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This article looks at the emergence of physical material in a growing number of contemporary sound-based art practices. From academic symposia to music festivals and media art exhibitions, the material presence of physical artefacts is notable in a variety of sound-based disciplines and scenarios. Considering the significance of the visual aspect of these works, this article proposes a reassessment of what audiovisual entails. I argue that our understanding of audiovisual status needs to be expanded beyond the scope of screen-based applications and move into the physical realm of objects and material. Further to this, I outline how the dominant discussions around materiality in sound-based art do not speak sufficiently to the physical materiality manifested in a growing wave within the field. Using an example of my own creative work, I will then suggest audiovisual materialism as an alternative lens through which such practices can be better examined, understood and built upon.

Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.

This article introduces an ensemble of mechatronic sound-sculptures designed and developed to realize glitch music outside of computers; the sculptures instead create glitches mechanically, physically and visibly. A brief description of the three different instrument types forming the ensemble is followed by a discussion of how the sound-sculptures employ a Brutalist “anti-beauty” approach in terms of both design and ideology.

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