The second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich’s artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colourful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse. Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd’s letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich’s positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich – a ‘fellow traveller’ in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualised with Johanna Drucker’s visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult. Translated by by Pavels Smišlajevs and Michel Chevalier.

The first volume in bie bao series dedicated to militant zaum investigations of Ilya Zdanevich - Iliazd (1894-1975). Zdanevich was a poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, and publisher who developed a new philosophy and methodology from zaum (trans-sense) experiments.

There is a story about a meatball which comes out of nowhere, hitting some people’s heads and changing their lives forever. There is a mouse that gets caught while trying to find a cheesy snack. There has been a 100% increase in the cost of rent in Berlin in the past 10 years and no increase in my wages. A bag full of basmati rice. A teacher stuck at work waiting for students stuck at work. There is the price one pays to purchase organic underwear so that their intimate parts are not stifled from nine hours in the office chair. There are 10 missed calls from my mother. There are places to which one cannot return and cities where it is impossible to live. There are fertility treatments that send fish oil straight into the veins two days before and two days after ovulation. The feeling of a needle in the middle of the uterus, which could be due to pregnancy, or due to fear. There is a Master’s thesis which is no Master’s thesis. There is a book that was not intended to be published, that was not intended to be read.Eva Ďurovec works as a software tester 40 hours per week and studies art at the same time. There are not enough hours in the day to complete everything, to comply with everything. And then there is also her desire to have children. The question: how can all of this be reconciled within the profession of artist? Ďurovec investigates the possibilities that arise from different class formats, and asks what we produce and reproduce—with our bodies, through our routines, trapped between the recurring desires and cruelties of daily life. She writes about forgotten dreams, social orders, and fantasizes about what kinds of new models for living together might be conceivable.With an epilogue by Alice Creischer: For me, it is not a diary, as Eva calls it, but an almanac […] that describes the counter- forces that prevent us from suffocating in the face of power. They are the desires and projections that, in this fragile life, tenaciously resist a pull that can be called normalisation. […] All labour relations, whether on the assembly line or in front of the PC, are only part of an exploitation that affects the whole of life and obliterates all projections. The almanac reports on this totality and how it becomes concrete in the everyday life of looking for a flat, wanting children, chronic illnesses and their treatment, relationships and friends. It also reports on the deep need for a spiritual asylum on the run from totality. The asylum lies in the knowledge of a historical continuity of thought and action that is always superior to exploitation. It exposes — often seemingly with ease and as if in a game or joke — the power of exploitation as incapable of creating meaning, as a machine.  

G.W. Sok co-founded of the internationally acclaimed independent Dutch music group The Ex in 1979. He became the singer and lyricist, more or less by coincidence, since he wrote the occasional poem and nobody else wanted to sing. At the same time he turned himself into a graphic designer of record sleeves, posters, and books. Together with The Ex he was awarded the Dutch Pop Prize of 1991. The band is well known for their energetic live performances, inventive music, and politically outspoken and thought-provoking lyrics. After 1,400 concerts in Holland and abroad, and 25 record albums later, G.W. Sok decided to leave the group at the end of 2008.A Mix of Bricks & Valentines showcases the lyrics G.W. Sok wrote during his three-decade period of Ex-istence. More than 250 songs of agitprop lyrics, poetry, and rantings are included along with an introduction by the author discussing his development as a writer. A foreword by English journalist, author, and musician John Robb (the Membranes, Punk: An Oral History and Death to Trad Rock) puts the work of G.W. Sok into perspective.A Mix of Bricks & Valentines is written with a sharp pen; provocative, creative, and witty, everything punk and art intended to be from the start. And yes, it can be quite loud at times, too.  

