SONIC WARFARE

Word has been on the street for about a year now that Steve Goodman (Kode9) - owner of the Hyperdub label and DJ extraordinaire - is writing a book. Well it's finally being released this month on MIT Press, and it looks to be a very interesting read.

Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Table of Contents). Basically, the book is about how sound affects not only the realm of sound art/pop culture, but also politics and warfare.

Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.

The book concludes by speculating about the concept of "unsound," or the not yet heard, and how it "relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths." (p xx of Introduction chapter)

You can get a better feel for this interesting subject by reading a couple of sample chapters:

Introduction

Chapter 1 - 1998: A Conceptual Event

For the hell of it, here's 2 of my favorite Kode9 tunes - both coming from his Black Sun/2 Far Gone Hyderdub release in March, 2009:



Kode9 - Black Sun


Kode9 - 2 Far Gone