Charting today’s sonic politics and fugitive frequencies

Sound has always been colonial currency, not just heard, but felt in the bones. When fireworks detonated nightly over Black and brown neighbourhoods during 2020’s uprisings, they weren’t celebratory; they were acoustic warfare. Just as the upsurge of surveillance helicopters triggered my Tamil mother’s war memories, so too did the unknown explosions startle mine and hundreds of others awake. 

These weren’t isolated events, but nodes in a global circuit of sonic occupation: Kashmir’s LRAD cannons splitting eardrums, Israeli psytrance festivals drowning out Gaza’s explosions, Australian doofs vibrating atop unceded land. Oppressors share a blueprint of sonic dominance as territorial marking. Yet, they’ve never monopolised vibration itself.

Fugitive sound operates by trickster logic. Beneath the state’s mono-track thrums a counter-frequency: Sufi poets stitching escape routes into love songs, Radio alHara hijacking bandwidth during sieges, Detroit’s techno pulse still echoing through gentrified streets.

Bayo Akomolafe encourages fugitive epistemologies for fugitive times, stating, “Deploying the settler epistemologies that contributed to the geo-ecological hostilities of the present risks reinforcing the dynamics we want to address.” Despite the attempt of the international hegemonies to break our soul through sonic occupation, colonised communities continue to misbehave beautifully, transmitting through stolen infrastructure—Palestinian DJs broadcasting Gaza’s air raid sirens as breakbeats, Aboriginal elders teaching songlines to those who’ll listen, Kashmiri protesters reclaiming Bollywood’s loudspeakers for resistance chants.

Perhaps sidestepping settler violence does not come in retreat, but in repatterning. The coloniser’s soundscape demands our hypervigilance; fugitive sound teaches us to listen sideways, to hear the land’s hum beneath the drone strike’s blast.

While empires continue to plagiarise each other’s acoustic violence, the off-centre will keep rewriting the score. From Darug to Detroit, they may own the speakers, but we know the rhythm of free ground.

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The partition of Kashmir in 1947 fractured the region’s cultural soundscape as violently as its borders. Before successive waves of colonisation, Kashmiri Sufi poets like 16th century Habba Khatun wove geographic codes into verses—directions to safe routes through the Himalayas and names of villages under siege, disguising maps as love songs. This was sound as subterfuge, a living archive etched into melody.

India’s occupation weaponised that legacy. In 2019, as pellet guns blinded protesters, the government approved the use of Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs), sonic cannons emitting 162-decibel waves that can shatter eardrums. Their innovation lies in invisible violence: no visible wounds, just internal ruptures grafting terror onto the auditory cortex. The US’s Abu Ghraib playbook, blasting Metallica to break detainees, found eager adopters in Modi’s regime. A 2018 UN commission documented musical torture during interrogations, while journalist Fahad Shah reported troops blasting Bollywood tracks like “Kashmir Main Tu Kanyakumari” during raids to humiliate residents.

“Bollywood is the most powerful cultural apparatus at the behest of the state,” says Ladakhi sound artist Ruhail Qaisar. In the 1980s, with sonic erasure replaced Kashmiri harmonies with Hindutva’s mono-track, and movie theatres doubling as torture sites were burned down in protest. 

Perhaps India and America were simply taking a page out of Israel’s playbook? The genocidal state has long weaponised sound as a tool of control, developing techniques later adopted by other regimes. Amnesty International notes LRADs were first developed in Israel and tested on Palestinians, revealing a global circuit of sonic warfare.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s forensic soundworks expose their system. His Earshot (2016) distinguished rubber bullets from live ammunition in the murder of Palestinian teens, while Air Pressure (2022) documented how 22,111 Israeli military incursions turned Lebanon’s skies into an 8.5-year symphony of psychological warfare. Abu Hamdan’s subsequent NGO, Earshot, was founded in 2023 to produce audio investigations for human rights and environmental advocacy. 

Earshot’s forensic audio analysis of the final six seconds of 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh’s phone call, which captured 64 gunshots fired at 750-900 rounds per minute. It was determined through ballistic acoustics that Israeli forces likely fired from a Merkava tank positioned just 13-23 metres away, corroborating her dying words (“the tank is next to me”) and contradicting claims that the shooter couldn’t identify the car’s civilian occupants.

The list of Israel’s use of sound torture throughout its annexation is vast and varied—now consider the same state patents this surveillance technology while marketing psytrance as cultural diplomacy. Israel’s soundscape is indivisible: the bass drops at desert raves and screams in interrogation cells are frequencies of the same occupation.

