In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Black Music—long out of print—features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of essays on jazz criticism, the creative process, and the development of a new way forward for black artists. Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967.

In this essential and impassioned text, LeRoi Jones traces the intertwined development of blues and jazz music with the history of its creators in ‘White America’. As important and relevant as at its first publication in 1963, it shows how music and its people are inseparable – expressing and reflecting the other, surviving and adapting through oppression.

Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There’s scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn’t anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie’s death.

Centered around Sun Ra, We Jazz Issue 14 ‘Cosmos’, includes a collection of Sun Ra pieces by Francis Gooding, Mats Gustafsson, Rui Miguel Abreu, Stewart Smith and Joshua Lane, rare Sun Ra Arkestra photos by Guy Stevens, Larry Stabbins by Dave Waller, Angélique Kidjo by Rob Garratt, Heli Hartikainen by Wif Stenger, Alan Wilkinson by Daniel Spicer, Black Artists Group by David Mittleman, Mike Stern by Rob Garratt, album reviews, book reviews, live reviews, photo essay & more.

Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has been a leading figure in the performing arts for over 50 years. Keeper of the Code is the first solo exhibition to spotlight his work in the visual arts. Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. Three years later, adding Joseph Jarman, upon their departure to Paris for a two-year sojourn the group transformed into the collective interdisciplinary troupe called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. By that time Mitchell had already recorded the first LP of music affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sound (Delmark, 1966), and he had joined forces with St. Louis trumpeter Bowie for Numbers 1 & 2 (Nessa, 1967), which featured a painting by Mitchell on its cover. Indeed, Mitchell had been painting since 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyperproductive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles.

The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893. Volumes 2 and 3 are based on John Lorne Campbell's recordings of songs made between 1938 and 1965 in Barra, South Uist, Eriskay and Benbecula. The translations for all the songs in Volumes 2 and 3 and many of those in Volume 1 are by John Lorne Campbell, who also wrote detailed notes discussing the songs. Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893.  Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893. Volumes 2 and 3 are based on John Lorne Campbell's recordings of songs made between 1938 and 1965 in Barra, South Uist, Eriskay and Benbecula. The translations for all the songs in Volumes 2 and 3 and many of those in Volume 1 are by John Lorne Campbell, who also wrote detailed notes discussing the songs. Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

I have chosen, in this study, to go deeply into my 1961 Transformations, to note the guises in which it appeared, to identify its issues and to sort them out. I will not rush toward an explanatory description of the piece as it is found in An Anthology (Monte Young, ed. La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, New York, 1963).I prefer to establish its context and to explore correlative issues. I want to explore fully how Transformations is positioned: .i    as a diversion from absurdist computationalist music.ii    as a diversion from the derivations of exact science.iii    as a cognitive nihilist object-lesson to exact science regarding derivations

This volume is an intimate consideration of musician Kim Gordon’s brother’s life and art featuring personal photographs and pages from his journals. Following Keller Gordon’s death in 2023, his sister collected mementos including drawings, photos, poems and the diaries he kept at various stages of lucidity. Through Kim’s prose and Keller’s own words, Keller extends and destabilises the form of the biography, foregrounding the fragmented and the imperfect. Including a diaristic essay about their childhood, the complexities of family dynamics and the double-edged sword of creating and maintaining legends about those we love and admire. Designed to evoke the format of Keller’s diaries, this volume features facsimiles of his writings, offering insight into the complicated figure of Keller Gordon as well as his sister’s life.  Kim Gordon is an artist and cofounding member of the bands Sonic Youth and Body/Head, and the author of the memoir Girl in a Band.

Thorough surprise storage space find of this scarce book by William Parker. Text written in 1999 and self-published on WP's Centering imprint in a very small edition (we reasonably estimate not more than 200 copies) circa 2011. 42 pages filled with copious text. The form is a science fiction novella, though with so much science fiction becoming non-fiction in these rapidly ensuing years, William's brief introduction is best:"A word is a sound. On paper it is an image that is both Black and white and in color at the same time. The Mayor of Punkville is a tone poem about the future of yesterday. It speaks about the salvation of humanity through music." -William Parker.

