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PREEMPTIVE LISTENING, by AURA SATZ

Excited for the world premier of this incredible piece of film art, Preemptive Listening, by Aura Satz, as part of Doc Fortnight at MOMA in NYC Feb 23. The film contains snippets of interviews Satz and I did about sirens and imaging a future where care-based institutions lessen the need for emergency services.

Directed, written and edited by Aura Satz
Producer: LONO Studio – Luke W Moody, Aura Satz
Associate Producer: Tendai John Mutambu
Co-Producers: Mika Taanila, Jussi Eerola for Testifilmi

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 collaborators form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?
Featuring newly composed sirens by (in order of appearance)

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 collaborators form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?

Newly reimagined sirens composed by (in sequential order):
Laurie Spiegel (astronomical planetary data)
Evelyn Glennie (percussion, thundersheet)
Maja Raatkje (voice, bells)
Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)
BJ Nilsen (wind, water, electronics)
Ilpo Väisänen (electronics)
Rhodri Davies (harp)
Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet)
FUJI||||||||||TA (insects, bats, DIY organ, electronics)
Laurie Spiegel (manatees, dogs, cicadas, electronics)
Sarah Davachi (organ, bells)
David Toop (fire, sparks, smoke, electronics)
Christina Kubisch (security electromagnetic sounds)
Moor Mother (sirens, electronics)
Raven Chacon (wind harps, solar-powered oscillators)
Elaine Mitchener (voice, whistles)
BJ Nilsen (wind, electronics)
Ilpo Väisänen (electronics)
Camille Norment (feedback sounds, voice)
Evelyn Glennie (cymbal sculpture, gong, percussion)
Mazen Kerbaj (49 trumpets of Jericho, voice)
Horomona Horo (Taonga Puoro)
Debit (Mayan instruments, AI, Schumann resonance)
Evelyn Glennie (waterphone, water triangle)
Raven Chacon (eagle bone whistle)
Kode 9 (sine wave shepard tones)

and spoken by:
Khalid Abdalla (actor and activist in the Arab Spring)
Daphne Carr (organizer and police sound weapons scholar)
Asantewaa Boykin and Niki Jones (co-creators of Mental Health First – ‘MH First’)
Erin Matariki Carr (Māori law scholar and activist, co-lead for RIVER)
Arturo Escobar (anthropologist and environmental philosopher)

Supported by:
AHRC, OKRE
With additional support from:
AND festival, Sonic Acts, Cinema Residency at Walker Arts Centre, Kunsternes Hus, Tyneside Cinema, Creative New Zealand, Avek, Artist Residency at EMPAC, CPH:FORUM 2021, RCA, Kodak
preemptivelisteningfilm.com/

Locations include a siren factory and siren junkyard in the USA, a coal-fired power station in the UK, sirens near the seawall in Fukushima, a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, sirens in Israel and Palestine, a volcano monitoring station in Chile, and alternative readings of the siren in a sanctuary mountain in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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Thank you for visiting my page.

Please support students, faculty, staff, administration, alumni, and the greater Valley community in its commitment to YSU as a place of low cost, high quality public education that encourages critical thinking and fosters equity and inclusion that creates the conditions for democratic participation.

The conversation continues to be the profoundly unethical backroom deal that produced Bill Johnson’s presidency and the enormous, now nationally recognized outcry against this illegal, unjust set of actions by a huge majority of students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, community members, and concerned advocates for fair and equitably public education.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

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Who Cares About the Rock Hall? NIN edition

The musicians of Nine Inch Nails are inducted to the Rock Hall this Nov. 7th. In October I spoke with comedians Joe Kwaczala & Kristen Studard of the podcase Who Cares About the Rock Hall? to talk about this overdue honor and all things Trent.

NIN Who Cares About the Rock Hall Daphne Carr episode

Writer Daphne Carr (Pretty Hate Machine for the 33 ⅓ book series) joins Joe & Kristen to talk about 2020 Rock Hall inductees Nine Inch Nails. Also discussed in this episode is northeastern Ohio, the Experience Music Project, and mall staple retail chain Hot Topic.

