Sound Strategies

A vital new theory of popular music considered as political strategy, from Industrial to Britpop.
Sound Strategies reframes popular music as a counter-ideological method. Reconsidering bands as a form of conceptual art project, the book contends that what we can learn from them goes beyond music production. Rather than exploring explicitly political music, it asks instead how cultural artefacts might perform politics.
Taking the 1990s as a point of rupture, a time when "a culture of margins collapsed around a center," it considers how alternative music lost its oppositional status, becoming submerged in a new pluralism. Mining the varied histories of industrial music, minimal synth, indie, Britpop, and electroclash, and relecting on the work of Throbbing Gristle, Chicks On Speed, Stereolab, Mashina, Laibach, and the Manic Street Preachers amongst others, Sound Strategies considers new ways of listening to, thinking about, and making music as an artistic and political strategy.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work interrogates the organisation of labour and the manifestations of ideology in late capitalism. They have had solo shows at Centre Clark, Montreal, Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand and The Showroom Gallery, London. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (2023) and Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus (Strange Attractor Press, 2025). They work as lecturers in Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.
Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. They have published six books: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (2007); Trans: A Memoir (2015); two volumes of short stories, Variations (2021) and The Woman in the Portrait (2024); Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (2022); and a novella, Monaco (2023).