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From the perspective of sound studies and media history this article explores approaches to analogue archives coming from the fi elds of sound art and media art. The authors analyse works of art by two contemporary artists from Berlin and Aarhus focussing on archival practices of storing and retrieving: Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and Morten Riis. What is actually (not merely metaphorically) ‘stored’, ‘inscribed’ or ‘archived’ in and subsequently ‘retrieved’, ‘read’ or even ‘decoded’ from a certain sound artwork? From this starting point the individual artistic practices, the research strategies and the new and surprising ways of archiving and retrieving as invented and refi ned by Papalexandri-Alexandri and Riis are described and analysed. The observed artistic practices, the authors argue, converge in the direction of sonic affordances inherent in the material instruments or storage media: These affordances are stored and retrieved, as they represent the tacit grooves of sound art.

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

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