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The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century

Wednesday, October 30, 2019—Thursday, October 31, 2019

Raytheon Amphitheater Egan Hall
120 Forsyth St, Boston, MA 02115, USA

The Future of Pop is a pre-conference symposium in advance of the American Musicological Society’s annual conference (Oct. 31 – Nov. 3), co-sponsored by the Popular Music Study Group, Amherst College, and Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design. The symposium will take place Oct. 30–31, 2019, at Northeastern University’s campus in Boston, MA.

Excited to present 10/30, 2–4pm on Panel 2

Chair: Stephanie Shonekan

Shana Redmond, “Unsubscribe: The Stakes of Not Listening”

Christa Bentley, “Reassessing Women’s Voices in the Era of #MeToo”

Daphne Carr, “Can you feel the beat?: Resounding anti-black police brutality in black popular musics”

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The Dreaming, Kate Bush

A Pitchfork review of Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982)

A meditation on the sound and cultural world of Bush’s first real artist statement album. It was nerve-wracking for me to grapple with the huge archive of critical thought and fan appreciation for Kate Bush. What more is there to say? I focused on the metaphors of the mouth and use of shapeshifting, and did a gentle call out of her sometimes problematic appropriation of distant Others in her laudable attempt to embrace storylines cross cultures. Very thankful to my editor Jeremy Larson for sticking with me on this one.

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Diversity (Equity and Inclusion) in Publishing

Here’s the slides for a presentation on “Diversity in Publishing” I did last weekend at the American Musicological Society‘s annual meeting in San Antonio, TX. The mandate was for academic publishing, but I don’t really think it’s apart from the larger publishing and academic knowledge creation ecology so I have a bit of that in there.

Here’s a very unscientific thing I put together on the Oct 2018 Best Sellers in Trade Music History. Would really like to do some work on the last 20 years of this history. Time to get a hold of Bookscan!

Amazon Oct 2018 Music Best Sellers

Teaching

University courses currently teaching

Artists & Audiences in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, NYU (with Jill Mapes)

Listening: Noise, Sound, and Music in Media, Culture, & Communications, NYU

University courses taught in the past

“Music and Media” Media, Culture, and Communications, NYU

Music and Film, Montclair State University

Alternative Literature, Music, and Lifestyles, Charles University, Prague, CZ

Writing Critical Ethnographies of Popular Music Charles University, Philosophy Faculty, Music Department, Prague, CZ

Theories and Methods of Popular Music Scholarship, Charles University, Philosophy Faculty, Music Department, Prague, CZ

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Published (on Salon.com): “Nine Inch Nails: a human scream in Reagan’s postindustrial America.”

Today Salon ran an excerpt  from my  Pretty Hate Machine 33 1/3 book, “Nine Inch Nails: a human scream in Reagan’s postindustrial America.”

More info about the PHM book is here on my site.

In honor of the Salon piece, I’ve put up a few of the final remaining limited edition NINPHM books here at Etsy. They’re hardbound, foil stamped, and handmade by Woodside Press bookbinder genius Davin Kuntze.


ABOUT THE EXCERPT

The editor and I went back and forth about which excerpt to pick, this one or the first 4-5 pages of the book. The one we went with gives some back history to how Nine Inch Nails’ fandom has been symptomatic of the discontent and depression brought on by post-industrialism in the Midwest. This is something that’s obviously been on the minds of many since the Trump campaign rendered visible these historical and contemporary feelings and found ways to weaponize them into a different, and much less pretty, hate machine.

The other excerpt was from the intro, which focused on now Nine Inch Nails and their fans became folk devils in the wake of Columbine. I think the section does a lot of good work to trace the social history of that time period and place it in context of larger American anti-hero archetypes.  If I were writing the book again, I would more critically situate the mediatized shock of Columbine as a product of white privilege and late capitalism. Why are some childrens’ deaths more important than others? Why is gun violence more newsworthy than “slow violence” like poisoned environments that lead to chronic health conditions?

I was not sufficiently intersectional in my approach when I hit that storyline, but for me all writing is a process and the print version is just the one I surrendered to an editor at some point.  Still learning.