Selected Publications
books
The Sound of Things to Come: An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, this book delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film.
Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear.
Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.
articles & chapters
"OTher kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance"
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic dance music culture
Vol 15, No 1 (2023): Special Issue on psychedelica & electronica
Cognition in extended brain-body music systems becomes especially agile during psychedelic experience, necessitating a sonic rhetoric emphasizing transformative agency. Rooted in the recursive listening spaces of dub, three forms of psychedelic electronica—ambient house, trip-hop and glitch—foster an echological sensibility unique to records made largely from the bits and pieces of other recordings. In this article, longform albums representing each of these genres are offered as sonic pharmakomedia, pharmacologically activated non-human agencies that sustain psychedelic mind-machine systems.
Managing the psychedelic experience by mediating set and setting through music selection is adopted in psychedelic research, therapy sessions and personal practices alike. I consider set and setting in terms of their contributions to a liminal sonic substance that facilitates encounters with non-human agencies. Putting indigenous shamanic practices in conversation with contemporary neuropsychopharmacolog y, sound studies and psychedelic music production, this article offers a diagnostic inventory of the effects of the sonic substance
"Ethnoforgery and Outsider Afrofuturism"
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic dance music culture
Vol 5, No 2 (2013): Special Issue on Afrofuturism
This essay detours from Afrofuturism proper into ethnological forgery and Outsider practices, foregrounding the issues of authenticity, authorship and identity which measure Afrofuturism’s ongoing relevance to technocultural conditions and the globally-scaled speculative imagination. The ethnological forgeries of the German rock group Can, the work of David Byrne and Brian Eno, and trumpeter Jon Hassell’s Fourth World volumes posit an “hybridity-at-the-origin” of Afrofuturism that deconstructs racial myths of identity and appropriation/exploitation. The self-reflective and critical nature of these projects foregrounds issues of origination through production strategies that combine ethnic instrumentation and techniques, voices sampled from radio and TV broadcast, and genre-mashing hybrids of rock and funk along with unconventional styles like ambient drone, minimalism, noise, free jazz, field recordings, and musique concrète.
With original recordings and major statements of Afrofuturist theory, the essay orchestrates a deliberately ill-fitting mixture of Slavoj Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism, Félix Guattari’s concept of “polyphonic subjectivity,” and Marcus Boon’s idea of shamanic “ethnopsychedelic montage” in order to argue for an Outsider Afrofuturism that works along the lines of an alternative modernity at the seam of subject identity and technocultural hybridization. In tune with the Fatherless sensibilities that first united black youth in Detroit (funk, techno) and the Bronx (hip-hop) with Germany’s post-WWII generation (Can’s krautrock, Kraftwerk’s electro), Outsider Afrofuturism opens up alternative routes toward understanding subjectivity and culture—through speculative sonic practices in particular—while maintaining social behaviors that reject multiculturalism’s artificial paternal origins, boundaries and lineages.
“Cyborg Ritual and Sentic Technology in the Vortex Concerts” The Poetics of Space: Spatial Explorations in Art, Science, Music & Technology, ed. Arie Altena (Sonic Acts Press, Paradiso, 2010)
This chapter presents the Vortex Concerts of Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson, which took place at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium between 1957 and 1959, as extensions of astronautic research and cybernetic space sciences. While considering the audiovisual content and new performance interfaces used by these artists, he is most interested in how this space age ‘theater of the future’ plays out a cosmological agenda.
The unique spatial structure of the planetarium dome represents the near atmosphere and distant outer space, but it also mimics the observatory and even the cramped interiors of spacecraft. Through this vehicular mechanism, the Vortex Concerts promote a new understanding of the nexus of mind, mood, and body as these are integrated into highly technical cybernetic systems by means of bio-engineering and pharmaceutical regimes. These performances facilitate the emotional life and imaginative health of the cyborg-astronaut through ritual use of sense-altering technologies
Only a handful of fringe space theorists and rogue researchers like Manfred Clynes and John Lilly have raised these issues in the context of practical science applications, though interdisciplinary arts and philosophy have done much to advance the cause of the mental health of the astronaut. Ultimately, the Vortex Concerts suggest that a space program rooted only in the military-industrial-commercial realm lacks a most needed component: the embodied cosmic philosophy of cybernetic intermedia. Such is necessary not only for the individual space-traveler but also for the well-being of a global culture and its post-national citizenry.
"The social Pulse of telharmonics:
functions of networked sound & interactive webcasting"
Cybersounds: essays on virtual music culture, ed. michael d. ayers (Peter lang publishing, 2006)
This chapter concerns developments in audio production and performance made possible through digital technologies as sound artists, musicians, and DJs have come to rely on computer networks for some phase of their projects or live shows. The chapter also describes web-based works, gallery installations, and computer-based media used in live performances and streaming Internet broadcasts. Technologies of sound embed social practice within the media networks of production, collaboration, broadcast, and reception. First, individual performers access a networked database of sound sources and media objects as a way of chronicling associative links among items stored in the material archive. Second, solitary performers collaborate across networks, processing and remixing one another’s streaming audio files or sharing virtual instrument interfaces through the Internet. And third, multiple sets of performers and webcasters interact with each other’s transmissions, coordinated in a live, globally synchronized event. The course of this sequence establishes some of the ways in which these projects and performances foreground the social function of organized sound in terms of telephonic connectivity.