Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  “Songs of despair and freedom”. Interview with Sashko Protyah. (2025) author(s): Vadim Keylin published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He's a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army. This interview was taken in February 2024 over email.
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  A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad (2025) author(s): Sam Riley published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).
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  Sounding the dissolution from a Cosmic Space (2025) author(s): Giada Dalla Bonta published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Whereas the sonic experimentations at the dawn of the October Revolution have been extensively documented, little research has been conducted on practices at the intersection of sound and art during the USSR dissolution. This article explores the political significance of sonic practices –alongside their cultural, artistic, and sensory dimensions– in late Soviet Russia's unofficial art scene, examining the case study of the New Artists group in Leningrad and their shift from mocking avant-garde legacies to a more organically interdisciplinary approach, presumably initiating rave culture in the region. This shift, along with the re-appropriation of cosmism, is framed as a sonic fiction made of music, dance, art, queer inclusivity that aimed at transcending the Iron Curtain and extending conceptually to the Universe. In particular, the paper aims to highlight the decisive influence, often overshadowed by the figure of Novikov, of musicians Valeriy Alakhov and Igor’ Verichev (New Composers) in such evolution by informing the group's poetic strategies and compositions in accordance with their sonic thinking and imagery. The understanding of “togetherness” as constitutive element of late Soviet underground culture and of the hypernormalized official ideology’s de-territorialization (Yurchak 2006) also demonstrates, through J.-L. Nancy’s theory of communal bodies, the role of participatory and corporeal sonic experiences in creating sonic fictions from “interplanetary sounds” able to penetrate socio-cultural dynamics. The artists’ “ubiquitous” (vsyochestvo) principle of absolute synthesis of the arts is thus extended to the realm of sonic materiality, multisensoriality and sonic agency, articulating afresh its appellation of “new avantgarde” of the empire’s dissolution. This article delves into the New Artists' initial evolution before their transition into the more reactionary "New Academy" formation, as some artistic strategies, successfully subversive under Gorbachev, faltered in the post-Soviet landscape and strengthened reactionary forces now intertwined with the ruling power. A forthcoming publication in the Journal of Sonic Studies (Dalla Bontà: 2024) will delve into this subsequent phase during the 1990s, offering insights into the intricate dynamics driving this seemingly contradictory development in the group and in certain figures in the Russian underground scene.
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  Sound Intuition (2025) author(s): Henrik Frisk published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This paper introduces the method of intuition as it is presented by French philosopher Henri Bergson in the book An Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson 1912). Its usefulness as a tool to observe relevant information in artistic practice in sound is further discussed in relation to a series of works by the author. Exploring this complex field the author makes a preliminary conclusion that sound is not a thing, and it is not limited to what we listen to. It is a system of interrelated threads, the meaning of which is much larger than the actual sound itself.
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• Een geluidsbelevingsonderzoek naar de radarpost in Wier (2025) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Tussen oktober 2023 en juni 2024 hebben Marcel Cobussen (Universiteit Leiden) en Tjeerd Andringa (SoundAppraisal) in opdracht van het Ministerie van Defensie een geluidsbelevingsonderzoek gedaan naar de radarpost in Wier.
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• Geluid en geluidsbeleving in Vlietland (2025) author(s): Marcel Cobussen published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  Van september tot en met december 2024 heeft Marcel Cobussen (Universiteit Leiden), gedeeltelijk in samenwerking met enkele collega’s en in opdracht van de Provincie Zuid-Holland een geluids(belevings)onderzoek gedaan naar de actuele en mogelijk toekomstige geluidsomgeving in Vlietland, met nadruk op tracédelen 1 en 2.
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