A Feminist Fanzine About Composition and Sound Art, based in Cologne

Sound American Publications announces its 27th issue, THE LIFE ISSUE, a reflection upon the smallness—and largeness—of living amidst a tumultuous, globally-shared moment..The Life Issue contributors include claire rousay, who writes about the many cuts accumulated while learning something new; pedal steel superhero Susan Alcorn recounts a battle with injury; composer Jack Langdon offers Sound American’s second fiction offering, a story of how the pandemic affects a fictional musician, presenter, and listener; composer Lea Bertucci interviews improvising vocalist Audrey Chen about identity, commitment to music, and motherhood; bass clarinetist Katie Porter lets us in on a quarantine’s worth of deep-questioning and the looping beauty of banality.Sound American’s ongoing series, “Sites of Formation”, celebrates the piano, featuring writing by pianists Pat Thomas (on Ahmed Abdul-Malik) and Cory Smythe (on Henri Pousseur), as well as Dr. Douglas Rust on the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata and Sound American’s editor, Nate Wooley on the Vangelis’s keyboard-heavy soundtrack to Chariots of Fire. This issue also includes writing by saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos on NYC guerilla concerts during lockdown and a roundtable discussion from members of the Catalytic Sound collective—Ken Vandermark, Luke Stewart, and Bonnie Jones led by Brock Stuessi—on their work to create a streaming platform as an alternative to Spotify.This issue’s Exquisite Corpse is an elegant, nostalgic site-specific work by composer, flutist, vocalist Ka Baird. The Life Issue also features a world-premiere, sixteen-page set of drawings with introduction by Lebanese-born, Berlin-based artist Mazen Kerbaj. The drawings feature his intimate, aching, everyday trek through multiple shutdowns.As we move on from a generation-defining year-and-a-half, The Life Issue allows some of the artists we love to speak intimately as people: people who happen to make art. Without requiring responses to the great traumas of the last eighteen months, the issues allows them to reaffirm their everyday humanity through the small injuries and victories, the days of nothing happening, and the ways that they try to fit in as small parts of a huge world. A unique issue of Sound American, it reaffirms the journal’s mission of making music for everyone in new and unexpected ways.

Frans de Waard published Vital, a fanzine for electronic and electroacoustic music, from 1987 to 1995. It was a low-budget, Xeroxed publication, bearing the revolutionary instruction: ‘No Copyright Publication. Reprint Now!’ It featured interviews with Asmus Tietchens, O Yuki Conjugate, Merzbow, P16.D4, Pierre Henry, Jim O’Rourke, Brume, Döc Wor Mirran and many others, hosted discussions on copyright, plagiarism and plunderphonics, house music, ambient music, cassette culture and noise, and included contributions from musicians such as Leigh Landy, Godfried Willem Raes, John Duncan, and GX Jupitter-Larsen. Every issue included reviews of cassette releases, LPs, CDs and books. A total of 44 issues were published. Vital moved online in 1995, where it appeared every week since as Vital Weekly.This book is a reprint of all 44 issues and is a lively record of the heyday of cassette culture and industrial music, but also of developments in the wider field of electronic music.

In late 1983, Frans de Waard published the first edition of De Nederlandse Cassette Catalogus, listing all known, independently released cassettes in The Netherlands up to that point. No images, no descriptions, just a list. In the following years, three more editions were published and then De Waard ceased producing these booklets. This book contains all four catalogues, along with a 100-page selection of ‘source material, articles from Vinyl, Muziekkrant Oor, De Nieuwe Koekrand, the complete one-off K7 fanzine, along with letters, flyers and label information.This book includes an English introduction to the background of the various catalogue editions, as well as translations of the instructions on how to consult the catalogues. Otherwise, the rest is in Dutch. The front cover is an homage to The International Discography Of The New Wave by Martha DeFoe and B. George, which was itself the direct inspiration for me to compile the first edition.

