Drawing on François-Bernard Mâche’s writings as well as interviews and analyses by musicologists, this paper tries to describe how his music may be described as ‘sacred’ music, however devoid of any religious aspects, and what this implies for us as listeners and/or as artists. To Mâche, the sacred is the consideration of a specific relationship to the world as the object and as the subject, as the ‘why’ and as the ‘how’ of music. Musical examples from his mixed music and acousmatic music illustrate how Mâche goes from his theories to more practical aspects of his compositional technique and listening behaviours.

In this article I discuss how Áine O’Dwyer and Graham Lambkin’s 2018 album Green Ways connects with recent criticisms of sound mapping practices. Following an interpretation put forward by the artists themselves, I investigate the cartographic aspects of their project, and how these are conveyed in an album format. The concept of cartophony, suggested elsewhere by Samuel Thulin, is employed as a way to consider different relationships between sound and mapping practices that extrapolate common assumptions of what sound maps are and how they operate. First, I listen to how the artists create sonic performances in which they interact with different elements of the places they are performing in, making sounds not only in the place but also with the place. Then, I consider the different ways in which specificities of place are mapped through the incorporation of speech and singing. Finally, I show how the album’s underlying narratives directly address the problematic distinction between performance situations and everyday life. Considering the project’s unusual emphasis on the artists’ presence, as well as its incorporation of speech, singing and artistic performances, I suggest that Green Ways invites us to broaden our understanding of what field recordings and sound maps can be.

This article invites reflection on the ambiguity of sonic temporalities as the lines between physicality and immediacy become increasingly blurred. Through the notion that digital technologies are haunted by analogic process, I foreground the concept of Palimpsestic Listening to explore the musical qualities and critical resonances of sonic acts and objects in hybrid physical/digital systems that evoke layered temporalities that are ‘historically distinct nonetheless linked’. I also seek to illustrate the significance of engaging practically with this concept by discussing the methods behind my composition D/ta Ro} – A Dialectical Trash Heap, a sound installation that interrogates the relationship between sonic materiality and digital audio processing and how acts of erasure and time-stretching might influence the layering of disparate sound materials.