On Aesthetic Theory and Sonic Fiction – Talk at Rhythmic Music Conservatory 9/9/25
I was invite by the composer and associate professor at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard, to speak on aesthetic theory for students on the Advanced Post-graduate in Contemporary Music (Solist) programme. It was an absolute delight to talk with these composers and performers about my work and engage with them about their ideas…
The Sustainability Situationship
This audio essay was made as my submission to the Utopia in the Ruins panel at GRASP fesitival 2025. Part relationship podcast, part interview show and part essay, The Sustainability Suituationship explores the dynamic similarity between unsatisying romantic relationships and the unsatisfying discourse of sustainability under capitalism. Thanks to the organisers for inviting me and…
Wants and Needs: On Desire and Left Moralism
There is some confusion about wants and needs out there. This became clear to me when I watched the documentary “You Need This” at CPH DOX this spring. The film’s argument is one I am sympathetic to; the hyperconsumerism that drives contemporary capitalism is painfully destructive to the planet and to ourselves, and it should…
“I have to feel”, or where is the Depression in Popular music?
Presented at the Depression in Popular Music Conference – Sorbonne University Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health – 27/06/2025 This paper is about how we locate depression, and what depression is when we talk about it being in popular music. The intention is not simply to be pedantic about the choice of prepositions,…
Have You Heard the Bad News? – On Ecocritical Ticks
Talks by ecocritics – humanities and social science scholars concerned with the ecological situation of their research ususually related to the climate crisis – often come with ticks. These are tells and twitches that reveal a possible dissonance between what they are saying and what they are feeling, thinking or what they know. One of…
On Sonic Warfare and Architecture – Talk at The Royal Danish Academy
I was recently invited to give a talk to students of political architecture at the Royal Danish Academy on sounds relationship to architecture and in particular Steve Goodman’s book Sonic Warfare: Sound Affect and the Ecology of Fear. I have written about this book at length before too. This is the audio from that talk,…
Deleuze’s Theory of Masochism as a model of Millennial Burnout
Ten years ago millennials were mocked by older generations for enjoying avocado toast while complaining that housing was arithmetically unaffordable. This was a resentful mockery. An accusation by older people that millennials didn’t know how good they had it, which ignored the fact that, despite being young, they didn’t have it that good compared to…
On Sonic Fiction – The University of Copenhagen, March 5th 2025
This is audio from my talk on the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of sonic fiction as I understand them in my own practice. I was invited to give the talk by Sheri Hellberg as a part of a course in the English department of The University of Copenhagen on non-fiction creative writing. I plan to…
You are not going to make it, and that is ok: or What could Kind Pessimism do for who?
First Published in YUIIE issue 2. “Oh, hope there is plenty, infinitely much hope, just not for us.”– Max Brod remembering something Franz Kafka might have said to him. You are not going to make it, and that is ok. Many people are not making it in profound ways already and that is far from…
What do we, critical academics, do with the imaginaries of others? (December 2022)
Macon Holt In this essay, I want to express and explore a concern about what is done to what imaginaries can do when they are discussed in settings such as this. That setting is not only business schools, though they are perhaps where the problematic tendencies that concern me here are most prevalent, but within…
Sensible Aarhus (October 2022)
Macon Holt Sometimes the understated corporate aesthetics of Denmark make me feel like a character in a Don Delillo novel The placidly accepted reduction of what is possible in life to a set of sensible decisions as the way to pay the price of welfare financed by globally extracted capital makes things feel disaffected and…
Meal Mural (September 2022)
Macon Holt Two giant triptychs by the Danish abstract artist Per Kirkeby, hang at either end of the semicircular canteen in the Dalgas Have building of Copenhagen Business School. There is a larger individual piece by the same artist in the entrance atrium, which gives the silly, symmetrical building some much-needed drama. But it’s the…
Impossipolitcs (September 2022)
Macon Holt About 7 or 8 years ago I saw the theorist and activist, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, speak at Goldsmiths in London. He said something there that has stuck with me ever since. He claimed that politics is no longer possible. At least not in the settings that are typically thought of as the domain…
Sponsortivism (from August 2022)
Macon Holt Right before the lockdown of the winter of 2020 closed the campus of Copenhagen Business School, I decided to take a walk around the Solbjerg Plads; the building full of lecture theatres in which I had yet to teach. Until then, I’d had no idea that these spaces were sponsored. I had seen…
Joakim Drescher – Motel Universe and the World that Could be Free
By Macon Holt Anyone familiar with the cover of my book should know that I adore the work of Joakim Drescher. And there is a good chance you have admired it too. So the occasion of the publication of the third part of his Motel Universe trilogy is the perfect moment to give his work…
Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism
In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun’s practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher’s analytical framework of capitalist realism,…
MaconHolt - Aesthetic Theory 