From 1984 to 1988 Anthony Blokdijk frequently visited Threshold House in London and corresponded with John Balance of Coil about playing live, releasing music and personal affairs. This book collects scans of Balance’s original letters, including idiosyncratic decorative flourishes and provides insight into his colourful world. Also included two articles on Coil from Blokdijk’s Abrahadabra magazine, and an interview with Coil he conducted for the Dutch magazine Opscene. Translations included. Foreword by Nick Soulsby.

Adam Morris spent more than twenty years at the coal face of the music industry. In 1979, he co-founded the DIY label Malicious Damage Records, releasing post-punk classics by Killing Joke as well as the highly rated John Peel favourite, “Agent Orange” by Ski Patrol.  He worked for two years as an unpaid tour manager for Killing Joke, an experience that later led him to tour manage the reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry, who paid him. He moved from the label into distribution, working in imports and exports where he bought and sold thousands of records from labels like Beggar’s Banquet, 4AD and Alternative Tentacles (Dead Kennedys). He distributed On-U Sounds for Adrian Sherwood, called at Dr Alimantado’s house for breakfast and represented Big Black and Sub Pop Records in Europe.  In 1988 he founded Mr Modo Records, which collaborated with many of the new MIDI based electronic music producers evolving on the scene at that time. This included Coldcut, 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald. He formed the alliance WAU! Mr Modo with Youth and Dr LX Paterson and became manager of The Orb when that group formed.  At one point he was known as the “Peter Grant of Ambient House”.  Ambient house (or chill out music) was a highly influential genre of the new electronic dance culture that achieved global domination from the end of the 1980’s.  Chill Out was a forerunner for what is now known as EDM. Adam became the first manager to take a MIDI based act on a coast to coast tour of North America. At the time, the main stream music industry saw no long term future in MIDI. They could not see how you could play EDM live or tour it globally. In doing their sell out American tours, The Orb pioneered the way forward and proved most of the music industry wrong.  In 1994, Adam lost his “job for life” on his 40th birthday and was ostracised by most of the biz. At that point, he began the first draft of “Losing It,” a fictional account of some of his working experiences inspired by the novels “Spinal Tap” and “Trainspotting.” He described his effort as “Spinal Tap for ravers.” He completed that in 1996.  Little did he know then that it would take another twenty six years before his stories made it into print. But it did. Its a trip, a mad ride to oblivion, but also a warning to us all.

From 1984 to 2015, Korm Plastics released cassettes, vinyl and CDs. Following a brief hibernation, Korm Plastics relaunched in 2019 as a book publisher. The first book was a re-issue of Frans de Waard’s memoir of working for Staalplaat, This Is Supposed To Be A Record Label, previously published by Timeless Edition in France but unavailable for several years. The success of the second edition led to the publication of new books, which include reprints of fanzines (Vital, De Nederlandse Cassette Catalogus, BOH, Neumusik, Nul Nul, some with CDs), an English translation of a book about punk in the Netherlands (1976-1982), a book about The Legendary Pink Dots’ first ten years, Adam Morris’ fictionalised account of working for Killing Joke and The Orb, a catalogue of ten years of Modelbau (also with a CD), a collection of letters between Coil’s John Balance and Anthony Blokdijk, and Freek Kinkelaar’s musings on music.Korm Plastics founder Frans de Waard teamed up with designer Alfred Boland for this, their latest publication, The Annual. For a long time both had wanted to publish a magazine, which eventually became what they hope will be a regular yearbook with ‘everything you never knew you were interested in’. They invited their authors (present and future) to contribute an article, which led to a wildly diverse selection. From the history of turntablism, a 1985 interview with Roger and Brian Eno, a report on the Groningen punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Truus de Groot about her formative years, Kubus Kasssettes, vinyl hunting in Trinidad, the Perversita festival in 1989, concerts that ended in riots, Willem de Ridder’s Radiola Improvisation Salon, Ultra in Eindhoven, Gary Scott meeting Florian Fricke, Killing Joke/Joy Division, The Slits, contributions by GW Sok and Harold Schellinx and more. Illustrations by Miss.Printed, short interludes by Freek Kinkelaar and Frits Jonker, plus a comic strip by Bertin.

