Absolute Rhythm collects, introduces and presents ten scripts generated in a period of remarkable political and institutional creativity in Australia.

Situated at the crossroads of an immensely fertile exchange between the European Ars Acustica tradition and the emergent environmental sound art movement in Australia, the scripts filter themes of exilic memory, cross-cultural encounter, sexual politics and political betrayal through the experience of migration whose discursive and poetic signature is, according to Carter, echoic mimicry, a sense of psychological and environmental self-doubling that shadows every aspect of colonial history and postcolonial conscience.

The saving grace of the mimetic condition is the irony it brings to the navigation of human relations and the scope it offers to explore the comedy of human desire when it is shadowed by proliferating phonic mishearings. The sonic mise-en-scène of many of the scripts is the edge of the sea, where sibilance is held ambiguously between sense and a deeper non-sense. Like any avant-garde, the radiophonic culture incubated at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in the period 1980–2000 was fragile.

Absolute Rhythm comes with access to the original productions: a double archive, in this sense, of a disappeared scene of production, its object is entirely forward-looking, to supply the groundwork for new forms of concomitant production. An acoustic archaeology, it serves, like Ezra Pound’s notion of ‘absolute rhythm’, to preserve ‘the main form of the work’ from ‘the vicissitudes and calamities’ of historical circumstance and repressive cultural politics.