Editor's note #3

Much has changed since we launched Infrasonica eight months ago. The beginning of this journey has been challenging and joyful. The project is moving fast and our community of collaborators, accomplices and listeners is growing. This is about learning and working together. Sound then becomes a place where commonality is possible and we want to start by thanking all of you who speak and listen, raising your voices, which are also our voices.

This first Current, titled Sonic Realism, aimed to explore the possibilities of sound beyond the audible. Sound as a potentiality that engages with deep transformation and that reflects our own sensitive constitution as occlusive but compelling expressive manifestations of beings. Sonic Realism is a call for vibrations that speak of encounters, affinities, kinship and language.

We take pride in closing the year with such a range of contributions, where sonic practices, planetary conversations, sound improvisation and music composition take the stage. The London-based sound artist and writer Ella Finer, in collaboration with artists Urok Shirhan, Sheila Chukwulozie and Vibeke Mascini, takes us through the sonic landscape of a written exchange that speaks from within a rare intimacy where language becomes an encrypted messenger filled with expressive silences and images.

The Chilean transdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole L'Huillier, in collaboration with the oral poet Claudio Mercado Muñoz, the scholar José Pérez De Arce, the researcher and performer Francisca Gili and the musician AnaRosa Ibañez resignify the very meaning of planetary conversations by engaging with the Chilean territory in a way that allows the immanent texture of cultures to emerge, bolstered by discussions about ethnomusicology and its role as a counter-ethnographic tool.

The artist Noe Martínez proposes a breathtaking exploration of Nahua poetics in relation to rhythm, spoken word and colonial memory in a sound piece that encourages a rare and powerful utterance of indigenous discourse while engaging with a dimension of sound that speaks from within its untranslatable substance. The curator and writer Rachael Rakes engages in an elaborate and intimate conversation with White Mountain Apache music composer and sound artist Laura Ortman, speaking on issues of sound and matter, field recording and music composition.

We are thrilled to have the sound theorist and artist Brandon LaBelle presenting an essay that takes us on a joyful ride to the intricacies of the acoustics and space regarding the sensuous, all enabled by sound and matter.

Finally, as we reflect on our first editorial line of Sonic Realism, the Wave track returns us to one of the sounds that inspired our project. “Bloop” remains at the core of the work we do, an unlikely reminder to engage with the perceived silence and to, above all, listen.

We are ending this first Current with excitement. We hope to explore the future together with you.