Books and Magazines

“The office was littered with discarded press releases and several scrawny men were using vinyl albums as frisbees…” An anthology of conversations and essays, memories and commentary from the heyday of British pop music writing. In its heyday, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the UK music press was the forging ground for a new critical culture, where readers could encounter anything from comics and cult films to new musical forms and radical underground politics. It created an off-mainstream collective cultural commons improvised through a networked subculture of rival weeklies, monthlies, and fanzines, including such titles as NME, Melody Maker, Sounds , Record Mirror, Black Echoes, Black Music, Let It Rock, Street Life, Zigzag, and Smash Hits. This anthology of conversations and essays, memories and commentary explores how this uncharted space first came about, who put it together, what it achieved, and where it went. Along the way, it unearths the many surprising worlds explored by this network of young anarchists, dreamers, and agitators who dared to take pop culture seriously, and considers what remains of their critical legacy. Contributors Valerie Wilmer, Charles Shaar Murray, Richard Williams, Penny Reel, John Ingham, Jon Savage, Cynthia Rose, Paul Morley, David Toop, Bob Stanley, Barney Hoskyns, Jonathon Green, Simon Frith, Paul Gilroy, and many others With cover and illustrations by legendary comics artist Savage Pencil.

A Hidden Landscape Once A Week

“In the spring of 1977, two musicians – Han Bennink and Peter Brötzmann – disappeared into the depths of a German deity named Dark Forest…” – David KeenanSchwarzwaldfahrt 1977 is a magical document of a moment out of time, a moment when the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and percussionist Han Bennink made a series of journeys deep into the heart of the Black Forest with a bunch of cameras and some early portable recording equipment in order to capture the sound of the moment. The recordings that they made there were released as the Schwarzwaldfahrt album by FMP in 1977 and it remains a free music classic, recorded completely in the open air, with Bennink and Brö duetting with the birds, playing in the water, drumming on great natural xylophones made of logs and catching the sounds of airplanes strafing the skies. It is a music of eternal expansion, of elemental communion.This new book comes with the original recordings on a CD and is assembled round a treasure trove of newly-discovered photographs taken during the trip by both Brötzmann and Bennink – photographs of each other, of their lodgings, of their ritual communions, of their route into, and out of, the forest. To contextualize the photos – and the music – the award-winning author David Keenan (This Is Memorial Device/Monument Maker et al) contributes an evocative/poetic text that situates the duo’s radical musical action in the context of their work while riffing on the uncanny beauty and long-ago aura of these evocative photographs, photos that seem to echo the very sounds of the Dark Forest itself.“It’s so lonely, this music, these two friends, making music on their own, in all of this space, and back of time, now, too, a document of a world that seems less populated – by people, by ideas, by demands, by the tyranny of modern time, itself.” – David KeenanEdition of 1000 copies. 120 pages. 20 x 22cm.Published November 2022

