This book draws from our quarter-of-a-century festival ‘celebration’, but it is not dedicated to ‘looking back’ on the way Sonic Acts, along with the world, has changed. Rather, it is devoted to finding ways of confronting and surviving the brutality of now. It contains a rare selection of critical essays on contemporary political and climate realities, colonial legacies of European projects, and racial and gender biases of contemporary technologies. Visual and textual contributions highlight an evocative approach to writing, merging field notes and memoir, to accurately capture the processes of making work fuelled by research. It also contains tender contributions that embed modes of discourse within the visual, in order to gauge the complexities and interconnections of this crisis and re-imagine a different reality.