Ecoes, Issue 04

About Ecoes:

Ecoes is a magazine about sound art, technology, and ecology, published by Sonic Acts. A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, it is rooted in environmental concerns and investigates how auditory practices shape our understanding of contemporary worlds — human and nonhuman. Through critical essays, artistic contributions, and interviews, each issue amplifies alternative ways of sensing, interpreting, and intervening in a rapidly changing planet.

In this issue:

With a ‘feature well on oil’ that dives deep into the ‘petrocapitalist noxiousness’ of our time, Ecoes #4 tells the complex personal stories of artists and researchers, inspiring and transforming different perspectives of reality. The fourth edition interweaves works from Sonic Acts OVEREXPOSED residents with interviews from FieldARTS 2022 participants and other creators and thinkers from our Underexposed mentorship scheme, all considering the composite ways toxicity can be buried, leaked, and unearthed across scales of daily life and deep time. From personal experiences of cancer treatment, caregiving and its aftereffects, to building relations with mounds, piles and heaps all around us; from the long-lasting impact of the 2002 MV Prestige oil spill off the coast of Spain, to ecological colonialism covering destroyed Palestinian villages with Aleppo pine; from misused restoration of the seminal oil pool sculpture by Noriyuki Haraguchi, to poetry by Russian queer feminist poet Galina Rymbu that ‘historicises the chokehold on oil, gas, and grain supply, now crystallised in the invasion of Ukraine’. This issue of Ecoes offers a powerful immersion into art during times of pain, toxicity, illness and crude capitalism.