Portable Gray: sound and music edition

June 26, 2019
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Portable Gray is a journal published by The University of Chicago Press Journals Division in partnership with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at The University of Chicago, launched in Fall 2018. The journal is interdisciplinary in scope and dedicated to groundbreaking approaches, offering a forum for artists and scholars to consider how experimental collaboration can enrich their practices and foster new discoveries. The editors will encourage contributors to challenge long-held ideas of artistic and literary forms by featuring essays, interviews, poetry, art, and musical compositions, among other works. It is available in both print and electronic editions, but UW-Madison Libraries is subscribing to the electronic edition only.

Portable Gray Volume 2, Number 1 | Spring 2019 focuses on sound and music, which made us want to bring it to the attention of our patrons. In his Editor’s Plaisance for the issue, Editor-in-Chief Zachary Cahill writes: “In this sound and music edition of Portable Gray you will find duets, trios, quartets, ensembles, jams sessions and even the occasional solo. These constellations of co-presences (or copresenters) manifest in, and emerge from, subjects that range from jazz to opera; song writing to rock criticism; sonic images to the cacophony of protest; music as anti-psychoanalysis and audio pharmacology; choral annunciations to messy political speech; sound art and modernist music; films on musicians and musicians on canvas; myth and the bottomless archive of the haunted present.”

The issue contains contributions from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Robert Bird, Seth Brodsky, Africa Brown & Maggie Brown, Yao Chen, Majel Connery, Stephanie Cristello, Mladen Dolar, Robyn Farrell, Kim Gordon, Ted Gordon, Shannon Harris, Hannah B Higgins, Jessica Hopper, John Kannenberg, Glenn Kotche, Barbara McCullough, W. J. T. Mitchell, Steven Rings, Jennifer Scappettone, Cauleen Smith, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Ytasha L. Womack, Judith Zeitlin, and Philip von Zweck (cover by Kim Gordon). We encourage the curious to click through!