Beholder Halfway #25 - Beyond Unwanted Sound w/ Marie Thompson

Tuesday 24th October 2017 19:00 - 20:00 BST

This month: A discussion with media scholar Marie Thompson about her new book, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury). We discuss different conceptions of 'noise', as anti-music or the cacophony of industrial society, competing theories of noise and Marie's powerful argument that noise is neither inherently bothersome nor transgressive. We end by discussing some of the musicians and sound artists that Marie argues transcend the dominant morality by which noise is related to.

Marie Thompson is a Lecturer in Lincoln School of Film and Media. Her research centres on the affective, material and gendered dimensions of sound, noise and music. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has also published a number of chapters and articles on the intersections of noise and femininity.

Beholder Halfway #22 - A Personal Hip Hop Odyssey with Warren Ali

Wednesday 26th July 2017 19:00 - 20:00 BST

This month: Warren Ali offers an autobiographical story of growing up under apartheid and later, post-apartheid South Africa and then moving to London, all through the lens of rap music and what it meant to him.

Beholder Halfway #20 w/ Anja Kanngiesser

Tuesday 30th May 2017 18:00 - 19:00 BST

This week: Paul Rekret and sonic geographer Anja Kanngieser examine the relationship between field recordings and pop music in an age of ecological and economic crisis.

Beholder Halfway #19 w/ Anthony Iles on Noise and Capitalism

Tuesday 25th April 2017 19:00 - 20:00 BST

This month, a discussion of Noise and Capitalism with writer and editor Anthony Iles.

Beholder Halfway #18 - Alpha, Isis, Eden

Tuesday 28th March 2017 19:00 - 20:00 BST

This month: exclusive excerpts of "Alpha, Isis, Eden", a sound work by Laura Oldfield Ford and Jack Latham (Jam City). Produced to accompany the eponymous commission exhibited at The Showroom, London, February to March 2017.

Beholder Halfway #17 - Black Atlantis

Tuesday 28th February 2017 19:00 - 20:00 GMT

Recorded live at the Empire Remains shop in London in November 2016, Black Atlantis looks at possible afterlives of the Black Atlantic: in illegal migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems, and in outer space.

Beholder Halfway #16 - Noise: The Political Economy Of Music

Tuesday 24th January 2017 19:00 - 20:00 GMT

This month: sound artist Patchfinder confronts Jacques Attali's book Noise: the Political Economy of Music.

Beholder Halfway #15 - Take This Hammer: Ethnographies of Work Song

Thursday 8th December 2016 20:00 - 22:00 GMT

This week: 'Take This Hammer: Ethnographies of Work Song'. exploring ethnographic field recordings of work songs + a lecture-performance titled 'Labour & Rhythm' by the artist Noah Angell.

Beholder Halfway #13 - Incipient Intentions

Thursday 17th March 2016 18:00 - 19:00 GMT

This week: 'Incipient Intentions'. There are severe limits to what the sociological imagination can inform us about music. This episode marks and celebrates those limits.

"Music points to true language in the sense that content is apparent in it, but it does so at the cost of unambiguous meaning, which has migrated to the languages of intentionality. And as though Music, that most eloquent of all languages, needed consoling for the curse of ambiguity - its mythic aspect, intentions are poured into it." Theodor Adorno, 'Music and Language - A Fragment'

Beholder Halfway #9 - Politics Of Rave

Thursday 18th February 2016 18:00 - 19:00 GMT

This week: the politics of rave and dance culture, from the 'second summer of love' to the Criminal Justice Act.

Beholder Halfway #5 - The Free Association (Part One)

Thursday 21st January 2016 18:00 - 19:00 GMT

This week: discussing the relationship between popular culture, music and social movements with Brian Layng, David Harvie, and Keir Milburn of The Free Association.

Beholder Halfway #4 - Exoticism & Appropriation: the New 'World Music'

Thursday 14th January 2016 18:00 - 19:00 GMT

This week: 'Exoticism and Appropriation': the will to hybridity; explorers and copyright; romanticism and innocence; pastiche and capitalism; cultural authoritarianism.