Sedimente
Official
Grounding
Group
.
A place for
enchantment
and critcal
perspectives
Sedimente is looking for sounds that appear wet—or that are wet in their sonic phenomenology.
Is it your mouth? A puddle? Mud? Skin? Your computer? Is it your echo, fully wet? A mollusc? A slippery floor? Wet hands and/or a slimy business handshake?
Have you ever felt a shiver from tip to toe when listening to wet sounds?
Wet sounds are political. Wetness is what makes all alive. Wetness is what lets us rub without getting hurt. Wetness is a reason to fight; a reason to right. Wetness is a feminist manifesto, liquefying common currencies without needing to write a thesis about it.
The Wet Sounds Library is an attempt to emphasize the sound of wetness; to connect the dusty materials; to stick to each other in draining worlds; to finally slide again (no borders!) and to get in touch with smoothness, slime, the slippery and more.
The Wet Sounds Library will be published in autumn/winter 2025.
Submit a Wet Sound
How does wetness sound to you?
Fill in this form by
(The Form asks you for your name, title, short descpription and to upload the soundfile.)
If you prefer to hand in a PDF thats fine too; just make sure to provide all the information asked in the form and a permament link to your wet sound to sedimente(at)sedimente.org
As soon as the publication of the Wet Sounds Library is ahead we will inform you!
With your contribution, you commit to a form of collaboration through publishing that seeks alternatives to hyper-individual modes of processing contexts and voices.
Thank you,
Sedimente
Context
Until the 1980s/90s, analogue sound libraries were essential tools in audio (post)production for film and broadcast scoring. Back then, these libraries were mainly published on vinyl and therefore had limited capacity. Availability and the infrastructure of archives changed when digitality became part of our everyday life and storing wasn’t a problem of capacity anymore, but one of curating, sorting and categorizing(1). By tracing pre-digital methods of archiving and production, we reframe the practice of analogue archive-making. Once meaning to collect and/or produce studio-quality sounds for reuse, we now turn it into a collective and feminist act of storing, storytelling, sharing, and listening to (wet) sounds. This re-activation of standardized entertainment industry techniques is also a response to our current sonic habits and habitats: an era of inexhaustible sonic availabilities; skip skip skip; ear-drilling sounds emitted by our everyday devices and the rise of noise-cancelling headphones that simulate silence while displacing it. Welcome to the hypersensory state of technified sencieties (2).
Footnotes
(1) Today we find sound archives all over the www. Some of them are dedicated to endangered sounds (see http://savethesounds.info/), some have a scientific purpose (acoustic ecologies), some are stored with a huge amount of sounds free for use, others have spatial references (sound maps).
(3) The term sensieties merges sense and societies, suggesting socially conditioned and technologically mediated modes of perception. It refers to the ways in which the senses are tricked, manipulated, or streamlined—psychologically or technically—through systems designed either for economic gain or for the reduction of perceived sensory disturbances. Examples include attention-hijacking mechanisms embedded in social media platforms or noise-cancelling technologies that aim to eliminate human-made, sometimes painful or distracting sounds. Informed by western logics of consumerism, sensieties reflects how sensory experiences are shaped, curated, and exploited by economic and ideological interests. Rather than inviting a critical reconsideration of what constitutes discomfort or distraction, these systems often reinforce narrow ideals of optimized perception. The term proposes a framework for examining how our capacity to sense is not neutral or private, but deeply entangled with cultural norms, infrastructures of control, and capitalist logics—raising questions about what kinds of perception are encouraged, suppressed, or commodified in contemporary life.