Resonances

Reviews / Votes

Resonances offers a conceptually diverse yet simultaneously minutely detailed investigation of noise that draws a line between popular music, cultural and sound studies. ... [Reverberations and Resonances] are a significant achievement, a comprehensive collection of thinking to date about where noise fits into our cultural lives, pointing forward towards a fertile development of the field. -- Adam Behr, University of Edinburgh, UK * Popular Music * From overviews of specific artists--Lou Reed, Einsturzende Neubaten, Diamanda Galas, Filthy Turd--to theorizing about the sonics of feminism, computer sounds, turntablism, and composition, this timely book resituates noise not as Jacques Attali's societal 'herald of change' but as a vital and everyday part of the new media landscape. It's a great addition to any serious sound scholar's library. * Gina Arnold, Adjunct Professor of Rhetoric at University of San Francisco and author of Route 666: On The Road To Nirvana * The collection itself is a diverse mix...Resonances is fairly highbrow. The book's language is intensively scholarly, and its appeal mostly academic. -- Guy Crucianelli * Pop Matters! * The value of this anthology lies in its attempt to be as complete as possible, and its inclusion of perspectives that often go unconsidered. -- Aurelio Cianciotta * Neural (Bloomsbury translation) * In the decade since, a stunning range of new offerings from a variety of publishers has become readily available, and sound studies is a far more expansive discipline. This fact is nowhere more evident than in Bloomsbury Academic's excellent sound studies catalog ... the scholarship here shows how adept the cultural study of sound can be at unearthing the thorny political and social tensions that define contemporary culture. -- Nicholas C. Laudadio, University of North Carolina Wilmington * Journal of Popular Music Studies * Resonances carries its readers from the ideas of Theodor Adorno to 'Hi-Fi Wives,' Russian punk and 60s rock. If you want to know what Iannis Xenakis, Eric Clapton, and the 'Filthy Turd aesthetic' have in common, this is the book for you! Handsomely illustrated and extensively documented, Resonances is a must-read volume for modernists and postmodern cultural critics alike. -- Michael Saffle * Endorsement * 'That's not music, it's noise!' The contributors to this book ask us to think again. They reveal that noise can prove as stimulating a part of sonic organization as melody and harmony-the distorted rock guitar being one example among many. These engrossing essays cover a remarkable variety of musical practices, exploring noise as both accident and deliberate design, and building theories about noise that set the agenda for future debate. -- Derek B. Scott, author of Sounds of the Metropolis (2008) and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). This collection is a massive achievement in laying the groundwork for a new way of thinking about things musical. Its scope is large - Hendrix, Xenakis, deafness, production aesthetics, pleasure, Russian punk - and essays impress in both their attention to detail and the breadth of their conceptual scope as we move from questions of aesthetics to detailed close reading. It is a study which succeeds as both music scholarship and cultural contextualization, particularly in relation to artists in other media (Ballard, Artaud) and key scholars (Attali, Adorno, Benjamin). And although it is hard to photograph noise, the book's photos find some excellent visual analogues. -- Allan F Moore, Professor of Popular Music, University of Surrey, author of Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means