'He spoke about music in its pre-cultural state, when song had been a howl across several pitches, [when] musical performances must have had a quality something like free recitation; improvisation. But if one closely examined music, and in particular its most recently achieved stage of development, one noticed the secret desire to return to those conditions.'- Thomas Mann Doctor 'Faustus' 'We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them.'- Cornelius Cardew 'Everywhere, the orthodox systems of our times anticipate the careful and clear presentation of ready-worked-out on-tap outcomes, throughout our lives. Said systems seldom afford focused vantage on the vagaries, protean problems, the awkward wealth, of investigation itself. Generally, the on-goings of development are hidden, edited or simply unseen; what has been developed over time is rendered public, honed for appreciation after the fact, variously knowable, reproducible and endorsable qua final product or record.'- Seymour Wright Percussionist Eddie Prévost co-founded in the 1960s the seminal improvising music ensemble AMM. In this book he presents a very personal philosophy of music informed by his long working practice and inspired by the London weekly improvisation workshop he first convened in 1999. Perhaps controversially, this view is mediated through the developing critical discourse of adaptionism; a perspective grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature. Music herein is examined for its cognitive and generative qualities to see how our evolved biological and emergent cultural legacy reflects our needs and dreams. This survey visits ethnomusicology, folk music, jazz, contemporary music and 'world music' as well as focusing upon various forms of improvisation - observing their effect upon human relations and aspirations. However, there are also analytical and ultimately positive suggestions towards future 'metamusical' practices. These mirror and potentially meet the aspirations of a growing community who wish to engage with the world - with all its history and chance conditionals - by applying a free-will in making music that is creative and collegiate.

Maya Dunietz: Root of Two is a 144-page catalog that accompanies an exhibition of the same title, on view at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2022. Designed by Omnivore, this catalogue traverses the career of experimental musician and composer Maya Dunietz, unveiling her multidisciplinary practice that has spanned performance, composition, sculpture and installation, avant-garde theatrical performance, and choir work. Edited by Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center, contributors include Rachel Adams, Chris Cook, Maya Dunietz, Michael Pisaro, Galit Eilat, Ariel Ashbel, Chen Tamir, Sergio Edelsztein, Ran Kasmy Ilan, and Keren Rosenbaum.

The passion, intensity and complexity of the popular music produced in England between 1965 75 is the work of an extraordinary generation of working-class and lower-middle-class men and women (in alliance with a handful of middle-class men and women) who saw in the new music the remaking of something bigger than themselves, or more precisely, something bigger than themselves that they could guide and shape and call their own. In this the "use-values" of popular music underwent an unprecedented expansion and diversity during this period. Red Days presents how music and action, music and discourse, experienced a profound re-functioning as definitions of the popular unmoored themselves from the condescending judgements of post-1950s high culture and the sentiment of the old popular culture and the musicologically conformist rock n roll seeking to displace it. The remaking of the popular between 1965 and 1975, accordingly, is more than a revision of popular taste, it is, rather, the demolition of old cultural allegiances and habits, as forces inside and outside of music shattered the assumption of popular music as the home for passive adolescent identifications. --- Minor Compositions, 2020

“There were two types of culture… Official culture and underground culture. I was always for underground culture.” Rudy Fuchs, Bone cutter and collector  During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film.  Who were they? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Based on years of interviews and oral testimonies, Bone Music continues the story of X-Ray Audio, presenting the stories of the original Bone bootleggers, their customers and persecutors, evoking their spirit of resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment.  Bone Music details how the bootleggers worked, explains their technical processes, and situates their unique discs in a revised history of recorded media with a wealth of compelling new detail. 

Sometimes described as ‘the British Brecht’, Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was a major twentieth-century political artist. This is the first biography of MacColl, and was prepared with the authorisation of his collaborator and widow, Peggy Seeger. MacColl became a communist at fourteen and spent six decades at the cultural forefront of numerous political struggles, producing plays, songs and radio programmes on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Poll Tax. Charting his involvement in radical theatre, his ground breaking radio work in the UK and the USA, as well as his musical influences and legacy, his three marriages, and his relationship with his songwriter daughter Kirstie MacColl, this is a lively account of a much-loved icon of 20th century folk music. Drawing on extensive research, Class Act is a freshly conceived and energetically written account of a highly creative and controversial activist.

