This development is exciting, revealing potential futures for sound publishing and distribution away from the download culture and immediacy of the worldwide archive of sound towards a more personal interaction delivered by post and performed by the listener. Thus the future of sound curation, so hotly debated this year, could lie in sculptural works of sound, texts and images that entice participation and instruct my listening through a tangible materiality and a physical presence.
In this jouissance of the material thing, there’s the danger of fetishism: that as we abandon the repository online we might start an archive of objects offline instead, their beautiful feel and touch requiring not my listening but inviting their preservation by leaving them unperformed and mute. But if we keep an performing what we hear, see and read, and engage with the aesthetic of the craft by crafting a listening response, we might just avert this fate and instead fast forward to a future where work is savoured in its materiality by performing its process while touching and singing its words.
— Salomé Voegelin, Papering Over The Cracks, The Wire (Jan 2015)
