Hold Music

The notion of sonic intimacy has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, but less well-established has been what it means for a sonic encounter to be non-intimate. This essay proposes an opposite to sonic intimacy, namely so…

Editorial

Recently, scholars have paid increased attention to affect as a structuring principle of political life, aesthetic engagement, cultural practice, and social formation (Ahmed 2010, Brown et al. 2019, Lutz 2017, Neuman 2007, Papoulias and Call…

‘We Feel Something’

On February 11, 1965, less than one year after the outset of the Brazilian military dictatorship, singer Maria Bethânia assumed one of the principal roles in the musical theater piece Opinião in Rio de Janeiro. Taking over for Nara Leão, …

Affective Turn, or Return?

The ‘affective turn’ suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities, and shape new forms of politics in the making. It invites us to move beyond established humanities and social science paradigms and …

Muzak, Lo-Fi, and Acoustic Violence

Violence, including acoustic violence, can be remarkably resistant to critique; the semiotic structures upon which scholarly arguments rely may appear, in their representationalism, to have a distancing effect from the sheer materialism of v…

Singing Wives and Oligarch Patrons

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on Swedo-Russian musical collaborations, this article explores the link between popular music and the conspicuous consumption of Russia’s wealthy elite. Presenting two specific cases, one following a…