First solo release from vocalist, movement artist and composer Elaine Mitchener, whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art. Solo Throat draws on the work of African-American and African-Caribbean poets Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Una Marson and N. H. Pritchard as source material for twelve new vocal compositions Elaine Mitchener is a veteran of vocal expression in the global Black Avant Garde, traversing free improvisation, cross-disciplinary music theatre and contemporary composition with clarity and joy. Most recently, Mitchener has been improvising and composing with the written word as source material - challenging classical ensembles with her piece (“the/e so/ou/nd be/t/ween”), and commissioning composers Matana Roberts, Jason Yarde and George Lewis to respond to the work of Sylvia Wynter (“On Being Human as Praxis”, Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2020). Her performance of Umbra poet N.H Pritchard’s text FR/OG at OTO in 2021 was a revelation - a solo vocal recasting of the powerful visual-material form that Pritchard uses to disrupt semantic ‘sense’. Building on this performance, Solo Throat takes the work of Pritchard alongside poets Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Una Marson as its source material. Its compositions are a loose translation - a carrying from text to voice which holds multiplicity and celebrates the transformative power of literary possibility. Surrendered to the spacing and repetition of consonants and vowels, Michener’s exceptional phonetic freedom gives rise to a sensuous experience which intensifies the roles of rhythm, timbre and breath in expressing meaning. Solo Throat comes together as much through difference as similarity. Mitchener’s own solo improvisations sit alongside the work of Brathwaite, Césaire, Marson and Pritchard, forming a constellation of unlikely alignments which make no aesthetic conclusion. Instead, Solo Throat is a site of encounter, an irreducibly plural de-composition of words into a heterogeneous assemblage of sounds and impulses, emphasising what Anthony Reed calls, “the play on and the surplus of margins of lyrical translation to resituate other pathways of expression”. Just as the poets cited use white space to complicate our act of reading, so Mitchener utilises silence and multiphonics to complicate the act of voicing and the way we listen. — Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist; was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow (2022) and was an exhibiting artist in the British Art Show 9 (2021-22). In February 2022 Mitchener was awarded an MBE for Services to Music. Her regular collaborators include: composers George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, and Tansy Davies; visual artists Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay and The Otolith Group; chamber ensembles Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, and Klangforum Wien; choreographer Dam van Huynh’s company; and experimental musicians such as Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Pat Thomas, Jason Yarde, Neil Charles and David Toop. — Recorded and engineered by Sean Woodlock at Hackney Road StudiosMastered by Sean McCannLayout by Jeroen WilleAll music and artwork by Elaine Mitchener

These poems grow out of ‘the hairline fracture/ writ through every dawn’, repeatingly remaking the forms of jackdaw, sycamore, Icarus. Life courses through them, taking the shape of raindrops that slick bodies with ‘a conductive gel razing separateness’. In a gesture that feels as timeless as it is astonishingly prescient, they build, and commit themselves to endlessly rebuilding, a space-time for joy within this ‘hell without echo/ entirely above ground’.ELLEN DILLONThis thorny and beautiful collection of poems is riven with wants realised, frustrations, moments of desire gnarled up. Amongst the delta, the thicket and the mountain, Timothy  Thornton declares an uneasy truce between the bitter and the euphoric.HUW LEMMEYPoems and language as cresting, skirmishing, released-exposed things — I can think of no better writer for our times. Thornton’s work draws upon Bosch-monstrous myths, the quiet undeniablities of folklore and the smarting contemporary moment where calculation and recklessness, the seething and the stark, vulnerability and mischief all pluck at narrative to provide its own omens. Full of consolation, grief, and smaller but pressing, bolting, rootling truths that buck between the reader’s hands, we are lucky to be in shapeshifting’s company, watchful all the while.ELEY WILLIAMS

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau's fundamental bass, Riemann's harmonic function, Schenker's hierarchic analysis, Forte's pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman's auditory scene, Terhardt's virtual pitch, Krumhansl's tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt's evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: • Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? • What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

Making audible what is usually inaudible, rendering sound visible in an unusual way, and facilitating a spatial experience of sound­—this is what constitutes the pioneering work that makes Alvin Lucier one of the most important representatives of American music in the second half of the twentieth century. The stated aim of the study at hand is the detailed historical and theoretical exploration of Alvin Lucier’s work, with particular focus on his decidedly reflexive experimental aesthetics. The research is thus based on two essential methodological approaches: on the one hand, a musicological study of the genesis of Lucier’s work, and on the other, an aesthetic analysis of the role of the real within Lucier’s aesthetics.Lucier’s experimental compositions are aesthetic reflections that are constantly making reference to the phenomenology of sound, as well as to the perception of perception itself. His aesthetic vision gravitated towards devising minimalist constellations and processes which, due to the withdrawal of the compositional subject, gave expression to an acoustic phenomenon and the unforeseeable idea inherent to it.

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected; they insist that they must be connected. Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by its incantatory repetitiveness, its flamboyance, and its mysticism, but also by its violence. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad, Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work, which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video, and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols, as well as Tintin creator Hergé. Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles, and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Sacred Bordello is a flexi-cover sewn, full color, 192-page, 11" x 9" book that includes essays, scores, and original photos of performances and installations, providing the most complete documentation of Charlemagne Palestine's art. The included CD features an hour-long recording of a lecture that Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at the ArtNow Centre in Canada. Following the performance of a strumming music concert, Palestine freely speaks about his music and philosophy, involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question-and-answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The CD also includes a previously unreleased multi-layer voice study from the early 1960s.