2019 edition of Poems by Silver Jews'  David Berman: features variant dust-jacket artwork, variant full-color endpapers, enlarged typeface and a larger overall dimension (6” x 8”) to accompany the ever-expanding prose of David Berman. Previous Drag City hardcover edition of 500 was released on August 18, 2003. Original paperback edition released by Open City in 1999.

Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him.    Clayton Eshleman, together with his translation collaborators such as David Rattray, began work soon after 1978 on an English-language edition, with extracts appearing especially in Eshleman’s poetry magazine, Sulfur. But they, too, were unable to take forward the publication of the book. This volume presents it in its complete form in English for the first time.      

Edited by the artist, Everything in the Universe is Unfinished combines never-before-published texts and invitation pieces written in 2016–18 with drawings from the Franklin Summer series Ono started in 1994. For Ono, words, artworks and books still have the power to change the world we live in for the better. Thus she continuously shares with us her vision and philosophy toward life—one that is made of pivotal experiences, unstoppable optimism and a love for the other. Coming after several volumes that have proved to be life companions for many, Everything in the Universe Is Unfinished reflects on her most recent feelings through a delicate interweaving of poems, aphorisms, short stories and drawings.

Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal Vol.3 explores sound and the socio-political dimensions of listening. The publication brings together essays, practices, conversations and artworks from artists, researchers, and activists who are actively engaged in practicing and thinking about sound and listening as an anti-hegemonic gesture. The themes that they dissect and historicize span diverse geographies and contexts, from environmental and military violence to communal agency, indigenous technologies, colonial archives, radio practices, cultural cannibalism, and more-than-human ontologies. Here, borders—both physical and metaphorical—are the sites where the authors position themselves and where knowledge is contested. At the core of these texts are questions of methodology and positionality, but also a concern for action and form—performing, dialoguing and instigating as ways of research.

Look Out! is a new anthology of graphic and narrative art from Glasgow (and her satellites). Old Hair Comix has been initiated as a holding cell in which to gather the work of mavrick artists that draw the non-idiomatic, psychedelic, folk, rap, techno, ambient, pop, free moods typically dispersed through an overlapping and undulating art/music scene. Often congealed into the form of posters, album art, t-shirts, pamphlets and phone ephemera their works are now available bound and portable for your pleasure. Sixty pages of colour risograph and digital printing by Sunday's Print Service, published by Old Hair Comix; a division of OLD HAIR CORPS.   Your Look Out! artists are: Marc Baines, Rob Churm, Jim Colquhoun, Malcy Duff, Aki Hassan, Jamie Johnson, Peter 'Suds' McKenna, Metaphrog, Julian Dicken, Hardeep Pandhal, Verity Pease, Mick Peter, Oliver Pitt, Sue Tompkins, Nat Walpole, Fritz Welch, Al White

Hardly War, first published in the USA in 2016 and finally published in the UK in 2025, splices the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire. Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.

  ‘I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.’ Woven from verse, prose, photographs, historical reports, typographic experimentation, drawings and more, DMZ Colony explores Edward Said’s notion of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ in regards to South Korea and the United States. At the start, the call of geese in the American sky translates into the letters D, M and Z, calling her back to her country of birth, Korea. She travels to a traditional village in the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, on the border of North and South Korea. There she interviews an old man who, although tortured brutally for many years, didn’t give up his belief in Communism. The artful use of the oral history genre continues as she gives voice to orphan survivors of a government massacre. In a language of haunting and suggestive construction, increasingly words give way to her father’s documentary photos from the time of General Park Chung Hee’s brutal putsch and dictatorship, a regime supported by the USA. Like its sister books in Choi’s highly acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War and Mirror Nation), DMZ Colony holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.   Winner of the National Book Award (USA)