé plus sur la démarche que sur la ligne esthétique adoptée.

L’expérimental, en effet, est d’abord un esprit, un esprit d’exploration des territoires inouïs, un esprit d’invention qui voit dans la composition musicale plus un voyage vers des terres incertaines qu’une démarche assurée produisant dans le giron de terres balisées et reconnues.

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).