Rock/Music Writings collects Dan Graham’s influential writings about rock and roll music and its cultural impact. First published in 2009,Rock/Music Writings includes thirteen essays written between 1968 and 1988, most of which were originally printed in small magazines or journals, including Extensions, Fusion, REAL LIFE,and ZG. Graham was a friend and supporter of many musicians active in the No Wave scene that was centered around New York City in the late ’70s. In addition to collaborating with musicians during this period, Graham created “Rock My Religion,” a video that demonstrates parallels between rock music culture and religious rituals, such as Shaker dances and revivalist meetings. The work’s related text, also titled “Rock My Religion,” is included in Rock/Music Writings, along with texts such as “The End of Liberalism,” “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” “McLaren’s Children,” and “Artist as Producer.” These texts examine the lyrics and backgrounds of bands like The Beatles, The Kinks, Devo, The Ramones,  the Patti Smith Group, the Sex Pistols, and Bow Wow Wow, relating them to consumerism and visual art movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Dan Graham is an artist based in New York. Since the 1960s, he has produced a wide range of work and writing that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social, and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video, and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which he articulates through essays, performances, installations, videotapes, and architectural/sculptural designs. --- Editors: James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff Designer: Karma

A vibrant, wry, and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual. While working as a photographer’s model, gallery usher, and exotic dancer, Dorothy “Max” Prior witnessed the births of Adam and the Ants, The Monochrome Set, The Sex Pistols, and Throbbing Gristle, as well as drumming in her own cult band Rema Rema and recording with Industrial Records.  Her exuberant commentaries, each presented as a stand-alone episode, illustrate the multilayered nature of the London music, art, and fashion worlds of the late 1970s, and the overlap between the early punk scene with the city’s rapidly evolving club and queer cultures. --- The title refers to the legendary house in South Kensington, where the author lived from 1976 to 1982. Through twelve vivid, engaging, and occasionally shocking vignettes, Max maps out the wild and exhuberant counter-cultures of late ’70s London, including: • Working life as a go-go dancer, model and stripper. • The queer counter-culture that gave way to punk. Disco meets Punk in the gay clubs of 1970s London. • A celebration of the women at the crux of the gay/punk axis, including Vivienne Westwood, Jordan, Louise’s DJ Caroline, and the fabulous and feisty Sharon of the Bromley Contingent. •Inside The Band With No Name, which became Adam and the Ants and The Monochrome Set; and spawned Bow Wow Wow and Rema Rema.  • Halcyon days working at the ICA: including Helmut Newton’s ‘dead’ women, Mary Kelly’s dirty nappies and Throbbing Gristle’s infamous Prostitution exhibition. • The notorious Eaton Square squat, whose inhabitants included various gay and trans performance artists and a real live lion.

A talented pianist and composer in his own right, Sun Ra (1914 - 1993) founded and conducted one of jazz's last great big bands from the 1950s until he left planet Earth. Few only know that he also was a gifted thinker and poet. Sun Ra's poetry leaves everything behind what's called contemporary, and flings out pictures of infinity into the outer space. These poems are for tomorrow. This is the only edition of Sun Ra's complete poetry and prose in one volume. The Contributors James L. Wolf Earned a music degree from Carleton College, and studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Now works at the Library of Congress in the Music Division. Active musician in various bands in the DC area. Many contributions to Sun Ra scholarship. Hartmut Geerken Oriental studies, philosophy and comparative religion at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Writer, filmmaker, musician, composer. Since the 1970s, close relationships to Sun Ra and his works, setting up the world's most comprehensive Waitawhile Sun Ra Archive Sigrid Hauff Studied oriental languages and arts, philosophy, and romance studies at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Free lance writer on literary and philosophical subjects. Klaus Detlef Thiel Studied philosophy and history at Trier University, Ph.D. Philosophical author, focussing on theory and history of writing. Brent Hayes Edwards Teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Author and Co-Editor of works on jazz and literature.

Diane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago. During the last years of her life, di Prima worked on the final iteration of her enduring project. This volume brings together fifteen new poems with all the previously published Letters in an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition.

Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Bunuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. --- 'An absolutely masterly work' Stephen Fry --- HarperCollins Publishing, 2020

A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism offers a spirited introduction to the life and work of this legendary but underappreciated musician, composer, and poet. Paul Youngquist explores and assesses Sun Ra’s wide-ranging creative output—music, public preaching, graphic design, film and stage performance, and poetry—and connects his diverse undertakings to the culture and politics of his times, including the space race, the rise of technocracy, the civil rights movement, and even space-age bachelor-pad music. By thoroughly examining the astro-black mythology that Sun Ra espoused, Youngquist masterfully demonstrates that he offered both a holistic response to a planet desperately in need of new visions and vibrations and a new kind of political activism that used popular culture to advance social change. In a nation obsessed with space and confused about race, Sun Ra aimed not just at assimilation for the socially disfranchised but even more at a wholesale transformation of American society and a more creative, egalitarian world.   372 pages | 6 x 9 | 23 b&w photos | Hardcover

A modern epic about the most consequential music culture today, Atlanta rap—a masterful, street-level story of art, money, race, class, and salvation from acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli.From mansions to trap houses, office buildings to strip clubs, Atlanta is defined by its rap music. But this flashy and fast-paced world is rarely seen below surface-level as a collection not of superheroes and villains, cartoons and caricatures, but of flawed and inspired individuals all trying to get a piece of what everyone else seems to have. In artistic, commercial, and human terms, Atlanta rap represents the most consequential musical ecosystem of this century so far. Rap Capital tells the dramatic stories of the people who make it tick, and the city that made them that way.The lives of the artists driving the culture, from megastars like Lil Baby and Migos to lesser-known local strivers like Lil Reek and Marlo, represent the modern American dream but also an American nightmare, as young Black men and women wrestle generational curses, crippled school systems, incarceration, and racism on the way to an improbable destination atop art and commerce. Across Atlanta, rap dreams power countless overlapping economies, but they’re also a gamble, one that could make a poor man rich or a poor man poorer, land someone in jail or keep them out of it.Drawing on years of reporting, more than a hundred interviews, dozens of hours in recording studios and on immersive ride-alongs, acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli weaves a cinematic tapestry of this singular American culture as it took over in the last decade, from the big names to the lesser-seen prospects, managers, grunt-workers, mothers, DJs, lawyers and dealers that are equally important to the industry. The result is a deeply human, era-defining book. Entertaining and profound, Rap Capital is an epic of art, money, race, class, and sometimes, salvation.

Amidst everything that has and is still going on, what is silenced and what reverberates? What is revealed and what is ignored? Is solidarity resonating? Do we perceive its echoes while some people keep being denied breath? The curatorial framework of sonsbeek20→24, centered around labour and its sonicities, connects a millenary history crossing times and geographies to the present moment, through a multitude of voices, sounds, and ripples. It invites us to listen to the sounds relegated to the “edges” of the “main” motive, to the whispered stories, to those passed through singing and through storytelling, and embodied narratives. An edition that inhabits the absence from the dominant image. An edition that draws particular attention to that which has been written otherwise — in singing, playing, performing, dancing, caring, in polyphonic rhythms and multiple motherless-tongues thanks to which memories, traditions, spiritualities, entire cosmologies crossed oceans and deserts. This edition aims to reveal the complex labour relations and inequalities that show who is (un)seen, who is (in)dispensable, who is seemingly worth our applause, and who is fawningly silent. This 12th edition of sonsbeek — the pathbreaking quadrennial for art in public space, is co-curated by Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders and Aude Christel Mgba, curatorial support by Krista Jantowski, under the artistic direction of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Force Times Distance – On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies is a journey, to say the least, into the unknown. A journey marked by a plethora of uncertainties, which we have chosen to embrace rather than fend off or deflect. From a global pandemic, to financial precarity, to arduous labour conditions, we consider the becoming of sonsbeek a wandering in wondering, trusting not only in our interlocutors — artists, curators, managers, audiences, producers etc — but more especially trusting on the agency of the project and what it wants to reveal through us. 