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.   Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense.

The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

Listening To The Music The Machines Make tells the story of a single generation of post-punk musicians, mavericks, visionaries and opportunists tinkering with primitive synthesisers in bedrooms, bedsits and basements around Britain, who assembled a potent cocktail of ideas and influences, took them apart, mixed them up, and reassembled them in entirely new ways to create a genuine golden age of British pop, and along the way creating some of the most enduring, iconic and influential records in pop history. It sets out to examine the multitude of influences that led to the synthpop revolution that spanned 1978 to 1983; tell the definitive story of a true golden age of British pop through the careers, releases and stories of the movement’s pioneers, mavericks and superstars; and explores the era’s lasting musical impact and enduring influence, including it’s role in the development of hip-hop, house, techno and beyond.

revised and updated paperback edition includes Shane's final months and the response to his passing.  also includes many previously unseen personal photographs.  A Furious Devotion vividly recounts the experiences that shaped Mcgowan's life including the formative trips to his mother’s homestead in Tipperary and the explosion of punk which changed his life.

The English Heretic Collection is a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein travel to England's strangest landscapes – with a host of tragic players.  From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making. Part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography, The English Heretic Collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making. Comprising 14 magazine type sections within the book, imagine living the gaudy occult reality of Man, Myth and Magic. Somewhere in that fetid, yellow smell awaits your favourite nightmare of culture...

The emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall—Take This Hammer shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to transformations in popular music. Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.

A timely new book of ten essays stemming from the second edition of the Radical Sounds Latin America festival, which took place virtually in October 2020. Writers, academics and musicians discuss new perspectives on Latin American music, with essays tackling case studies and research in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Guajira peninsula.

Some of the most beautiful, era-defining music has been co-composed by Karl Bartos. ‘The Robots’, ‘Computer Love’, ‘Neon Lights’, ‘Tour De France’ and Kraftwerk’s 1982 number one single ‘The Model’ all contain his deft musical touch. For the first time, in The Sound of the Machine, Bartos speaks candidly and with wit and humour about his life in Kraftwerk, a band widely acknowledged as being one of the most important in modern music. In The Sound of the Machine, Karl vividly recalls what it was like to be in the Kling Klang studios during recording, describing the process and perfectly capturing the joy and passion of three people composing and recording. Now, with a successful solo career of 30 years, Karl Bartos recalls his post-war childhood, the amazement he felt on first hearing The Beatles, his first bands, his parallel career as a musician and teacher, his years with Kraftwerk, and his hopes and fears for today’s musical culture. 'Full and frank disclosure of life in the world's most influential electronic band... Karl Bartos' enjoyable tome.' - Record Collector, 4* 'A full-blooded insider's account of life inside the Kling Klang studio. This is a must read for the robots' fans.'  Prog Magazine

The third compilation of Synth History interviews in tangible 'zine form! A 200+ page high quality 'zine featuring a curated compilation of interviews with legendary and modern day pioneers.

Black Slit documents a process whereby Katrina Palmer learned to throw a knife, using vibrantly painted clay objects as her targets, as well as high density foam board blocks. The setting is a studio/office/classroom/bedsit at night – a multi-purpose space which must be prepared for the action. We see a sofa-bed being made in low light, a knife laid on a table before it flies through the air, and then the focus shifts to the targets themselves. The clay was still wet and unstable when struck by the blade, resulting in unpredictable radical disruptions to the colour and shape of these hand-crafted forms. Alongside filming and editing footage of the knife throwing, Palmer practised drawing lines, to make a series of works on paper which are also reproduced in this book. Responding to the borders, margins and channels of the lined A4 page, Palmer produced curiously visceral but lean forms that are a new element to her work.

Pedagogy of the Heart represents some of the last writings by Paulo Freire. In this work, perhaps more so than any other, Freire presents a coherent set of principles for education and politics.