The Anomalous Reading Room

Comprised of publications on sound art, voice, experimental music, noise, radio and sound studies, The Anomalous Reading Room is installed at the Errant Bodies studio.

If you like to visit the Reading Room, please contact us at: contact@errantbodies.org 

As a researcher and artist, I’ve been focusing on a range of topics related to sound and listening, and through the process of researching and writing, have been actively reading a diversity of authors and literatures. I have always been curious in what ways sound and listening lead to particular forms of knowledge, as well as approaches to reading and theorizing. How does sound and listening teach us to read? And how do practices of reading lend to cultivating a listening consciousness? The reading room is proposed as a space for reading, studying, and conversing, as well as for nurturing a highly eclectic and transversal approach to what a sound studies might be. It embraces and supports a diffracted reading, which, as Donna Haraway suggests, is less about categorization and more about interference. While sound studies increasingly defines itself as a field, I’ve always felt that what sound provides are opportunities for staying in touch with the outside: a being-in-the-open. In this way, I hope the reading room can provide a base for supporting others in their research and practices.

The focus on interference underpins the reading room, not only in its discursive attitude, but also through referencing Anomalous Records, a record store and distribution channel run by Eric Lanzillotta throughout the 1990s. Attending a concert at Anomalous in 1996, in the city of Whittier, located East of downtown Los Angeles, was to prove foundational to my own personal development as an artist and researcher. And Anomalous provided an important channel for acquiring records and CDs from an international community of artists at that time, which impacted on the sound and noise scene in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The reading room is dedicated to the anomalous potentiality of sound, and the wayward courses it may incite, which are equally ways of encountering each other. 

— Brandon LaBelle