Soap Ear is an online publication dedicated to subjects of sound, hearing, listening, music, culture, art, theory, and practice. Over the past three years, we have set out an open format platform for long-form consideration of the sonic and the musical, understood broadly. We are dedicated to the experimental in both sound and writing in the sense of that term’s Latin etymology: experīrī, “to try.” Our publication is interested in trying new and exciting things in various media including essays, videos, sound pieces, visual art, poetry, live performances, newsletters, and anything else we can program onto our site or elsewhere in the world. Born out of L.A., Soap Ear also welcomes all kinds of geographic and site-specific entanglements that the internet can afford our writers and readership.
As editors, we are excited to think about and through music, noise, sounds, and the mediated modes of experiencing them. Soap Ear looks to experimental music for new ways to both organize and interpret sound, thereby expanding the boundaries of what music is. As something that reflects and accompanies the motions of culture, we also hear music as inherently political.
Soap Ear’s editors hold that all of us are music critics. People can really only experience sound through malleable but culturally specified critical frameworks, and even the most informal critical framework is still critically oriented. When we reflect on a concert with friends or suggest to them a new album, we are engaging in critical discourse, shaping our own past, present, and future listening. To hum a pop song’s melody in the shower is to give a work its own kind of five-star review or Best New Music accolade. The droning comfort of falling shower water also never really goes unnoticed.
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Soap Ear is a collaboration between editor-in-chief Lyle Daniel, assistant editor B. Levinson. We are sad to say goodbye to our former assistant editor and creative director Ashley Chaney who has moved on to other endeavors. Yann Novak (www.yannnovakdesign.com) is our web developer. Soap Ear is a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel and the project began at LARB’s annual publishing workshop.
Soap Ear is also a project of Fulcrum Arts’ Emerge fiscal sponsorship program. We are a not-for-profit fiscally sponsored project. Help support Soap Ear here.
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You can contact us with pitches, questions, comments, and anything else at thesoapear@gmail.com
