Sound—at the Interregnum

The fourth annual Alchemy Lecture brought together four “Alchemists”—thinkers and practitioners working across disciplines and geographies—to share a constellation of ideas for the future. Their urgent, poignant, and inventive lectures compose Sound—at the Interregnum, which asks what sounds we make and what sounds we should leave behind in a world on the cusp of becoming something else. At the interregnum, we meet oligarchs and fascists, ongoing genocides and displacements, deepening anti-intellectualism, the use of sonic weapons (Long Range Acoustic Devices), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone’s needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. There are also the sounds of protest, of anthems, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes—which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself. The acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who are in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum—this period of great danger, and also great possibility.