“Music is a powerful dissociative,” observes musician Justin Tam, analysing rave culture as a colonial tool. “Supernova, the psytrance festival that took place right outside of Gaza in October 2023, is a side festival of Parallelo Universo, a festival in Bahia, Brazil, the port where Portuguese colonists processed enslaved people that were sent to sugarcane farms,” he explains. “There are street interviews with Israeli settlers who say Gaza should be cleared so they can put on Tomorrowland.”

Israel exports psytrance to pinkwash apartheid, hosting desert raves on stolen Bedouin land while Gaza burns. Worse still, the Israeli government funds these events, marketing them as proof of the country’s ‘progressive’ values while scapegoating queer visibility to distract from ethnic cleansing. Scholar Jasbir Puar has dubbed this ‘homonationalism’: the selective embrace of nonheteronormative identities to frame the state as enlightened, while framing Palestinians as homophobic savages. “Israel mobilises queer bodies to counter solidarity with Palestine as if its bombs discriminate by sexuality,” writes QIP.

Psytrance’s paradox is stark. Ex-IOF backpackers appropriated the genre in 1990s Goa, transforming it into settler enclaves. Now, enclaves of wellness fanatic ravers are found internationally in coastal towns considered inexpensive by westerners. London-based music supervisor Rachitha Seneviratne witnessed this in Sri Lanka; Israelis, Russians and other European tourists blasting music on a small beach at sunrise, ignoring local swimmers, retreating to private villas pounding psytrance as children prepared for school. “A subtle form of neocolonialism,” he called it. 

In so-called Australia, doof culture dances to this same tune, its ‘conscious’ scenes built on spiritual bypassing and waving sage over stolen land. A bush doof is a multi-day psychedelic rave in a remote, natural area. Often positioning themselves as radical alternatives, these, too, replicate colonial violence through their existence on unceded land.

Australia was colonised in 1788. Since then, its Indigenous peoples have been systematically dispossessed and displaced from their country. Bush doofs rarely ever acknowledge the Indigenous struggle for land rights and often risk disrespecting sacred sites. “When there’s a bush doof on some guy’s farm in rural Victoria, where did he inherit it from? Who did his ancestors steal that land from?” questions Tam.

These are the same new-age organisers who preach decolonisation while conveniently forgetting to pay rent or share power with traditional owners. And the parallels with Israel are evident—both lands bear scars of forced removals, both see sacred sites desecrated for settler entertainment. In fact, look deeper into corporate bush doofs like Esoteric and Wild Horses, and one will find an organisational board or a DJ headliner that sympathises with the Zionist project. 

“Unless there’s co-creation with Indigenous people, it’s not decolonisation—it’s reinforcing colonialism,” asserts Yorta Yorta artist Neil Morris, better known as DRMNGNOW. He describes festivals as sites of “spiritual, ethical, and economic bypassing,” where MDMA-fuelled ‘connection’ happens without reparations. Pre-colonial protocols demanded reciprocity. “You couldn’t just roll up to another Mob’s land and do whatever you please”, explains Morris. Today’s settlers buy US$200 tickets to ‘find themselves’ through appropriated cultures, their chemically enhanced epiphanies outsourcing reconciliation labour.

These aren’t just overtly Zionist parties, either. They’re progressive spaces performing allyship while replicating colonial patterns. The new-age left’s failure is its refusal to materially change—to pay rent, to relinquish control, to acknowledge that dancing on stolen land isn’t liberation but another form of occupation. Where James Baldwin writes “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do” to the oppressor, it is difficult to participate in a fantasy of utopia where neoliberal ideas of community uphold the status quo. Utopia, after all, is also a spiritually deficient colonial project.

Trans-feminist artist Bhenji Ra has alluded to this, recounting their experience in non-heteronormative corporate sonic spaces. “Institutions began asking queer people of colour to run events. It became aestheticised, it grew capital.” Like empty land acknowledgements, Ra, the mother of Western Sydney ballroom house Slé, describes institutional inclusion’s hollowness: “There’s always depletion of soul, it’s shadow boxing.” Mardi Gras exemplifies this, being inherently intertwined with corporations tied to genocidal projects. “Our survival politics would be considered ‘unrespectable’.” Ultimately, to Ra and many other queer people of colour, “there’s no kinship” in these spaces.

