And there were other girls who were odd ones too and that was how it was. We loved each other and that was that. I was 18 in May 1968 and it seemed as though my style was becoming popular and that everything was going back to normal, if I dare use the word because I really don’t like the word normal. I prefer the word abnormal but only just, because in the word abnormal you can still hear the word normal and that’s a word I really don't want to hear. In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films.My Mother Laughsis both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Celebrated author Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed the rebellions and upheavals of the twentieth century, including women’s liberation, the civil rights movement and anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work fighting for social and environmental justice, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time. Gathering speeches, essays and stories, Space Crone offers new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in her ecological and anti-war concerns, to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

OTOHan releases its second title - the first illustrated chapbook from musician Josephine Foster. Written during a bout of illness that prevented Foster from playing and performing music, Kneel to Heal is a grateful offering to the restorative power of nature. Across 24 pages, Foster muses upon the simple joys of just being in the world, her figures traversing a landscape of words and imagery that is both playful and deeply felt. There is an uncluttered simplicity to Foster's art, at once charming and profound; a sense of calm and openness reflective of her feeling during its making "of being drawn profoundly into and toward silence" Conjuring the easy fluidity of Shel Silverstein, or the dreamlike, transportive scenes of Marc Chagal, Foster's brushwork digs deep into the soil whilst looking up to the stars. There are no weighty proclamations, no authoritative conclusions, just a shared wonder and a sense of time unfurling alongside the book's creation that offers solace both in its giving and its receiving. The joys of the natural world may be fleeting but Foster seems to suggest that there is no cause for despondency in this, merely an acceptance that this is how reality is. Nevertheless, "what emerges from the mystery.. and that real reality.. will heal".

We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it. Do colleagues roll their eyes in a meeting when you use words like sexism or racism? Do you refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't funny? Have you been called divisive for pointing out a division? Then you are a feminist killjoy, and this handbook is for you. The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration. Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and a range of musicians, from Mtume to Black Unity Trio, to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—“a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,” as Spellman writes in the book’s preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, “to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool” and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers “to finally make a way for themselves.” This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.” --- David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton  (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). He is currently a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, where he is working on two manuscripts, Survival Music: Free Jazz Then and Now and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1943–Present  (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and a further edited collection on Umbra.  A.B. Spellman is a poet, music critic, and former director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the National Endowment of the Arts.

Interviews with:CHRISTIAN BLANDHOELMARTÌN ESCALANTERUSSELL HASWELLCAMPBELL KNEALETINE SUREL LANGEGREG POPEJOE POTTSMARIAM REZAEIEDWARD SOL

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton's band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists-musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists-passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame.In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra's participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap’s emergence on New York City’s airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop’s performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York’s African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiments with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Brar foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life. Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of Blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Brar rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary Black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in Blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism. Dhanveer Singh Brar Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter, and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. He is lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at University of Pennsylvania and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask. With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art. 

CRUEL/CRUEL is the manifestation of a Black, queer voice grappling with the intricacies of (un)belonging and identity. These poems use genres of queerness and race to reckon with the pervasive power of oppressive institutions, shaped by art and a soundtrack of Black musical traditions of resistance: from jazz to soul to experimental to hip hop. A hybrid visual and literary object, CRUEL/CRUEL feels relentlessly present, and yet emphasizes the archival and documentary as intrinsic to our personal and collective survivals.

A contemporary and historical look at the relationship between art and music within education in the United Kingdom.Art school Britain in the 1960s and ’70s was a hotbed of experimental DIY creativity that blurred the lines between art and music. In Blank Canvas, multi-genre musician and university lecturer Simon Strange paints a picture of the diverse range of people who broke down the barriers between art, life, and the creative self.Tracing lines from the Bauhaus “blank slate” through the white heat of the Velvet Underground and the cutting edge of the Slits, Blank Canvas draws on interviews with giants of the genre across the spectrums of music, gender, and race, from Brian Eno to Pauline Black, Cabaret Voltaire to Gaye Advert. What emerges is a portrait of the era as an eclectic range of musical styles and cultures fused, erupting into a diverse flow of outspoken originality. Providing a framework for creativity within the arts and education, the book illuminates a path for the cultural evolution of both musicians and artists hoping to create the future.

