Acousmatic music eliminates the sound source from the sound. This breaks down the holding cell of what’s inside all of us. Our innate imaginal faculty, our inner genius jail breaks out of its unconscious black iron prison—the prison imposed by modernities infatuation with the degraded image… and begins to dream.
Acousmatic Crossings presents some of the artists creating in this space today. We have received a plethora of works, some from artists well established in this realm, many from artists new to me, all bursting with an intrinsic and untaught ability to transport you, the listener beyond the fields you know.
If you choose to explore these zones, there is only one simple prerequisite, a prerequisite that all of us have access to. And that is to simply use your cognitive imagination.
Slap your headphones on, turn down the lights and let this music do its work. Who knows, it may just succeed in lifting veils, revealing symbols that illuminate the way to your own Mundus Imaginalis.
–Michael Eisenberg, Editor
Latest Acousmatic Music
Sound as Passage, Passage as Sound
An Acousmatic Crossings installment exploring Illusion of Safety’s Lost and Profound: cinema for the ears, liminal sound, imaginal ascent, and transformation.
A Winter Playlist for the Acousmatic
A Winter Playlist of Acousmatic music along with some brief history and definitions
Trickster Signals and Dark Rooms: Two Paths Through Acousmatic Night
A descent into the coded unknown: Morose Code fractures the audible world into uncanny aural riddles, while Hotel opens a shadowed door into a space where noise becomes dread made audible. Two works, two thresholds—each demanding you listen beyond the surface.
Transmissions
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Gregory Amenoff, Mountains and Garden, 2015
“… By freeing itself from the grasp of visual representation, acousmatic listening liberates our imagination’s mental images and creative forms. The acousmatic sounds you hear coming from the speakers without knowing what caused them, are the basic elements of the vocabulary of acousmatic art and musique concrete.”
—from the Musiques and Recherches page
“Beyond the fields we know, there are strange things waiting—things too wonderful for our imagining, too terrible for our telling.”
—Lord Dunsany
Join the Conversation
We have a whole channel dedicated to acousmatic music at Infinite Conversations where you can engage in thoughtful conversations with other enthusiasts and the composers about their work.
To gain access, become a patron of Metapsychosis.
(This channel is also accessible to anyone with a Cosmos Co-op membership.)
Gregory Amenoff, Tower for Strindberg, 2016
Full Playlist
- An Acousmatic Crossings installment exploring Illusion of Safety’s Lost and Profound: cinema for the ears, liminal sound, imaginal ascent, and transformation.