Ultra-red

Ultra-red is a Los Angeles–based sound art collective founded in 1994 by AIDS activists Dont Rhine and Marco Larsen. The group has since expanded to include artists, researchers, and organizers across North America and Europe, engaging in social movements such as migration rights, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS. Ultra-red is known for its “militant sound research,” a methodology that combines acoustic ecology with political activism.

The collective’s projects often involve community-based listening sessions, radio broadcasts, performances, and installations that explore how sound can reflect and influence social relations. Notable initiatives include “Soundtrax” (1992–1996), which investigated needle exchange spaces; “Second Nature” (1995–1998), focusing on public sex; and “Structural Adjustments” (1997–2003), examining the state of public housing in Los Angeles. Collaboratively, the members of Ultra-red have produced radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, installations, texts, and public space actions (“ps/o”). In the mid-90s, Ultra-red launched the electronic music club, Public Space. “Ground zero” for Los Angeles’ nascent electronic music community, Public Space served as a hub for a diverse group of essential electronic musicians, including those associated with the Plug Research label, noise musicians like the group Fin, and out-of-town acts like Spacetime Continuum, Autechre, and numerous other hallmarks of Los Angeles’ 1990s underground electronic scene.

Operating for over 30 years between the realms of sound art and modern electronic music, Ultra-red pursues a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organizing. Today, Ultra-red stands out in the artistic activism space, given that its founders see themselves as activists-turned-to-art under contexts of urgency (rather than artists-turned-activists). For example, in the early stages of Soundtrax, and in the midst of the devastating heroin and AIDS/HIV epidemics of the 1990s (mutually-reinforcing issues), an increase in police harassment in the streets necessitated documentation, especially during an intervention undertaken by Ultra-red founders Rhine and Larsen to get clean needles to the public (alongside a LA’s first syringe exchange program, Clean Needles Now). However, given the obstructive nature of camera equipment in the early 1990s, Rhine and Larsen opted to carry audio-recording devices to capture evidence of the difficult exchange with the police and local security squads. The audio recordings, which were cut and mixed into avant-guard electronic soundtracks, served as essential early evidence against the police’s obstructive commands against harm-reduction initiatives (revealing greater political agendas in the United States that stood and remain against substance harm-reduction). The avant-guard methods employed by Ultra-red in public interventions like Soundtrax also serve as a precursor to mainstream contemporary formats, three decades later, such as filming police covertly as a self-defense/documentation procedure.