At Sonic Transformations —a joint event by MASSmcr and DVRK Arts Collective— my sound piece ‘A queer sonic geography of Manchester’ was presented. It comes with contributions by
AminaB
Dyphnos
Gabriel Marques Camargo
Gary Fisher
Hal
Industries
kaoti
Leah Wall
Norrisette
PHIA SKY
Ryan Charles Jacob
The sound piece is composed of eleven different soundscape compositions by the research participants and me. We all went on soundwalks and recorded field recordings around the Gay Village area in Manchester. Each of us arranged their field recordings into soundscape compositions with the aim to sonically represent our individual relationships to Manchester from a queer perspective. I then took the stems of each soundscape composition and mixed them all up, creating a sonic collage inspired by Foucault’s notion of homosexuality cutting ‘slantwise [through] […] the social fabric’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 138). In doing so I queered the sonic geographies explored by the research participants and me.
Foucault, M. (1994) ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ in Rabinow, P. (ed) Ethics: subjectivity and truth. New York: The New York Press, pp. 135—156.
Snippets of the sound piece are also included in MASSmcr’s Sonic Manifesto, listen below.