The Sacred Harp choral singing tradition originated in the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, spread widely across the country, and continues to thrive today. Sacred Harp isn’t performed but participated in, ideally in large gatherings where, as the a cappella singers face each other around a hollow square, the massed voices take on a moving and almost physical power. I Belong to This Band, Hallelujah! is a vivid portrait of several Sacred Harp groups and an insightful exploration of how they manage to maintain a sense of community despite their members’ often profound differences. Laura Clawson’s research took her to Alabama and Georgia, to Chicago and Minneapolis, and to Hollywood for a Sacred Harp performance at the Academy Awards, a potent symbol of the conflicting forces at play in the twenty-first-century incarnation of this old genre. Clawson finds that in order for Sacred Harp singers to maintain the bond forged by their love of music, they must grapple with a host of difficult issues, including how to maintain the authenticity of their tradition and how to carefully negotiate the tensions created by their disparate cultural, religious, and political beliefs. --- University of Chicago Press, 2011

We arrived in a fleet of white stretch limos at a clearing in a wood near Woking. Here the K Foundation was exhibiting a million pounds in cash, while Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty circled the perimeter in two orange Saracen armoured vehicles, blasting out Abba's 'Money Money Money' . . .The list of bands and artists Mick Houghton worked with in an illustrious career in the music business reads like a Who's Who of some of the greatest, most influential and downright dysfunctional cult groups of the post-punk era and beyond - Ramones, Talking Heads, The Undertones, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Felt, Sonic Youth, The Wedding Present, Spiritualized and Elastica among them. Often judiciously (or unintentionally) sidestepping the major trends in music - baggy, grunge and Britpop - his reputation for attracting outsiders led to him working with artists as disparate as Sun Ra, Andrew Oldham, Ken Kesey, Bert Jansch, Stereolab, Mercury Rev and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.But the three acts Mick is most closely identified with are Echo & the Bunnymen, Julian Cope (and the Teardrop Explodes) and the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu/KLF in all their guises. Between them, these three played a significant role in shaping the musical landscape of the eighties and nineties, and - as confidant and co-conspirator - Mick was with their chorus along the way, carefully navigating the minefield of rivalries and contrasting fortunes. It is Mick's indefatigable belief that it was always the music that came first, and it is his knack of attracting so-called difficult and troubled artists that makes Fried & Justified such an amusing, honest and insightful tale.

The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.   --- “David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” — Ben Lerner “It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” — Will Oldham, music maker "Grubbs uses the set-up to extrapolate many philosophical questions surrounding the materiality of technology, the motivations of the performer, the collapsing of distinctions between different media and musing on the economics of entertainment – all within the crucible of the noble ruin of the recording studio, once the promised land for an aspiring musician and now an expensive obsolescence. . . . A kind of torrent of ideas and anxieties in the form of a visual score pouring forth from his three decades of recording in grungy studios and gilded arts academies all over the world." — Alex Neilson, Record Collector "At times, Grubbs goes into incredible detail: the buttons an engineer presses, the way a space looks, the feelings that arise from playing an instrument. However.just when it becomes almost tedious, such detail proves to be the book's greatest charm. As it progresses, one more fully appreciates how these descriptions illuminate the mindfulness that music-making can beget." — Joshua Minsoo Kim, The Wire "[The Voice in the Headphones] is an experience encapsulated in the space-time of the recording process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the room that not only floats acoustically but also is free from the flow of real time in the outside world. . . . This is an insider’s inside book about an inside experience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal to anyone who’s wondered just what goes on in those sequestered rooms." — George Grella, New York City Jazz Record

Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry's innovative and road-tested textbook is an introduction to Rock and R&B suitable for general education courses in music and also accessible for general readers interested in a novel approach to gaining a historically rich, yet concise understanding of these genres. The book is organized around a series of timelines, tables, and figures created by the author, and provides fresh perspectives that bring readers into the heart of the social and cultural import of the music. Charry lays out key theoretical issues, covers the technical foundations of the music industry, and provides a capsule history of who did what when, with particular emphasis on the rapid emergence of distinct genres in the music industry. The book's figures distill the history and provide new insight into understanding trends. Over 1000 artists, albums, and songs are included here, such as Muddy Water, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Madonna, Talking Heads, and Public Enemy. Publisher: Wesleyan University PressISBN: 9780819578952Number of pages: 272Dimensions: 203 x 184 mm

A contemporary novel containing 122 tracks of audio in QR code along with the author’s art. A total immersive experience when used with a QR code reader and earphones.

Long before the invention of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler takes us back to an age, long before Edison, when writing itself was still relatively new. He meticulously reconstructs a series of Greek and Roman soundscapes ranging from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then, and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Petrarch to Puccini, Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice — as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time to students and scholars in voice studies, sound studies, and media theory. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists but to anyone interested in the verbal arts — literature, oratory, song — and the nature of aesthetic experience.