On many levels Tristan Honsinger invites the reader to embark on the trip of embracing, chasing and changing the perception of what is possible. The routines and wisdom retrieved from his 50 years of living in the world of spontaneous imagery within the expression of sound and body are transmitted in a way that is both lucid and ludic. His texts are not about music per se, but they are musical in the sense that they welcome you to take part in the mysterious act of transformation. And in the end you are challenged to lead the trip elsewhere, based on your own associations in being the essence of us. “This book has been written over the course of a couple of months in the spring of 2020 and contains dialogues, aphorisms, songs, poems and short stories, sometimes combined. Counterpointing Tristan’s handwritings are the breezy, chasing and questioning drawings of Joel Grip. These two individuals form one of the most formidable acts in improvisation that I’ve ever seen. It’s a match!” – from the introduction by Antonio Borghini. Compiled by Klaus Kürvers, this book includes the complete discography of Tristan Honsinger‘s issued recordings so far, 1972-2020 : a 15-page directory of treasures from the recent history of modern music.  

In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand – and the world’s – great independent music labels. Hundreds of full color & black and white photos illustrate the story!Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in Christchurch, New Zealand, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of music that had an impact around the world. Needles and Plastic is the first comprehensive history of the early years of the label and its bands covering the critical period from 1981–1988 when many of the most influential and critically acclaimed artists emerged on Flying Nun, bands like – from The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space. The influence of the obscure label became apparent in the 1990s, when big-time indie acts like Pavement, Cat Power or Yo La Tengo started covering Flying Nun bands.In entries on over 140 records from The Clean’s ‘Tally Ho!’ 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines Bird-Dog LP in 1988, Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. His book draws on years of in-depth research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs, and the audience, with a host of significant characters contributing along the way – Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour and many more. In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one the world’s great independent music labels.

This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works. Citing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Brisley emphasises the critical importance of error to the creation of his performances: ‘You can say what you’re going to do, you can think about it, you can prepare it, and then when you start, it’s all disappeared because it’s actually meaningless… errors make for where the key value lies.’ The enduring resonance of Brisley’s work lies in its formless and slippery characteristics that resonate so poignantly with our shared human condition.  

Who produces what, and how? What tools and technologies, what values and intentions are fed into the process? What part do power and control play in the context of semiautonomous technologies that will shape our future world? The book’s conversations, essays and artist contributions focus on the practices and politics of production as a response to our contemporary processes of planetary transformation.

I grew up watching films with my mum. One of the most affecting was Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. We laughed and cried, whilst watching a mother and daughter, on their respective sofas, watch tv and smoke fags. My dreams are the offbeat moments in these fictions where I smoke with my mum. I yearn for the imperfect feelings of familial harmony in Secrets and Lies, a meal eaten at a table, unacquainted people brought together. It hurts, I said. It’s like the storm in my head broke the thunder directly above my flat, the lightning half a second before. Suppose A Collapse arranges moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other, intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Memoir, poem and essay combine to form a collection of experiences based on the author’s changing relationship with her absent father, extended ‘(non)family’ and mother, while film and art inform the movement between lucidity and a fracturing present. How many times can we fold up our lives into smaller and smaller shapes until there’s no room anymore, only the one that we’re in? Lucie McLaughlin is an artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her work has been published in Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, California, performed at Raven Row, London and exhibited at Lily Robert Gallery, Paris. She is currently on the MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art.

Organising the book’s chronology around the time log of a public event, Anne Tallentire invites us into the activity of plotting a number of (1:1) diagrams of domestic rooms across the emptied-out ICA theatre in London.Upon this joyous illumination of the stains of past productions and mass gatherings appears a new assembly of enactors, who summon the social sediment of the ICA as a spirit of communal activity. This new event butts against the extremities of the room. A laser level and tape measure cut across the seams of dusty bricks, the patchwork painted floorboards, a leftover bass bin, electric cables, and plywood stage to inscribe abstractions of interior spaces in builder’s graphic tape.These ambiguously intentioned drawings gain political purchase when we imagine ourselves residing within the cramped dimensions being unfolded. We remember the premise of our lives upon the buildings that we have subsided into, and those responsible for them. This act of contextual comparison is a key leverage of the book. A socialist motivation that ignites the agency of our collective imagination to participate in the language and critique of housing provision.