In Sound arts now, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle explore contemporary artistic practices and theories, and what contributes to or hinders artistic and career development. This is conducted through a series of interviews with artists and curators, putting the often-unheard voice of the maker at the centre of the discourse.

There is a conscious shift of reference away from the “white men from the global north” who have dominated the canon during the decades of the discipline’s emergence and establishment. The twenty interviews focus on contemporary and future ideas and practices with artists at early or mid-points in their working lives, whose backgrounds, geographical locations and experiences are as wide-ranging as their approaches and ideas.

While not claiming to be a definitive survey, Sound arts now broadens and destabilises what we have come to understand as sound arts, offering new and different pathways, frames of reference, and modes of thinking.

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Since 1998 Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle have collaborated on many artistic, curatorial, academic and educational projects, establishing along the way Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), a research centre of University of the Arts London.

They have published In the Field, a collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work, and On Listening (both Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording.

Cathy Lane works primarily in sound, combining oral history, archival recordings, spoken word and environmental recordings to investigate histories, situations, our collective and individual memories and the forces that shape them. She is inspired by places or themes which are rooted in everyday experience and particularly interested in ‘hidden histories’ and historical amnesia and how this can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound.

Angus Carlyle studied law, completed a masters in political theory and a doctorate on the conditions of vocalised political exchange. His subsequent theoretical engagements were with cyberculture, photography and architecture before developing his long-standing pre-occupation with environments, their inhabitations and representations. His creative work shifts between a documentary impulse and a more poetic register, deploys experimental writing and compositions based on field recording, often in collaboration with others.

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Elsa M’bala, performance in the field, photograph by Simone Gilges, 2017