Ultra-red, the international sound art and popular education collective are 30 years old!! And to celebrate here is the first volume of ULTRA-RED: A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry, investigating movement-based listening practices that take the forms of militant inquiry and political education.

In the words of Ultra-red, “No movement without listening!”. Ultra-red began as a queer techno duo coming out of AIDS activism. Since starting in 1994, Ultra-red has expanded into an international collective rooted in different popular struggles such as anti-racism and anti-gentrification. In the early 2000s, the collective began experimenting with militant sound inquiry synthesizing diverse forms of organized listening in Left and social movements.

Theme of this edition is “conjunctural analysis,” or “naming the moment,” as a practice of collective inquiry.

Contents

• Conversations with three popular educators in North America who, in the 1990s, developed a body of literature meant to guide radical groups through an inquiry into what Stuart Hall once called, the history of the present.
• A discussion with Toronto-based activist Chris Cavanaugh who participated in numerous conjunctural analysis efforts in political movements across Canada. In 2000, Cavanaugh helped start the Catalyst Project as a center for working-class and leftist education.
• The next interview features Mary Zerkel, a Chicago-based organizer and artist who produced the seminal text, Coyuntural Analysis: Critical Thinking for Meaningful Action in 1997. Zerkel talks about the relationship between her organizing work in local anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles as well as her involvement in numerous political art collectives in Chicago.
• The journal also features an extended conversation with Gustavo Castro Soto in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Castro Soto is known internationally as the last person to have been with Honduran indigenous activist Berta Cáceres when she was assassinated by paramilitaries in 2016.

The ULTRA-RED journal connects local struggles across contexts, publishing dispatches from ongoing militant investigations in London, Los Angeles, and in prisons in the U.S. South. The journal also introduces reflections on the problems of militant sound inquiry through poetry, book responses, letters, and visual art.

The journal is edited by Dont Rhine in collaboration with David Albright and Christina Sanchez Juarez. It includes contributions by Tony Carfello, Janna Graham, Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, Chris Jones, Karla, Elliot Perkins, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, and Robert Sember.

Sofcover, 248 pages, including over a hundred images in black and white and full colour.