“It’s a reviewer’s dream because there are so many layers to it” (p. 96). Steve Goodman comments in reference to the audio essay On Vanishing Land during a conversation around its release on his Flatlines label. The comment is made in passing, but there is something about the form or medium under discussion, reflected in this publication, that generates responses, creates ripples, and echoes. The scale of this book, 300 plus pages, responding to three works of sound art, expanded radio, or as the editors have chosen ‘audio essay,’ is evidence of the way the form provokes or prompts further noise, more discourse, additional attention.

Sonic Faction was a pair of events, one held at Iklectik in London (July 2022) and one at KARST in Plymouth (February 2023), where three works were presented for collective listening, along with a public discussion and an installation of related material. The three pieces were: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land (2006), Steve Goodman’s Astro-Darien (2021) and Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2022). This book takes on several tasks, operating as a catalogue for or record of the events, offering an expanded commentary on the works presented and giving significant detail on the conception, making and presentation of these. The book also functions as a primer or a means toward defining or describing a genre – the audio essay – situating it in historic, artistic, critical, theoretical contexts. In pursuit of this, the book brings together a selection of essays that describe or demonstrate the audio essay as a medium and as an approach to making art. Bringing together writing by artists, theorists, publishers, broadcasters the mix of perspectives and modes of involvement with the audio essay results in an array of textual riches, supplemented by a comprehensive playlist on YouTube.

Curator Ben Borthwick examines the experience of these works from the audience perspective, an audience used to other ways of engaging with or consuming art or music or text, as he writes in his Foreword: “one of the powerful sensations of this mode of experience is that consistent focus gives way to a tendency to oscillate between the conceptual spaces created through language and the embodied feeling of being absorbed into sound and space” (p. xii). These themes of oscillation and absorption are developed in the various contributions in the volume, with oscillation occurring between and among genres and forms, in modes of attention or engagement, in situations of showing or presentation, as works shift between gallery or music or performance spaces, as audiences adjust their modes of attention from listening to sensing, from focus on text to appreciation of rhythm. Questions of absorption thread through the book as the nature of listening to these works is discussed, with types and levels and depths of attention depending on varying conditions.

Maya B. Kronic in their detailed Introduction to the anthology explores the audio essay as a genre, situating this in relation to art, to the essay, and to music. “We could provisionally define the audio essay as an extended recorded piece that combines discursive and/or narrative speech with both musical and non-musical sound elements” (p. 1). But they immediately acknowledge that this definition is inadequate, and the genre spills beyond these bounds. Developing this sense of the audio essay as functioning to disrupt discursive modes and spaces, Kronic suggests that “it may be a privileged medium in which certain modes of thinking and certain voices begin to be heard – and therefore may bring with it certain political and ethical demands” (p. 3). The consideration of the ethical and political throughout the book draws in voices from different practices and gives space to discussion around gender, ecology, violence, and the legacy of colonisation alongside detailed engagement with technical and material aspects of production.

If I can pick three threads to follow through the weave of material in the book, these might be voice, listening, and space. As a form that hasn’t yet been fully claimed or staked out, the audio essay offers space for other voices, it can render audible “[e]verything that can be spoken on the ground of the enormous voices that have not yet, or cannot yet be heard” (Stuart Hall, cited by Paul Nataraj, p. 315). Kronic cautions against explicit politicisation of the medium, saying that it is in “superimposing political, conceptual, and aesthetic contestations, balancing sensory seduction with discursive stringency, that [the audio essay] produces its unprecedented effects” (p. 25). The audio essay offers possibilities of polyphony, it shifts from the individual authorial voice, to collective, collaborative, multiple voicings. As Eleni Ikoniadou writes, “This has nothing to do with idealised and essentialist definitions of language and voice as indexes of human meaning-making processes, and points instead to their pluralistic, collective, and contrapuntal expressions” (p. 240). She continues, “At the same time, it points to ancient, indigenous, and intersectional ways of being and living, where the truth is held by many voices and communicated through a poem, a song, or a lament. This polyphonic practice threads together fact, speculation, and future-oriented action, for reimagining, making, and living in other worlds outside the limits of the colonial mind” (p. 251).

If the audio essay provides a space for multiple voices, it also can accommodate multiple hearings. Lawrence Abu Hamdan in response to an interview question on the essay as a form, says that the essay is a space to translate the process of prolonged detailed attentive listening on the artist’s part “into a collective act of listening, pausing and slowly zooming out from the sonic minutiae to unfold these sounds into their full significance through the course of the live event” (p. 232). Steve Goodman in a public conversation held as part of the KARST Sonic Faction event, points to the sense of ‘essay’ as a trial or attempt, and links this to failure, with failure allowing for an openness or incompleteness. He continues, “there is also a way in which, as a form, [the audio essay] requires the listener to complete the system, or it asks for some work from the listener: it’s not easy to listen to these audio essays, it demands attention and immersion simultaneously” (p. 64). Considering relationships between the audio essay and footwork (styles of dance music at an intersection of electronica and rap) Matt Colquhoun points out their distinct orientations to the space of dance, the dancefloor, but writes that “each implores the listener to suspend the easy separation of these two forms of cultural object in space and instead focus on the act of listening as a more amorphous activity that transversally crosses spaces, temporalities, and subjectivities of all kinds” (123).

The essays further engage with space in varied modes, the space travel and off-world structures in Astro-Darien, that also folds in the digital non-spaces of computer games, and the colonised spaces of imperial expansion. In the essay by Angus Carlyle the spaces of the Norwegian sub-arctic regions are intertwined with the spaces of Glenn Gould’s radio work, and the constructed audio spaces of digitally edited material, dance floors and the academic study intersect in Matt Colquhoun’s essay. The places associated with the three audio essays at the centre of this project, are marginal, liminal, provisional, unstable, whether the rapidly eroding coast of East Anglia, a failed Scottish colonial project in Panama, contemporary developments of spaceports in Shetland, an abandoned shopping centre in Berlin, or digitally constructed worlds. There are other in-between places that are crossed in the essays through the book, the skies over Lebanon, the Atlantic of the slave trade’s middle passage, the zones of the aurora borealis, these variously connect to projects of recording, of documenting, of listening, as noises, signals, and voices emerge from them.

Kronic states at the close of their Introduction, “What we hope to present in this volume are some indicators as to what the ‘dialoguing fragments’ of the audio essay might offer us in navigating the perplexing new configuration, to which, centuries later, we are still struggling to adapt our inherited language and attitudes – as an auditory probe into the unmapped zones of a global culture with neither unity nor univocity” (p. 30). As an introduction to this zone, the work gathered in this publication offers a diverse and inspiring mix of entry points for further listening, making and critical response.