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The article analyses both the book of American philosopher Christoph Cox "Sonic Flux: Sound, Art and Metaphysics" and a wide range of critical publications dedicated to this book. The project "Sonic Flux" belongs to sonic materialism (a branch of "New Materialism') also known as "Deleuzian sound studies". For Cox this means a development of "immanent metaphysics" launched by G. Deleuze. But while continuing the project of Deleuze, Cox inherits his predicaments. Their range is as broad as the specter of Cox's sources covering philosophy, arts, theory of perception. Debates around the project "Sonic Flux" highlighted such problems as the way Cox understands materialism and how he understands access to reality. Cox's correlation of finite and infinite; particularity and universality, and anti-historicism are highly problematic for critics. Since Cox claims to develop a theory of sound art we assess his ideas from this perspective. This allows us to focus on modernism, anonymity and anti-humanism, central to Cox's project but not to its criticism. A less important aspect – resentiment in Cox's style – turned out to be helpful in drawing conclusions that the whole project "Sonic Flux" is built upon a range of assumptions. Cox himself names some of them while we indicated some others. The main conclusion of the article is the idea that the project "Sonic Flux" cannot provide an adequate theory of sound art nor contribute to sound studies because it is too embedded in the worst kind of modernism and structuralism. Such important notions of sonic materialism as autonomy and anonymity of sounds perfectly fit the tradition of Modernism while being completely alien to the sound studies.