As well-known as Peter’s music has become, I’m excited by the prospect of this volume making us all listen again. I’m excited by the prospect of its both throwing us back on our own listening projections (Nope, it was never just more Neue Musik; Nope, it was never just more “Sound Art”), and of its offering us a mode of listening characterized by the inexhaustible intersection of our own irreducibly complex situated listenings, his, and of the likewise irreducibly complex situated materiality of the sonic. This publication is an invitation to join him in the space of a practice in which the distinctions between thinking, feeling, writing, composing, and listening become all but irrelevant—in which a ‘work’ becomes just one mode of expression in a complex of oscillatory sensation. At a moment when the raisons d’être of both ‘Art’ and ‘Theory’ seem to be buckling in the face of the present, the degree to which Ablinger’s project exceeds and yet stays with the remnants of both makes it all the more urgent.

Bill Dietz