Daniela Cascella and Salomé Voegelin have begun a show on the great British radio station Resonance 104.4 FM, as mentioned here on Saturday. After two broadcasts on Resonance’s radio signal, each show is to be collected online for broader distribution. The debut episode is now available for download, and it features Cascella and Voegelin talking about what drew them to write about sound, about how writing on sound differs from music criticism, and about the freedom they both feel in the endeavor given that neither is writing in their native language. Cascella is Italian and the author of En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing (Zero Books, 2012). Voegelin is Swiss and the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010). Both live in London. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the inaugural episode is how much it is a conversation: not a prepared dialog, but a discussion in which they ask questions of each other, questions in which the questioner and the questioned are not necessarily entirely sure of the answers (MP3). This lack of assurance is presented as much as an ideal representation of listening as it is of the duo’s shared curiosity, because they both focus on what they describe as the lack of the tangible in sound, the “contingency of listening,” as it is put, in which the experience is ephemeral, unlike, say, in the visual arts.
Track originally posted for free download at ora2013. More on Cascella (above left) at danielacascella.com and Voegelin (right) at salomevoegelin.net. The Cascella image is from an interview with her at earroom.wordpress.com, as is the Voegelin image.