Editor in Chief: Mirna Belina
Assistant Editor: Hannah Pezzack
Copy Editor: Andrea Rožić
Design: Rafaela Dražić
Sonic Acts Press Intern: Dominika Mikołajczyk
300 pp., 16.5 x 23.5 cm, English, January 2025, double issue
ISSN: 2772-5685

What does it mean to listen – not just to hear, but to attentively attune to the world around us? Building on Sonic Acts’ 30-year legacy, the seventh edition of Ecoes – a special, double issue – delves into the art of sound and presence. From Salomé Voegelin’s remixing of the ‘curatorial order’ to maximalist composer Charlemagne Palestine and Loma Doom’s cerebral DJ sets, this magazine reimagines listening as a form of attention – at once a method, an ethics, and a poetics.

A continuation of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 project Touched by Sound, Sève I.V. Janssen excavates the media archive of Dutch performer and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz. Meanwhile, Elias Anastas of Radio alHara discusses the Palestine-based station’s efforts to sustain (inter)national solidarity amidst escalating Israeli violence. In their collaboratively written article, Shortwave Collective proposes another (radio) listening exercise, asking: ‘Do we listen to the same things, differently?’

The landscape too becomes a sonorous body, resonating with its own rhythms. Along the Wadden Sea, Cocky Eek reflects on the subtle acoustics of the mudflats; researcher Sarah Agerbaek evokes the silencing magic of snowfall; and, by listening to the soil, Juan Cortés uncovers the devastating impact of monocultural farming in Colombia.

Martina Raponi, operating as noiserr, examines how audism has shaped society, drawing on Deaf researchers and artists to develop a theory of ‘the unheard.’ This edition also includes a contemplative report on The Listening Room – Sonic Acts’ 8.2-channel sound exhibition and online spatialised platform. Additionally, NTS resident Elena Colombi speaks to raving futures, sonic fictions, and the queer avant-garde.

In What Can’t a Body Do? Indigenous scholar M. Murphy reminds us that bodies are entangled in the messy affairs of history. Through her visual essay Models of Maintenance, Alina Schmuch uncovers hidden infrastructures beneath our feet – sewage, riverbeds, water storage, and testing samples.

Spread across several pages, Sammy Lee's psychedelic contribution Cymatics translates auditory phenomena into vibrant, intricate patterns. Mobilising listening against borders and across temporalities, Jacek Smolicki walks into Białowieża forest, an ancient woodland straddling Poland and Belarus. Finally, sibling duo Hannah and Charlie Pezzack’s collaboration concludes with a Welsh folk song, lingering in the ears.

About Ecoes magazine

Ecoes unpacks alternatives to the anthropocentric perspective that approaches the nonhuman as a resource. A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, this periodic magazine about ‘art in the age of pollution’ showcases compelling artistic and critical perspectives that engage with the past, future or afterlives of environmental harm, toxicity, extraction, and waste.

Published with the support of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Contents

Hear, hear… – Mirna Belina, Hannah Pezzack 

Five Ways to Unperform the Curatorial – Salomé Voegelin 

Charlemagne Palestine: Connecting to Divinities and Childhood Fantasy – Interview by Maud Seuntjens

Loma Doom: The Art of Listening – Interview by Hannah Pezzack 

A Walk in the Forest: Transversal Listening to Białowieża – Jacek Smolicki 

Elias Anastas: Echoing Struggles and Solidifying Solidarities through Radio alHara – Interview by Lucas Nessim Snaije

Plural Radio-Listening – Shortwave Collective 

Elena Colombi: Raving and Radical Futures – Interview by Hannah Pezzack                              

Cymatics – Sammy Lee 

We’re All Ears? – Martina Raponi/noiserr 

Under this Falling: Snow, Silence, and Attention – Sarah E. Agerbaek 

Juan Cortés: Sounding Out the Subterranean – Interview by Anton Spice

Listening Together – Hannah Pezzack 

Cocky Eek: Mud, Air and Tidal Rhythms – Interview by Dominika Mikołajczyk

Touched by Sound – Sève I.V. Janssens 

What Can’t a Body Do? – M Murphy

Models of Maintenance – Alina Schmuch

Past Echoes: Women, Horses, and Celtic Folk Traditions in Post-Industrial South Wales – Hannah Pezzack