Saturday 28 November 2026, 7.30pm
Join us for a special Mushaira celebrating the work of Nathaniel Mackey and the special box-set publication of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Volumes 1-5.
The evening will feature a digital reading from Nathaniel Mackey, followed by live readings from the box-set by Elaine Mitchener, Dhanveer Singh Brar, Annie Goh, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and James Goodwin. Musical trio Braze_____Braise will close the evening with a one off 45 minute performance in response to Mackey's work.
From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Volumes 1-5 is a serial jazz fiction which began in the 80s and was completed in the 2010s. It is critically acclaimed and has been influential to many writers and musicians working today. It's a milestone publication from the87press and will be offered for purchase at a discounted price of £50 inclusive of a totebag.
DJ Will René will provide tunes throughout the night and Chef Yogi’s pop up kitchen will be serving up Sri Lankan cuisine.
Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays. Additionally, we offer educational and creative workshops, industry leading live events, and regular commissioned work with online journal of culture theHythe. Committed to equity, all authors receive fair contracts regardless of their background. As part of Arts Council England's National Portfolio, we contribute to the Let's Create project and look forward to fostering inclusive learning spaces as the only NPO in the London Borough of Sutton.
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of thirteen chapbooks of poetry, 6 books of poetry, and the five-volume work of fiction From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry from the National Book Foundation (2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society (2008), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress (2017), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974-1976), the University of Southern California (1976-1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979-2010).
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.
Her debut album SOLO THROAT released in May 2024 under Café Oto’s OTOROKU label has been described as “An uncompromisingly imaginative approach to text that does credit to the power of the human voice, as well as the mind that pushes it on to previously unheard paths.” (Jazzwise)
Experimental musicians and improvisers she has worked with include Moor Mother, Joelle Leandre, Hamid Drake, William Parker, Pat Thomas, Black Top, David Toop, Xhosa Cole. Elaine is founder of the collective electroacoustic unit The Rolling Calf. Composers, visual artists and poets she has worked with include: George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, Matana Roberts; visual artists The Otolith Group, Christian Marclay, Sonia Boyce; Jay Bernard, Roy Claire Potter, Dante Micheaux; chamber ensembles Apartment House, ICE, Ensemble MAM, Klangforum Wien, Van Huynh Co.
Dhanveer Singh Brar is a writer, scholar, and teacher focussing on questions of race and culture, aesthetics and politics from the mid-twentieth century to the present. His work explores the music and the art of Black and Asian people in Britain, the U.S., and the Caribbean. Dhanveer has published two books, Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) (The 87 Press, 2020), and Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early Twenty-First Century (Goldsmiths Press / MIT Press, 2021). Dhanveer is also a member of two research and performance projects, “Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective” (with Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Fumi Okiji, Louis Moreno, Paul Rekret and Ronald Rose-Antoinette) and “Lovers Discourse” (with artist, DJ, broadcaster and composer, Edward George). He is currently Lecturer in Black British History at the University of Leeds.
Annie Goh is an artist and researcher. Her work, in its numerous forms from sound installation, composition and computer music to writing, performance and social practice, takes a critical approach to contemporary debates in the fields of digital technologies, media arts, generative and computational processes and communication studies, with a particular focus on sound, intersectional feminism, decolonial theory and the politics of knowledge production. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 on archaeoacoustics and sonic knowledge production. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project since 2015 with Dr Marie Thompson.
https://anniegoh.net/
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is the author of two critically acclaimed books, What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) winner of the Frantz Fanon Award, and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013) shortlisted for the 2014 Bread & Roses Award. More recently, In Defence of Armed/Art Struggle (Bogota: UTadeo, 2019), “A Future for the Philosophy of Liberation” in Decolonising Ethics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2020), A Hopeful Political Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2025) and the poems Way Out World (the87press, 2021) and Under the World (the87press, 2024). Professor at the University of London. Fellow of the RSA.
James Goodwin is the author of Fleshed out For All the Corners of the Slip (The 87 Press, 2021), Aspects Caught in The Headspace We’re In: Composition for Friends (Face Press, 2020), and Faux Ice (Materials, 2022).
In 2016, the Creaking Breeze ensemble was formed around the writing, voice and conductorial steering of Nathaniel Mackey. The group - Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott, Evie Ward, Ute Kanngießer and Billy Steiger - was joined by Mackey for a residency at Cafe OTO in 2019, where they performed two long songs over two nights. The resulting recordings were released by Fonograf Editions as Fugitive Equation.
To mark the87press’s release of all five volumes of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the group will reconvene as a trio of Wright, Abbott and Steiger, revisiting the music and ideas of the series' fictional inhabitants.
This trio is called Braze_____Braise.
Paul Abbott / acoustic drums, synthetic sounds
Billy Steiger / violin, piano
Seymour Wright / alto saxophone
Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. His work has grown in relation to collaborations with a range of musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists.
Projects include: XT (with Seymour Wright); Kavain Wayne Space (RP Boo) Trio with XT; XT collaborations (with Pat Thomas, Anne Gillis); X Ray Hex Tet (with Pat Thomas, Edward George, Seymour Wright, Crystabel Riley and Billy Steiger); Strangeness Of Drumming (with Edward George), OWLLL (with Ute Kanngießer); yPLO (with Micheal Speers); F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie (with Will Holder); film sound for Keira Greene and The Creaking Breeze Ensemble (with Nathaniel Mackey, Ute Kanngießer, Billy Steiger, Seymour Wright and Evie Ward). Paul has performed at venues and festivals internationally. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and resident artist at Cafe OTO 2015 & 2023.
Recent releases include: Slip; Strata, Act (Joy Contemporary)*; YESYESSPEAKERSYES; Knees, Elbow Bag; Deorlaf X; Fugitive Equation and very good*.
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential.
Seymour's solo music is documented on three widely-acclaimed collections - Seymour Wright of Derby (2008), Seymour Writes Back (2015) and Is This Right? (2017).
Current projects include: @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; [Ahmed] with Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Pat Thomas; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; XT with Paul Abbott; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's Atlas Mnemosyne.
@xcrswx
Will René produces and presents Plastic Language on NTS Radio, a show exploring the intersections of poetry, music and sound, and Endpapers on Noods Radio, a genre-hopping programme of music without words to listen to while reading or writing. He makes music under the name Hack Mystic and is a librarian at the Southbank Centre's National Poetry Library, where he curates and manages the sound collections.
