Professor of International Politics at Richmond to speak at Tate Liverpool. The “chill” aesthetic: music streaming as a cultural form

Dr Paul Rekret, Associate Professor of International Politics at Richmond, will be speaking at Tate Liverpool on Saturday 9 February at an event entitled, Alien Sound, Ambient Music and the Limits of the Human.

Dr Rekret’s lecture, ‘Melodies Wander Around as Ghosts on Playlist Ambience’, will explore music streaming as a cultural form, looking at the tendency towards a “chill” aesthetic in popular music.

The event at Tate Liverpool will focus on new and creative developments in ambient music and sound art.  In addition to Dr Rekret, artists and theorists will open up new possibilities for thinking and practising a different relationship to noise and music.

The symposium will investigate constructive ways of understanding and producing this disturbing ambience. It will ask: how can we hear ambience differently? How can it make us strange to ourselves again? How can this ‘alien sound’ generate alternative ways of experiencing space, time and world?

The event follows a recent appearance by Dr Rekret in Berlin at the annual CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, which includes concerts, club nights and performances together with a vast daytime programme of talks, screenings, workshops, networking events, installations and exhibitions spread over some of Berlin’s most exciting cultural and nightlife venues.

Dr Paul Rekret, who teaches political theory at the University, is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence  as well as the book Philosophy, Politics, Polemics: Derrida and Foucault.  His work has appeared in Frieze, the New Inquiry and the Quietus, among others.