El disco es cultura: Sonic artifacts and Latinx Chicago

Abstract

In music production, a sonic artifact refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, typically the result of the manipulation of sound. This understanding connotes both physical and figurative meanings: artifact as material alteration and as subjectively defined auditory disturbance. Both meanings attune the act of listening to noise—the perception of which relies on normative conceptions of rationality. This article takes up the sonic artifact as an aesthetic figure to listen to Latinx Chicago with attention to vinyl records (or discos) as literal material artifacts and asks: how do discos broadcast—in embodied and symbolic ways—the racialized politics of urban territory, and in turn amplify forms of spatial entitlement? Chicago's racial geography relies on the social reproduction of valuable forms of inequality that render Latinx communities displaceable, or unheard. What place‐making strategies emerge given such profound and intersecting dispossessions, and how are they amplified within the aural public sphere? El disco es cultura provides one answer. As curatorial practice, it embodies a phonoaesthetic assemblage of transcultural and transhemispheric sounds and connections that avails sonic artifacts as layered auditory experiences forged within the politics of displacement, pointing us toward the materiality of Latinx place‐making aesthetics and auditory fields of social recognition.