Thresholds of Address: Sensorial Returns to Slavery in Jacqueline Tarry and Bradley McCallum’s Topsy Turvy by Faye Gleisser (Art Journal, Spring, 2020)

”In his work with archival sonic samplings Harnetty attests to the importance of the aftersound—the experience of hearing a sound displaced from its original source—as a return with a difference when he asserts that “the resulting music isn’t about stepping back into the past, but rather experiencing the past and the present simultaneously in a way that is instructive.” Here, Moten’s rumination on the sonic traces of systemic violence is especially instructive. He contends that “every disappearance [of the black body into the ‘asylum of the West’] is a recording,” an “aftersound” or sonic presence shaped by the disappearance in the visual regime that both bridges and structures social relations and the perception of difference. By sampling audible illusions of ghostly specters of minstrelsy, ship hulls, and mournful hymns, the video’s sonic layering paired with its optics produces an immersive experience of encounter.

It is precisely through the manipulated lowered octaves of the minstrel songs that Topsy Turvy makes use of a repertoire of psychoacoustic, barely perceptible sounds innately sensed in the body. With the use of infrasounds—those low sounds found in soundtracks for horror films or suspenseful dramas that exploit the human body’s tonal literacy in the audio illusions—Topsy Turvy deploys internal reverberations through the inclusion of a constantly ascending chord, thereby inducing an embodied sense of anxiety and anticipation that suspends historical sounds of slavery and soliciting viewer-listeners oriented to what is not merely seen but felt.”