In Sound arts now, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle explore contemporary artistic practices and theories, and what contributes to or hinders artistic and career development. This is conducted through a series of interviews with artists and curators, putting the often-unheard voice of the maker at the centre of the discourse.

There is a conscious shift of reference away from the “white men from the global north” who have dominated the canon during the decades of the discipline’s emergence and establishment. The twenty interviews focus on contemporary and future ideas and practices with artists at early or mid-points in their working lives, whose backgrounds, geographical locations and experiences are as wide-ranging as their approaches and ideas.

Adam Basanta, AM Kanngieser, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Caroline Devine, Elsa M’bala, Evan Ifekoya, Hanna Tuulikki, Hong-Kai Wang, Jau-Lan Guo, Jennifer Walshe, Khaled Kaddal, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lina Lapelyte, Maria Chavez, Mark Peter Wright, Mikel R. Nieto, Mikhail Karikis, Samson Young, Yang Yeung, Yashas Shetty

While not claiming to be a definitive survey, Sound arts now broadens and destabilises what we have come to understand as sound arts, offering new and different pathways, frames of reference, and modes of thinking.

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Since 1998 Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle have collaborated on many artistic, curatorial, academic and educational projects, establishing along the way CRiSAP, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice research centre of University of the Arts London.

They have published In the Field, a collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work, and On Listening (both Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording.

Reviews
'A collection of meandering but geographically and socially contextualised discussions - almost like qualitative research materials - takes us from Brighton to Beirut and beyond, in many cases via Skype or Zoom, to establish some of the contemporary geographies, sociologies and economies of sound arts while looking beyond a network of 'white men from the global north' - Art Monthly



'A fascinating book' - The Wire



"Sound Arts Now offers new and different and interesting and exciting pathways, frames of reference, conceptual frameworks, and modes of thinking that we might now apply to sound arts" - Leonardo Journal

Image: Elsa M’bala, performance in the field, photograph by Simone Gilges, 2017