Endless Ends: From sacred music to phantom sounds on the brink of a new dark age

The present article addresses the topic of this issue of the Performance Research Journal 'On Ghosts' by investigating the resurgence of sonorities from sacred music traditions within contemporary electronic music, situating them within a hauntological framework that foregrounds the spectral entanglements that bind the realm of the living with that of the dead. Often desacralized through processes of profanation (Agamben), these sounds function as rituals of remembrance, while at the same time challenging the present historical configuration by reintroducing voices that refuse disappearance. Rather than nostalgic recoveries, they emerge as ghostly presences that compel us to confront histories of violence obscured by colonial and imperial projects. Drawing on Judith Butler’s reflections on mourning and interdependence, and informed by a neo-materialist approach, I examine sound as a political and aesthetic site that unsettles and exceeds arenas of visibility by creating connections with what is not represented as it remains unheard and unseen. Shifting the inquiry from 'what sound is' to 'what sound does', and engaging with Steve Goodman’s notion of the ‘politics of frequency’, I examine how sonic vibrations function both as instruments of control, deployed as weapons in times of asymmetrical conflicts, and as vectors of resistance in and beyond war zones. Within this theoretical framework, I examine the work of American composer Kali Malone as a case study of how contemporary electronic experimentations incorporating sacred sonorities engage with present forms of collective loss. Her sustained and slowed-down atmospheres do not merely reproduce liturgical echoes but transform them into perturbative forces that fracture temporal continuity, oppose systems of censorship, oppression and control, and shape new politics of visibility. These sonic processes open the possibility for new modes of solidarity and affective community.