Against Ambience and Other Essays

As an entreaty to sound artists and gallerists to think discursively about the artistic production of ambience, Kim-Cohen's Against Ambience is a necessary and timely intervention. It should be read by anyone with a serious investment in the creation or presentation of `sound art' or `environmental' art installations. As aesthetic theory, the essay is at once discursively productive, cognitively stimulating, well organized, linguistically playful without indulgence, and frequently razor-sharp in its dissection of concepts ... The art world could use more ethical appeals such as Kim-Cohen's, and his clarion call in Against Ambience justly deserves amplification. * Twentieth-Century Music * This fantastic new collection of essays confirms that Seth Kim-Cohen writes about sound and unsound, sense and nonsense, like no one else. Kim-Cohen polarizes-not just his readers, but his subjects and, inevitably, himself. The Big One-Thing is always cracked in two. Easy magic can't get a break. But make no mistake. Kim-Cohen is a lover of intensities: litany becomes a hard bright joy, pleasure heaves its darkness into view. That love of intensity- faith, really-is what lets him break down the `superjoke' of rock 'n roll without spoiling its punchline. An astonishing feat. We could all take a page. * Seth Brodsky, Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities, The University of Chicago, USA * Against Ambience and Other Essays is like one of those bombs the anarchists dreamed of back at the birth of modernism: exploding whole worlds with a single throw. In their case, some wood panelling was splintered, tuxedoes were spoiled, and a few (usually the wrong) people injured. But Kim-Cohen here, once again, pulls off the more utopian dream-and with aplomb. * Craig Dworkin, Professor of English at the University of Utah, USA * [Against Ambience and Other Essays is] a polemical air horn that might just wake celebrants of ambient art from their nostalgic dream of decontextualized sensory immersion. * Lytle Shaw, Professor of English, New York University, USA *