Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 'I Turn up the Volume and Walk Towards Home' : Mapping the Soundscapes of Loaded
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel Loaded (1995) is one of the most sonically intense Australian novels ever written. Taking place over a 24-hour period, it depicts Ari – a 19-year-old child of Greek migrants – engaging in a continuous flow of sexual encounters, drug taking, walking, dancing, and listening to music. Ari’s movements through the city of Melbourne immerse him in an almost constant series of soundscapes. Traversing between venues of excess and confrontation – the city street, the nightclub, the Greek club, and a variety of domestic spaces – Ari pushes the boundaries of his identity, his sexuality, challenging what it means to exist in Australian urban modernity. In this article I will trace Ari’s engagement with sound, sound technologies, and sound spaces. I argue that Ari maps a terrain of social and historical alienation, from the values of both his parents and friends, and of the larger society. This is not to say that Ari wholly rejects his parents and society: rather, his position is shot-through with contradictory attitudes and experiences. The fault-line of this ambivalence and tension is located around sound – mostly manifest as forms of popular music – where Ari is able to reject the mainstream, but also, at times, to connect with his family, and be part of a community. To chart Ari’s use of sound technology is, I argue, to encounter the core of Loaded’s portrayal of a second-generation Greek homosexual man grappling with the demands of contemporary Australian society.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Epigraph:

    One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus.

    Listening to music is listening to all noise, realising that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. - Jacques Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Critical Soundings : Voice, Space and Sound in Australian Literature vol. 15 no. 1 2015 8859932 2015 periodical issue 2015
Last amended 19 Jan 2017 10:21:38
http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20150930-1552-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/3652/4542.html 'I Turn up the Volume and Walk Towards Home' : Mapping the Soundscapes of Loadedsmall AustLit logo JASAL
X