Yet the land remembers what settlers forget. Artist Fjorn Bastos contrasts Aboriginal ceremonies where “eagles appear—the land calls to its people” with Zionist-run Pitch Festival’s trashed sites. This dissociation is intentional. Israelis lose themselves in desert trance while their peers in the military murder women and children, white Australians chase ‘consciousness’ while ignoring sovereignty claims.

The final colonial irony? Techno’s four-on-the-floor pulse, now fuelling global dissociation, came from Black Detroit. Make Techno Black Again’s DeForrest Brown Jr identifies the creation of techno as “a model for Black self-sufficiency,” forged by Juan Atkins and Vietnam veteran Rik Davis against Reagan-era austerity. Yet today, Brown notes how “the infrastructure rests on real estate and military defence economies,” with firms like KKR-backed Superstruct Entertainment dissolving lines between mainstream and underground. UNESCO’s declaration of techno as “German cultural heritage” completed the erasure.

Brown warns of tech oligarchs’ Delete All IP Law campaign, a final colonial push disguised as democratisation, as “the total commercialisation of cultural expression”. Still, he finds hope in “extrastatecraft distribution to re-enchant listeners”—those moments when, like the cover of Cybotron’s studio album Enter, a body is “digitised mid-stride”, collapsing colonial time. Detroit artist Omar Meftah embodies this, creating music as ritual, from producing the beats to designing the album cover and pressing vinyl. “When you’re responsible for every element, you feel the weight of the sounds,” he reflects. “You can’t just extract.”

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The didgeridoo’s drone resonates with the Palestinian yarghul maqamat, West African drum circles, and Andean siku flutes—not arbitrary notes, but ancestral prescriptions. Colonial capitalism attempted to sever this by imposing the 440 Hz standard, enforced by Nazi Germany in 1939, a tuning of disconnection. Yet underground, healing pulses persist. 

Could sonic reclamation be manifested through sonic solidarities? When colonised communities align their struggles, they expose the shared architecture of displacement: the same imperial playbook of land theft, cultural erasure, and systemic violence. Could the notion that sovereignty is collective and liberation is interdependent be applied to the way we hear music and occupy dance floors?

Palestinian-Australian DJ Ramsey steps onto these contested grounds with radical clarity. “As a Palestinian in the diaspora lucky enough to settle on stolen Aboriginal land, it is a due diligence and number one priority to uplift, platform, and support my First Nations siblings in their battle for sovereignty,” he proudly claims. 

Ramsey has made it his mission to repoliticise the dance floor. “You have the freedom and choice to move your body in autonomy—my people do not have the freedom or choice to what happens to their body and how it moves,” he reminds crowds during his sets. The dance floor becomes a tribunal; every kick drum, a verdict. Yet, he refuses tokenisation, insisting: “I’m booked to ‘represent Palestine’, but I won’t perform without handing the mic to Blak elders first.”

Radio alHara further models what co-creation looks like—art that doesn’t simply soundtrack resistance, but sustains it. While Israel weaponises sound to enforce apartheid, the Palestinian “neighbourhood radio” born in Bethlehem’s 2020 lockdown engineers a radical alternative, a sonic sanctuary where off-centre voices rewrite the spectrum. 

Co-founder Elias Anastas describes the model as a public space built on appropriation, not algorithms, where over 300 global contributors upload directly to a communal Dropbox, blurring the lines between listener and producer. During Sheikh Jarrah’s forced evictions, they launched the Sonic Liberation Front, broadcasting field recordings of protests alongside sets from Nicolás Jaar and Mykki Blanco, transforming radio into “a tapestry of resistance through sound”.

Where Fanon states, “the native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler,” sonic reclamation begins when we stop dancing to their tune and start playing our own game. Ra speaks to this fugitive potential. “They’ve learned our language, so we must metamorphose,” they curiously suggest. Their vision speaks to Akomolafe’s call for “post-activism” resistance—not confronting power directly, but shapeshifting through its cracks like mycelium under concrete.

“You can’t co-opt a trickster,” concludes Ra. This is the lesson of Radio alHara’s Dropbox otherworld and Detroit’s self-pressed vinyl: build systems that dissolve when grabbed. “We’re transforming spaces into something that can’t public-face,” they insist, rejecting visibility’s trap. Maybe it’s about returning to what was censored, practices where sonic culture was never meant to be legible to cops or corporations. To survive is to be illegible; to resist is to change the game before they learn the rules.