In this collaborative account of Iddon's Sapindales, the authors recount how their experiences of live and virtual clarinet sounds and environmental sounds combine in varied ways. By focusing on relationships among sonic layers, the authors emphasise the dynamic interplay of live and recorded performance, music and environment, the real and the virtual, the abstract and the concrete. Each relationship involves mediation and ambiguity, with elements that alternatively split apart or join together. The listening outcomes that we describe repeatedly highlight a positional swing between subject and object, as the authors reach across explanatory modes, drawing on phenomenology, musicology, psychoanalysis and ecological psychology, among others. We aim to capture the process of aesthetic listening, a process that is live, interactive, constructive, imaginative.

This introductory article defines somatic music/ology as music that emphasises and reflects on its embodied nature and an associated theoretical discourse that addresses this aspect. It further traces the genealogy of this concept to the convergence of different intellectual and artistic currents from the mid twentieth century, including the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ecological psychology associated with James J. Gibson, performance- and body-oriented musicology represented by Roland Barthes and Carolyn Abbate and later developments such as 4E cognition as well as the experimental music theatre emerging from the 1960s. Finally, it introduces the various contributions to the issue.

Sonic Bothy is an inclusive experimental and new-music organisation with an ensemble of musicians with and without disabilities and neurodiversities. This article considers their audiovisual piece Verbaaaaatim (2020–21), its form marked by the context of its development and composition during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a set of interlayered perspectives that mirror the formal layers of the piece. Recorded in a single take, it comprises instrumental sounds, spoken words, written words, static and dynamic graphics and videos of the performers, aligned so that the piece seems consistently to flow onwards, although it is not always clear which element impels its forward motion. The article considers, in particular, Verbaaaaatim's presentation of modes of embodied conviviality between its performers, the ways these find resonance in wider histories of experimental music and the ways in which its elements can be understood in an ecological framework as ‘sound actions’.

This essay seeks to lay out the process that went into the making of Dark Things, which I co-directed with Deepan Sivaraman based on Ari Sitas's oratorio on the Silk Road, by repurposing the production notes of the performance, which opened in Delhi on 18 April 2018 at the Ambedkar University Delhi and later played at the International Festival of Kerala in January 2019. Both the method and the form of Dark Things, I suggest, were a collaboration. Collaboration as a method intimates collective creation, usually by means of improvisation, where authorship is distributed between theatre-makers (actors, scenographers, musicians) and materials (objects, site, landscape). Collaboration as form intimates that the performance's explicit grammar has been shaped by a sensuous give-and-take between the practitioner and the material. In this essay, I ask, from my perspective as a theatre-maker, how handling actual objects and tools obviously leaves an imprint on the performance, scenography, dramaturgy and mise en scène. In writing this article, I have retained the stylistic features of production notes – their provisionality and incompleteness; their sliding timescale; their looking forward to work that is to be done and backwards at work already done, marking failures, solutions and openings.

This article focuses on the history of the Czechoslovak sociology of popular music, which formed at the beginning of the 1960s. The article first examines the origins of thinking about ‘mass music genres’ in the Czech lands in the interwar period. It further discusses considerations of mass music genres and their audiences after World War II in light of the communist takeover in 1948, Stalinism of the 1950s and liberalisation of the 1960s. Finally, the article presents the situation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. Based on analysis of archival sources and original theoretical texts, hitherto unknown in the context of Anglophone scholarship, this article seeks to show how the specific political background of the Central European state behind the Iron Curtain determined the foundation, scholarly focus and social role of the sociology of popular music and how it differed from the situation in Western capitalist countries.

Like any form of artistic production in the Soviet 1970s (Brezhnev's ‘Stagnation’ era), films had to tread a fine line between being acceptable to official organs, yet managing to appeal to the average citizen. Music – and specifically popular music or estrada – was an important factor contributing to how filmmakers could express themselves and connect with audiences despite official restraint. This article will explore the soundscapes of two iconic movies embodying that tension: The Twelve Chairs (Двеннадцать стульев, 1971, dir. Leonid Gaidai) and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ирония судьбы, или с легким паром!, 1975, dir. El'dar Riazanov). A close reading of musical scenes from these Stagnation-era artefacts will expose several key tactics that emerge in the complicated nexus between composer, director and text, demonstrating how popular music fits into a complex and multi-faceted relationship of minor liberties and major limits.

Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes are world-renowned for their intensive laboratory processes leading up to unique, interdisciplinary performances that defy expected theatrical conventions. Their piece El Gallo (2009) is a poignant example of this company's capacity for innovation and social action. Here, actors are transformed into opera singers in a piece that is sung – in an entirely invented language – while inciting audiences to consider the anxieties that fuel the act of exposing one's body onstage, as fears over our own perceived differences prevent us from feeling ‘normal’ in a society that constantly judges us as we recognize the discriminatory power of social normativity.