AnimauX veGeTal is the second release of the collaboration between Anne Gillis and XT (Seymour Wright & Paul Abbott). The trio began working together in 2018. Slowly, remotely (in Brussels, London and Paris respectively), they developed and grew the work ‘Our/s Bouture(s)’. It was broadcast to an in-person and on-line audience at Cafe OTO (London) in 2021 and later released on ArtIntoLife (Japan) in 2023.In 2022 they performed more together at Cafe OTO and Q-O2* (Brussels), growing, grafting, pruning and diffusing volatile elements of the broadcast (and accompanying film), planting and seeding new sounds and movement into and over what grew from the speakers.In September 2024 the three met again to record at XTUDIOs (London). 'AnimauX' and 'veGeTal' are what emerged. Shared, discrete and whole these two blocks show how the trio grow its own sound, and move on and into new things. The titles are named after the doings – audible and palpable, heard and felt – they capture the pulsing fact, fabric, and flourish of the matter, pace, and space of what grew and bloomed that day.-----------The zonal wheezing of a compression artifact projected through the inverted curvature of a slip-n-slide, coiling, tumescent, love's last gasp. The deadline has been exceeded. - Sunik Kim

‘Almost Something’ is the debut release of the long standing collaboration between artist/dj Laura Not and Andrew Hulme of O Yuki Conjugate. The two pieces cover a musical domesticism, developed around location recordings made in London and Berlin. The duo, known separately for their considered and attentive handling of collaged textures, rhythms and ambiences, offer up a sonic landscape where fugitive moments of creation meet the concrete sounds of everyday life. The unfamiliar is what sticks and encourages repeated listening, moving you back and forth between cities, dissonance and harmony. The tone of the album has a sustained dustiness, shrouded in a thick smog where feedback tones and scrapings on thick metal lurch at you. Sounds that can one minute appear as distant aeolian sediments suddenly become compact and then break into shards - you’re constantly in motion. You could almost liken it to feeling transported to an inner city reconstruction of Gordon Monahan’s ‘Aeolian Winds Over Claybank Saskatchewan’, if it stretched between the tunnels of the underground and the dark corner of a household boiler room.

We use the same method of what we did on Responses (Zappak, 2022): being in a place for a whole afternoon, but not playing together. We took turns on recording solo piece, and each session was a responses to the former one. Even the length was same with the former album (each one 7 minute). Only one difference: on this time we played outside but last time we played in room. There were lots of limitations from the lack of alternation electric power (and also the hot temperature and mosquito). But the open fields brought some possibilities on the other hand. Same as the former one, Sun Yizhou selected and paired these solos into duos, and I did the mixing work. I drew the cover of Responses, which was designed by Leo Okagawa. Thank you Leo, for accepting my submission and releasing it in 2022. It was the starting place of our new work.----Zhu Wenbo

'GAX is the duo of Seymour Wright (alto saxophone) and Vasco Alves (gaita de fole) and ‘as tradiçōes/the traditions’ is their first published recording. They started playing together in 2008 as regular participants in Eddie Prévost’s weekly, London workshop. GAX have rarely performed publicly, which only adds to the pleasure of being able to share this inimitable first release. Seymour Wright is known for his solo work, the duos XT with Paul Abbott, @xcrxswx with Crystabel Efemena Riley, and GUO with Daniel Blumberg, as well as his part in larger groups including أحمد [Ahmed] and X-Ray Hex Tet. Vasco Alves has previously released a solo record with gaita de fole and electronics ‘Gaita Contra Computador’ on After Action Review. ‘Estrada Longa’ for synths and voice was released on Cafe OTO’s TakuRoku, and reissued by Feedback Moves in 2024. He currently leads the exploratory bagpipe ensemble As Rochas da Ajuda. As well as GAX, his other ongoing collaborations include OndaXoque (with Pedro Rufino), a duo with Margarida Garcia. He has also performed extensively as a part of VA AA LR with Adam Asnan & Louie Rice. '‘The traditions/as tradiçōes’ was recorded across two days in the summer of 2023. Both pieces accentuate micro-motions in the interplay between Alves and Wright’s instruments. ‘The traditions’ folds and cuts, placing silent blocks between the duo’s play of sounds. The physicality of the performers is audible through the psychoacoustic oscillations and investigation of rich overtones. On ‘As tradiçōes’ Alves and Wright each play layered glissandi spanning the entire side of the record. Squalls of air from bellows and lungs control the slow, rising movement, grounded by and juxtaposed with a drone from one of Alves’ chanters which sharply fizzles at the pieces’ end, leaving in its shadow a short, continued blast of complex high tones.The 10" record comes housed in a matt-finish sleeve designed by Vasco Alves and includes a fold out poster. The photographs on the front cover and "as tradiçōes" side label are taken from the book 'Gaiteiros de Sesimbra' published by Associação Portuguesa Gaita de Foles.' 

Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what in turn drew John Lennon to visual art? Why, in 1980s West Germany, did Joseph Beuys record a pop single and artists such as Walter Dahn, Albert and Markus Oehlen, and Michaela Melián form bands? What role does utopia play in the pop music and art of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, and Fatima Al Qadiri? And, vice versa, did dystopias of transgressive imagery and noise lead the artist group COUM Transmissions to make music as Throbbing Gristle? In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Ever since Duchamp’s readymade und Hugo Ball’s sound poetry, the definition of art has widened and dissolved to a point where nearly anything geared toward an art audience can be considered an artwork. Today it has become convention to praise art as a way of questioning conventions, not least in regard to conventional borders between disciplines, media, and genres. However, heroic claims of dissolving borders have become a way of kicking at doors that are already wide open—in a political and economic environment defined by neoliberal deregulation and flexibilization geared toward new markets, and permeating every social and cultural sphere. It has thus become increasingly important to discuss the relationship between different fields of cultural production. This book does just that, looking closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. Historically, these figures provoked cognitive dissonance, but the seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop and art from the 1960s to the present, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while pointing toward radical alternatives.

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways, reflecting the vitality of water, from source to sea. A diverse group of artists and writers set out to trace river systems from the sierras and forests of southern Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, proposing new routes for collaborative research and knowledge-production. In newly commissioned texts and a selection of influential essays—including a transhistorical dialogue between the twelfth-century mystic, Ibn ‘Arabī  and the renowned essayist, Sylvia Wynter—as well as lyrics, scent, recipes, critical-contemplative writing, and guided meditations, Meandering combines rich visual documentation with insights from the fields of art, visual culture, environmental humanities, ecotheosophy, mysticism, critical theory, and decolonial studies. This volume offers a practical and poetic toolset for a dynamic reconciliation between action and imagination to address the pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. This publication is part of an art and ecology research program of the same name curated by Sofia Lemos at TBA21–Academy. By exploring social and environmental justice through the lens of community-oriented practice, it presents a case for the role of artistic research and public programs in revealing our interbeing, and shapes new convergences between interdisciplinary and interfaith studies.

Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated. Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.