Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age

The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage’s (’silent’ piece) 4’33. But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos collectively known as 'sound art' has displayed a postmodern need to ’load’ modernism’s ’degree zero’. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century Dr Linda Kouvaras’s Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local national gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement but also engages with aesthetic standpoints through numerous interviews theoretical developments analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian and wider postmodern context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform music critics scholars and educators.