“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.
A quote whose certain source remains unknown while attributed to people such as Miles Davis, Elvis Costello, or Frank Zappa among others. I think I found it firstly through the tireless re-mediator Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. Dj Spooky).

It amusingly illustrates the contradictions often inherent to some critical and intellectual discourses on experiential and sensual matters, which sometimes might reveal as rather pointless or simply boring. It came back to my mind while sipping fastly a coffee in the hall of De Balie in reply to a friend heading out the conference hall who joked about the difficulties and confusion that talking ‘too much’ about sound might lead to.

The panel titled ‘The Hot Space in Music‘ was still taking place and we had just listened a while ago to the intervention of Steven Connor, who introduced that session. His name was unknown to my ears before the festival and actually resulted in another of the inspiring discoveries of this edition. Although his lecture: ‘Auscultations (Listening In) consisted in a nonstop discourse full of thoughts and words (no powerpoints, no actual audio examples, just his text, voice and gestuality) definitely it was not boring or pointless at all, but a rather poetic reflection on sound and listening.

Author of books about Joyce, Beckett, ventriloquism, skin or flies and currently preparing a book about the historical poetics of air, his presence in the program drew our attention and curiosity, making us remain in the Conference even though if the plan that afternoon was finally visiting the exhibition (the full schedule of the festival was making of it a difficult task to fulfill in the weekend).

He talked about the locus of listening, its nuances and the space(s) of sound and music, elaborating on those through tinnitus and other topics. Both dense and eloquent, it was inspiring to listen to this talk, which actually I hope to re-listen to soon. A visit to Steven´s site confirmed him as an accomplished orator, cultural critic and a prolific writer with an archive full of talks, writings and broadcasts ranging a variety of topics, many of them available as texts and in audio too. Specially interesting for us the ones classified under: ‘Seeing to Sound: On Sound, Music and Voice‘.

sound is unthinkable without space…
sound is always more than space…
sound and space never exactly coincide…
sound and space are consustantial but never exactly coexistant…

I am outisde the sound which is at the same time inside me…

music rarely happens in space, because music IS space.