By Prof. Daniel R. O’Shea, Department of Sonic Arts, Monmouth College, for the Handbook of Lesser-known artists
If the twentieth century belonged to artists who pushed sound to its limits, think of Cage’s chance compositions or Xenakis’s sonic bombardments, the early twenty-first briefly flirted with its opposite: a movement that attempted to sculpt with silence itself.
At the forefront of this paradoxical pursuit was the collective known as The Anacoics, founded in Glasgow in 2001 by three students who had grown tired of noise.
Origins: The Allure of Absence
The group’s name derives from “anechoic chamber”, defined as spaces designed to eliminate echo and reverberation. Founders Graham Liddell, Aya Nomura, and Philip O’Connor began staging underground “performances” in which nothing audible occurred. The audience would sit in complete stillness while the artists moved silently around them, recording the room’s near-inaudible hums and bodily noises.
Their first manifesto, The Sonic Zero (2002), declared:
“Noise is everywhere. We offer the rare commodity: the sound of nothing. Our instruments are absence. Our scores are void.”
Exhibitions: Capturing Silence
• “Hushed” (2003, Tramway, Glasgow): Visitors entered a large padded room where microphones recorded the silence. The recordings were later released on CD, each track simply titled by its duration (“2’14”, “7’09”).
• “White Noise, Black Walls” (2006, Tote Modern, London): A vast gallery space painted black, with white speakers mounted on the walls. The speakers emitted… nothing. But visitors swore they “heard” tones and vibrations. Some critics called it mass hallucination; others, a breakthrough in psychoacoustics.
• “Mute Choir” (2009, Venice Biennale): Perhaps their most infamous work. Forty choristers stood in formation, mouths open, rehearsing the posture of song without releasing sound. The sight unsettled audiences: one critic wrote that “it felt like watching grief itself, wordless and immovable.”
Fractures and Falling Out
Success brought strain. Liddell believed silence was enough of a medium in itself; O’Connor wanted to incorporate faint tones and vibrations, “just enough to unsettle the ear.” Nomura, increasingly frustrated, accused both men of “fetishising quietness while ignoring sonic politics.”
The split became public during their 2012 New York show Zero Decibel, when Nomura stormed out mid-performance, declaring into a hot mic: “Silence is a privilege, and you’ve mistaken it for art.” The recording, ironically the loudest moment in the group’s history, went viral.
By 2013, The Anacoics had dissolved.
Aftermath
• Liddell now runs a retreat in the Scottish Highlands where visitors pay to experience curated silences.
• O’Connor became a sound designer for low budget Croatian horror films, finally able to indulge his passion for barely audible frequencies.
• Nomura emerged as a leading critic of “acoustic inequality,” arguing that silence is denied to much of the world’s population.
Legacy: The Sound of Nothing
The Anacoics remain a fascinating footnote in the history of sonic art. Were they charlatans selling empty air, or pioneers forcing us to hear what we usually ignore?
In retrospect, their most enduring achievement may have been a simple reversal: making silence an object of attention, rather than its absence.
As one bemused critic wrote of their 2009 Biennale piece:
“For three minutes, I listened to forty singers say nothing. And for the first time, I realised silence might be the loudest sound of all.”
