"This idea that sound can be there and not there is explored in François Jullien’s book, In Praise of Blandness. To write about blandness in the 21st century could appear perverse and futile, the weakest possible riposte to a century in which anything less than a bombardment of the senses is considered too flimsy to be of consequence. But Jullien’s text is a reminder that extreme subtlety, even insipidity, the near-absence of taste, smell, image or sound, has an intensity and beauty which makes all that is ultra-vivid and overwhelming seem crass."

from Lingering Tones by David Toop

The book features full colour images detailing the installation works in the in Danny McCarthy's exhibition at the Crawford Gallery, Cork. With specially commissioned texts by David Toop, Sarah Hayden, John Godfrey, Dawn Williams, Stephen Vitiello, Helen Frosi, Patrick Farmer, Bernard Clarke, Anthony Kelly, Paul Hegarty, EL Putnam and Cristín Leach, all in response to McCarthy’s exhibition.

We would like to extend a special thanks to Dawn Williams, and all at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork for their kind support and assistance with this project.

"A silenced silence is not absence of sound or silence. Rather it is the act of silencing performed on the absence of sound, in a place where hearing could occur. This tantalizing possibility, of an emptied emptiness, like the vial of nothing that is emptied, in Stéphane Mallarmé’s strange prose work Igitur, is what drives the last exhaustions of the avant-garde – which has always been about exhaustion, ending, rather than the superficial appearance of newness and beginning. The silence of silence is so much lower than the absence of sound, it falls beneath perception."

from hearing (in) silence as space by Paul Hegarty