This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry's traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble's performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world's premier musical groups.

Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, which have generally reduced it to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes a framework that opens up new theoretical space for considering collective knowledge formations and collective knowledge production. Roberts argues that the historical, cultural and social experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of the South Bronx and other urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. An Afro-diasporic dance form, Hip Hop dance, she argues, is a provocative and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call. --- Bloomsbury Press, 2021

The memoir of international music icon Richard Thompson, co-founder of the legendary folk rock group Fairport Convention. --- Guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson came of age during an extraordinary moment in British culture: it was 1967 and popular music was reflecting a great cultural awakening. In the midst of this, eighteen-year-old Thompson co-founded Fairport Convention and helped invent a new genre of music.Thompson packed more than a lifetime of experiences into his late teens and twenties. From the pivotal years of 1967 to 1975, he matured into a major musician, survived a devasting car crash and departed Fairport Convention for a duo act with his wife, Linda, at the height of the band's popularity. His discovery and ultimate embrace of Sufism profoundly reshaped his approach to everything in his life and, of course, the music he wrote thereafter. In Beeswing, Thompson goes back to his childhood, recreates the spirit of the sixties and takes us inside life on the road in the UK and the US, crossing paths – and occasionally sharing the stage – with the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Jimi Hendrix and more.An intimate memoir of musical discovery, personal history and social revelation, Beeswing – like Patti Smith's Just Kids or Marianne Faithfull's Faithfull – vividly captures the life of one of Britain's most significant artists during a heady period of creative intensity, in a world on the cusp of change. ---'Honest in its self-appraisal, often very moving and sometimes extremely funny — this quiet joy of a memoir is just what you’d expect from one of the finest British musicians of the last 50 years.'RICHARD WILLIAMS'With Beeswing [Thompson] adds master memoirist to his long list of artistic accomplishments . . . fascinating.'BOB MOULD

Percussionist, Improviser and AMM founding member Eddie Prévost's fourth book presents a fascinating series of reflections and challenging insights on music in its various forms, and the development of improvised music at the intersection of contemporary compositional and conceptual forms; alongside a personal history of Prevost's life and his relationship with music. "Part personal history, part provocation, here is a compelling book about musical improvisation. But it's also about so much more."-- Ajay Heble, Director, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, University of Guelph  ".... a very different kind of musician's memoir, a provocative and stimulating account in which the founder-member of AMM questions every aspect of his life and purpose in making music."-Richard Williams  "An uncommon voice that weaves together an extraordinary life of musical exploration and trenchant, relentlessly discomfitting observations on improvised musicking, Eddie Prévost's unsettling An Uncommon Music for the Common Man excoriates critical pretense and academic cant while getting at uncomfortable truths about how and why music matters." Daniel Fischin

Minute Particulars - meanings in music making in the wake of hierarchical realignments and other essaysEdwin Prévost The only way we have any purchase on the world is by our own actions. And just the thought of the usual strategies for political and cultural response - applying the democratic process - in the face of the overwhelming odds of tradition and existing economic and political power is immobilising. Our activities must be closer to home, closer to our being. To borrow from William Blake: it is in the development of 'the minute particulars' that we have real power. As musicians our power is in how we decide to create sound. Now we place a sound next to another. How we chime with or divert a musical course in dialogue with others - while at the same time developing the structure, the nature and the dynamic of dialogue itself. As an audience too we must decide how we discern and positively support these practical efforts in music-making, and insist upon such aesthetic priorities. If these considerations begin to command our musical lives and even become the basis for musical appreciation and cultural critique, then the power of those who wish to do things to others is challenged by the determination of those who choose to do things with others.