How do we access “Asia” through sonic archives, modes of listening, and the related media technologies? How do Asian practices of indie music, podcasting culture, and popular film production allow us to track the contours of alternative cultural and political spheres, or to delineate the circuits of inter-cultural translation and transnational resonance? Situated at the intersection of sound studies and Asian studies, this panel approaches “sound” and “Asia” each as object and method to the other ––– Asia as much as sound refers simultaneously to specific histories and geographies and to modes of mediation that in turn shape each other and beyond.

In this emergent field of inquiry, existing scholarship shows varied methods and concerns: whereas some scholars have undertaken projects of media archeology through excavating the histories of sonic production, storage, and broadcasting, others focus on specific sonic forms, their attendant habits of listening, and the engendered soundscapes. This panel enters this conversation by focalizing on resistant or alternative cultural collectives and the public sphere, highlighting the multilayered complexity of profit-driven commercial culture and exploring the guerilla-style tactics of counter-culture. Together, the speakers pose the following key questions: How does sonic connection afford a unique lens to interethnic and transnational political alliance and cultural affinity? How do contemporary sonic forms that rely on new media technologies address the longer history of radio and broadcasting? How does responsive and empathetic mode of listening foster alternative perceptions of state-society relation and community formation?

Each presentation will last for twelve minutes, leaving twenty-seven minutes for introductions and Q&A. First, Oscar Man, examines Hong Kong indie music in the 2010s to consider the meaning and influence of counterculture comparatively in an East Asian context. Through case studies of Hidden Agenda, a now-closed live house in the industrial area of Kwun Tong, and Guerillas Gig Hong Kong, an organization that hosts yearly live music events in a “guerilla” style, Man explores how these industrial area-based groups of indie musicians create a communal, self-determined, and alternative lifestyle in the 2010s, and how they organized and participated protests and demonstrations to fight for the right of the city and their own spatial justice.

Second, Erick Raven proposes that the mixture of Japanese and African American musical styles revises the films by Kaji Meiko, turning these genre films into liberationist articulations championing women’s rights and critiquing white supremacy. Leaning on the overall left-leaning political stance of many Japanese directors of genre films, Raven discusses how they took advantage of the opportunity presented by studios desperate for revenue after the collapse of the studio system. The Afro-Asian musical soundtrack that featured blues, jazz, and rock and roll, often mixed in with Japanese musical features, such as the yonanuki scale, delineates a sonic rhetoric countering the common perception of these films as nothing but commercial propagations of explicit sexual content and glorified violence.

Following up, Shuang Shen approaches contemporary China’s political culture by investigating the emergent podcasting culture in China as alternative sonic publics. Her presentation draws upon the fieldwork on the influential podcasting group “Vistopia,” a forum that involves scholars and intellectuals from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in the production of podcasts on wide ranging topics, from historical knowledge to contemporary culture and lifestyle. Exploring the complex conjunction between neoliberalism and authoritarian rule, she argues that the intersubjective or affective communication fostered by this new cultural form is instrumental for community formation. Her presentation also delves into how podcasting evolved historically but also diverged from the state-owned radio and public broadcasting practices.

Last, Eileen Chow zooms in onto what could boast as a "Hundred Flowers Bloom" moment of the emergent podcast culture. For a few days in early February 2021 before it was firewalled in China, the Silicon Valley-oriented tech-and-investment invite-only live chat app, Clubhouse, was transformed into a playfully polyphonic, polylinguistic soundscape, and its unrecorded chatrooms populated with thousands upon thousands of voice participants from within the PRC and from throughout the Sinophone diaspora. Evanescent as this moment may be, its historical significance becomes apparent only when placed in conversation with both a longer history of alt/underground live-talk radio in Sinophone spaces, and the more immediate context of the popularity of Chinese-language podcasts and webcasts. The re-emergence and normalization of fangyan (dialect) use in these ad-hoc sonic spaces were deployed variously as means of fostering immediate connection and intimacy, of emphasizing and de-emphasizing particular nation-state affiliations, but also as another means of safeguarding content and evading censorship.