WIRELESS IMAGINATION - SOUND, RADIO, AND THE AVANT-GARDE

edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts-London, 1994

(book review)

Although a couple of challenging inventions of our age have been related to the transmission and recording of the sound, our understanding of modernism, the avant-garde and postmodernism does not seem to have been transformed by the sound. Artists did not take advantage of the new technologies; and in fact contributions to the art of the sound are diverse, and historically incoherent. WIRELESS IMAGINATION/SOUND, RADIO, AND THE AVANT-GARDE is a brilliant collection of original essays and newly translated documents on the art of the sound composed with the aim of breaking the "deafening silence" which surrounds the sound, as the editors claim.

Reviewed here.