Sound is invisible stuff. Those who have expertise in its properties and potentialities also have a tendency to lack a full understanding of the worlds of tactile matter, visible surfaces, the volume of sound. Sound is a thing and no-thing, like air, money, time or love, complex to infinitude as one of the ungraspable phantoms of life. All these metaphors we use to bring into being the property of sound and the sensation of its hearing: a honeyed voice, a rough voice, a piercing scream; the taste of viscosity, a hand passes over splintered wood, a needle punctures the skin. Think of sound – that high sound of hearing and air – pouring into the volume of a space, translucent block of air like colourless jelly flecked and warped with every passing noise event and its trail of decomposing matter, something like a stiff liquid or intangible runny paste through which the body passes without resistance yet it enfolds and penetrates the body with the insistence of abyssal pressure and the clotted emotions of memories as active entities, in flight like birds, insubstantial as papery moths.
David Toop, A Piercing Silence: James Richards, from Inflamed Invisible, originally published in James Richards: To Replace a Minute's Silence With a Minute's Applause, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015