A Note from the Editors: Issue 35

Welcome to the new year–we’re well and truly within the roar of the ‘20s. 

A few months ago, we asked our Patrons to decide on our first theme for 2021. The answer: NOISE. A ferocious beginning indeed.

We are entering this year from the tight grip of a pandemic. A tiny, intangible, invisible virus has upended the world, and from this, massive noise has arisen. Deep-seated frustration with governments and failing, unjust systemic structures have been exposed in a harsh light. There is no better time to be loud, and that has been shown through the mass political and social mobilization occurring across the world, from online to within whatever constricted physical capacities we could afford.

Staying inside to protect the community has also turned the volume up inside our minds. There is more to unpack, more to despair, more to grieve, more to destroy, construct, rebuild–for uncomfortably long hours inside one’s room. In turn, the Internet, that seemingly borderless space, has grown ever more mutable, simultaneously instrumental and intolerable. 

Our new Noise issue sees creators spanning every continent within various systems of living and being, probing the “ear” they keep attuned to this new form of the world. We wind through psychedelic musical listening practices to hip-hop photography, echoes of corruption and war, national suffering, and internal chaos. Each creator works with a theme or topic or idea that speaks, that sings, that makes a tune out of the hand we are dealt from our society, our world. 

In one Arts & Culture piece, our Multimedia Editor asks: how do we differentiate between mere noise and music? Is one random, incidental, ugly, and indifferent while the other is spun into something greater, more beautiful? Where do we draw the line? Any human being, but most especially any creator, wrestles with a cacophony of questions. In my bid to make something out of my life, how do I balance and create harmony? What sounds true to me? What resonates? What will resound into legacy, long after my physical body?

We hope the pieces in this issue may help you confront the “noise” in your life, whether that be the sheer cacophony or the lack of it. We hope you may find yourself more aware and discerning of any “voices” within your mind or body and where they may be leading you. We hope you make some noise, even a whisper, where silence may be acting as a tool of oppression. We hope you find music, that serendipitous noise, in unexpected places. We hope you move and dance.

And, of course, most of all, we hope you listen. 

Love always,
Zoe & Vamika

Artwork by Fatema Al Fardan and Garreth Chan