In Western Australia, musician Ross Bolleter collects ruined pianos that he parks into open cemeteries and from which he draws his inspiration for his compositions. In this publication, Bolleter explains his musical practice and tells the unique story of these ruined pianos scattered in the heart of the Australian territory. “A piano is said to be Ruined (rather than Neglected or Devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers and has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, clicks and dedoomps, with not a single note (perhaps excepting "D") sounding like one from an even-tempered upright piano. Sometimes you push down one key, and five or six others companionably go down with it, making for a surprise cluster, and swathes of harmonics singing forever. The notes that don't work—clicks, doks and tonks— are at least as interesting as those that do.” - Ross Bolleter -- Ross Bolleter (born 1946 in Subiaco, Western Australia) is an Australian avantgarde composer and and improviser notable for his experimentation on old pianos that have been found after having been left exposed to the action of time and weather (he classifies his pianos into different categories: neglected, abandoned, weathered, decayed, ruined, devastated, decomposed, annihilated), thus acquiring novel and unexpected musical possibilities. His recordings are published by the Emanem and WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies) labels. In 2021, he released the great Total Piano on Thödol Records. Translated from the English by Marie-Hélène Estève (original title: The Well Weathered Piano, WARPS Publications, 2005).

In this special series of eight perfect-bound books, each book is an anthology and a conversation between the guest curator and the elder(s) she hosts. In ELDERS SERIES #7, Cara Benson hosts Jayne Cortez and Anne Waldman.Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. 2009 marked the tenth anniversary of their mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary ELDERS SERIES is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.

Unlike the vast, unknowable underworld, the field in which human activities take place is but a thin film on the Earth’s crust. Delving towards telluric intensities, SUBTEXTS is a collection of geopoetic, sublithic writing – an earthward analytical offshoot exploring Nature’s underbelly and its chaotic psychic propensities. Poetry, art writing and essay come together in this mysterious anthology, to give silhouette to what lurks beneath.Contents:1. Preface: Cryptolithic Passions by Robin Mackay2. cc: Chislehurst Cave by Siegrun Salmanian3. Calc by Alasdair Milne4. Conduit by Elaine Tam + Arthur Gouillart5. The Phantom Cave Snail by Silvia Bombardini + Siegrun Salmanian6. Exhuming Shadows by James Hendrix Elsey7. Bunker by Elisina de Zulueta8. Infranoia by Will Jamieson9. Plughole by George Finlay Ramsay10. Disinterred Distortions by Giles Thackway11. Subterranean Cinematic Landscapes by Guillermo Fernandez Alvarez, Sanjita Majumder + Siegrun Salmanian12. egg — cave — o — by Eloise Bennett13. Watcher of the Hour by Silvia Bombardini

Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.  

With Nathaniel Mackey's fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey's art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub's disintegration at the end of his previous collection -- the National Book Award-winning Splay Anthem -- we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec- tion is divided into two sections, both titled "Quag," and it is this double-Quag ("Nub's new colony Quag" or Qraq or Ouab'da or Quaph . . .) that the tribe is exiled in, worlds within alternate worlds where names and places are ever-shifting, and dreamlessness reigns. From the pyramids to the projects, Ivory Coast to Lone Coast, Lagos to Stick City, amidst chorusing horns and star-spar lightning, Nod House ("Nub's / new / address") unfolds as gorgeous eulogy, copla-cuts of deep song, the long elegiac march of "day after day of the dead." --- New Directions, 2012

'From a premier contemporary, murmur invitates us to revised attention, to a verbal & typographic spatiality where operates a liberating vulnerability to what irrupts.'  Full colour work, available for the first time in print.

New project from Matthew Walkerdine: The Grass is Green in the Fields for You. A small press publisher investigating the unsung corners of music culture, its participants and subculture fandom. Releases shun exaggerated self-opinion instead favouring collaboration, community and conversation. In the early 1980's, in the small town of Rugby in the centre of England, three teenagers began melding early blues with feedback, one-chord drones, booming drums, smashing cymbals, gospel, Turkish Saz and two-note melodies. Natty Brooker, Pete Kember and Jason Pierce were Spacemen 3. On 3 August, 1985, they played a gig in the backroom of the Black Lion pub on St. Giles Street in the nearby town of Northampton. All these years laters, it is still the best gig I’ve ever seen. It is also the gig that led directly to the band’s first-ever recording deal. As a teenager growing up in Rugby in the '80s I saw Spacemen 3 play in many pub backrooms. They were, and remain, an incredible band and over the years, their reputation has spread far beyond those sticky floored, fag ash filled, grubby backrooms. Sometime in the early part of the 21st century, in a house in the south of France, I rediscovered a shoebox filled with photos, posters, tickets, flyers and cassettes from the mid-'80s and I tipped the lot out onto the floor. In among the ephemera were the photographs and cassette recording from that gig on 3 August 1985, the earliest Spacemen 3 gig for which there was a recording and photographs. And I wondered: where were all the people who were at the gig that night? And did they remember it too?