Sound--At the Interregnum

The Alchemy Lecture 2025

By: Glen Coulthard, Canisia Lubrin, Madeleine Thien, Immanuel Wilkins, Christina Sharpe - editor

Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The fourth annual ALCHEMY LECTURES features award-winning fiction writers, a lauded scholar, and a prize-winning musician in an astonishing, immersive investigation of the meaning of sound in this moment in the world's soundtrack.

Sound—at the Interregnum asks: What are the sounds you make? What are the sounds you want to make? What are the sounds you need to make? What are the sounds you need to leave to a world on the cusp of becoming something else?
At the interregnum we meet oligarchs and fascists and manufactured crises of housing, ongoing genocides and displacements, extraordinary renditions, the takeover of universities and a deepening anti-intellectualism, the militarization of public space, the shrinking of the commons, the use of sonic weapons (LRADs-Long Range Acoustic Device), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone’s needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. Sound is also key to life. There are the sounds of protest, of living and witness, of anthems and ululation, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes—which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself.
Alchemists Glen Coulthard (political theorist), Canisia Lubrin (poet), Madeleine Thien (novelist), and Immanuel Wilkins (saxophonist) are acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum--this period of great danger, and also great possibility.