The Unsound 1

Ashli's first day as a nurse at Wiermont Psychiatric Hospital turns into a nightmare as a bloody riot sends her fleeing into the bowels of the hospital. Her descent takes her to a hellish world populated by lunatics and monsters, cloaked in a secret history of black magic and heinous scientific experiments.

Ashli and the remaining survivors try to escape the asylum before insanity envelops them all. But there are stronger forces that won't let them leave - forces that will reveal age-old secrets about the Prince of Fools and Ashli's role in the growing madness.

Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and holosonic phenomena). For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present. This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present. The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead. Contributors Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnès Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.

Yalena Russo, your STAR Academy invitation has arrived. Unlike other teenagers across the near worlds, Yalena isn't space-crazed. But a surprise invitation to join the exclusive STAR Academy opens a window to her unknown origins, making her ponder... What if space is where she belongs? Mystified by the leadership trio known as the O'Donnells, as well as the reason they brought her on board, Yalena stumbles onto an alarming secret. Pulled deeper into the mystery by the commander's son, she will find that some riddles can be hard to walk away from--especially if she is the one holding the answers. Take a plunge into the not-so-near future, where travel is interplanetary, competition is a rush, and even the elite don't always play by the rules.

Eisner Award-nominated writer Cullen Bunn (Harrow County, The Empty Man) is joined by brilliant newcomer artist Jack T. Cole to present a surreal psychological horror series that will have you questioning what it is to truly be crazy... Ever since she was little, all Ashli wanted was to help people. It’s why she went to nursing school, and it’s why she signed up for the vacant position at Saint Cascia, despite the psychiatric hospital’s less-than-sterling reputation. But when strange occurrences begin in the midst of her very first day on the job, Ashli is forced to escape through the labyrinthine bowels of the asylum to not only help her fellow nurses, but to save herself.

Ashli and the other survivors of the asylum riot stumble upon a fully functioning (albeit horrifying) mental ward in an abandoned level of the depths of Saint Cascia.