Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan stages a one-night-only performance exploring various aspects of sonic memory. After SFX is a performance of the sounds from Abu Hamdan’s self-constructed sound effects library and their accompanying narratives. It uses inventive methods to uncover the unexpected ways in which we encode sonic events in our minds. After SFX is prompted by Abu Hamden’s investigations into crimes that had been heard but not seen. In his conversations with earwitnesses, he first attempted to use sound effects from the libraries of the BBC and Warner Brothers to see what comparisons could be made, however, these cinematic samples were too inflexible and imprecise to unlock the witnesses’ acoustic memories. He has since built Earwitness Inventory, a library of objects to be used specifically as mnemonic devices. These objects encompass both sounds that have been used in his interviews with earwitnesses to facilitate re-enactments of crimes, and sounds pertaining to stories in which surprising sonic analogies emerged, such as a building collapsing into a sinkhole ‘sounding like popcorn’.