BRÖTZMANN / BENNINK – Schwarzwaldfahrt

INCLUDES THE BOOK: NOTHING IS POSSIBLENERVOUSNESS, OR IMMORALITYDON’T WAIT TO BE HUNTED TO HIDEby T.R.S.: The Fucking Terrible Receding Shapes, trading as TRIPLE NEGATIVE 250 pages128 x 165 mm248 pages (195 b&w / 53 colour) AND the cassette TRIPLE NEGATIVE, Spoilt health. Edition of 100 copies Not obvious from any of the 3 front covers, but yes this is a Triple Negative product. T.R.S. is the eminence grease, the actual persons irresponsible. Before anyone else gets blamed: almost all writing/drawing is by Clinical Wastemn [“Matthew Hyland”], except for the best piece of writing (Down With Childhood & Adulthood, mostly by Mme Tlank [“Anja Büchele”]) and Best Picture (I IS FOR [YOU ARE NOT] IMPOTANT, by Adam Vass). Denis Velimirovich is right there from start to finish but blamelessly so. See back cover for group portraits [L-R Velimirovich, Tlank, Wastemn in both]. [2 weeks + 2.5 punitive migraines later] So —— the product is a compendium of bad bad grace/gratuitous disgrace, 1997-2022. Written 1998-2016; pictures made 2016-more or less now, apart from photocopied stickers/zine pages etc, which go back to 1997 (e.g. introuvable front/back covers of The Journal of Childish Psychology [*co-ed Naomi Rousseau, praised by the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv in a letter stating: only you have illness in your doing]). Other Zeichnungen are all accidence (i.e. opposite of Cagey “chance”). Media are colour pencil, ink, photocopiers, collage. More birds, sea, flowers and Tlank in them than you might think, along with usual utopian city ruins. All 2D going on 1. Even less clue what to write about written parts. Highlights of bathetic basso continuo? Full lyric sheet for Bad Emotional Investments (aggressive begging rebetiko on God Bless the Death Drive). 1998 thing about Artaud/Heaven’s Gate/workplace motivational psych [*1st pub. Semiotext(e) but handscrawled manuscript was so fucked the print version looked like they applied pre-millennial OCR]. Unpublished hommage to Aotearoa’s greatest living artist, Daniel S. Malone. Whole lot of B. Traven, Judge Schreber, Goya, Wm. Blake. Re-refutation of 1637 attempt by Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop to refute Anne Hutchinson’s Antinomian heresies. Hymn of praise (described by Ben Watson as “craven”) to the late Robert Dellar/Ldn Mad Pride at large. 1 (one) actual love prose-poem, disguised by its 1st words being “T.J. Clark”, who is most definitely not the addressee.etc etc Whole text section is really just 20 years of trying & failing to write like the late Giovanni Intra [see, finally, www.semiotexte.com/pageee]. Some examples instead of more dysexplanation: Almost everything that befalls Schreber –- irritation by insects, violent headaches, fits of bellowing –- is attributed (with empirical evidence) to miraculous intervention. There’s no such thing as a single cause, there’s always something else behind it. – Nervousness, or Immorality [2004] ‘Non-verbal’ modes of communication are supposed to make life easier to understand and endure by breaking freight trains of language down into discrete, comfortable spaced signals. But each new ‘obstinate blockage’ is also a cryptic alarm. What can a smirk, an insistence, a flick of the wrist, be trusted not to mean other than endless conflicting demands and convolutions? If some people avoid being overwhelmed most of the time, that’s not because ‘non-linguistic’, ‘lateral’ thinking is tied to scientific progress, but because it plays to a bogus gallery of intuitions. – La vie pue, messieurs [1998] In him is the friend of bleeding.His boreholes are explicit and impressive.He would like to experience a Home InvasionAnd is almost afraid that Iwill commit that indiscretion. – Good Clean Dirt [2017] help mental illness to smoke and fume! an outpatient about towneyesore stomach and hidea hundred powers slumbering spoiled the carriagewayfor himself and others – Deforcement [2012] THERE’S NOTHING NOTSUPERFICIALABOUT IT! – Keys to the Street [2006] [clinical wastemn (“M.H.”), 21/4/2023]    

Triple Negative – T.R.S.: The Fucking Terrible Receding Shapes, trading as TRIPLE NEGATIVE – NOTHING IS POSSIBLE NERVOUSNESS, OR IMMORALITY DON’T WAIT TO BE HUNTED TO HIDE / SPOILT HEALTH

THE SCREENPLAY FOR A HORROR FILM THAT NEVER WAS “Read The Otherwise and shed a tear for one of cinema’s great, long-lost screenplays.”   Ben Wheatley In 2015, Mark E. Smith of legendary post-punk group The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff co-wrote the script for a horror feature film entitled The Otherwise.  The Fall are recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The surrounding Lancashire landscape is at the mercy of a Satanic biker gang, and haunted by Scottish clansmen who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.  Every film production company they showed it to said it was “too weird” to ever be made. Yes, The Otherwise is weird. It’s also witty, shocking, and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside handwritten notes and previously unpublished photographs by Jim Moir and Smith’s widow and Fall keyboardist Elena Poulou.  Also within are essays by Duff and Poulou, and transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, in which they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favourite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat).  With Manchester’s visionary frontman Mark E. Smith as their one constant, The Fall were the most individual and influential group of their era. From post punk angularity to mutant rockabilly and machine-driven garage rock, via slanted Northern pop, The Fall were one of Britain’s last great singles bands.   As well as their own unmistakable songs, The Fall’s single discography also takes in a panoramic range of cover versions, including the psychedelia of The Move, the northern soul of R. Dean Taylor, the country rock of George Jones, the quintessential Englishness of The Kinks and William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.    Covering a diverse and thrilling run of over 50 releases between 1978 and 2016, Graham Duff has interviewed key members of The Fall, including Marc Riley, Elena Poulou, Simon Wolstencroft, Keiron Melling, Una Baines, Tim Presley and Paul Hanley. 

Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff – The Otherwise

A Secret History of the Esoteric UndergroundRevised & expanded edition464 pages, hardback/paperback, 216mm x 156mmFully illustrated in colour with 240 images. * Full colour throughout* Two new chapters and a significant number of new images* Cover by Mark Titchner  Strange Attractor Press are proud to announce the release of a new revised and expanded edition of David Keenan’s seminal secret history of the UK’s esoteric underground, England’s Hidden Reverse. Based around hundreds of hours of interviews with members of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 as well as contemporaries, friends and associates, EHR illuminates a shadowy English underground scene whose work accented peculiarities of Englishness through the links and affinities they forged with earlier generations of the island’s marginals and outsiders, such as playwright Joe Orton, writers like death decadent Eric, Count Stenbock, ecstatic mystic novelist Arthur Machen and occult figures like Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley.While functioning as an obsessively researched biography of the three interrelated groups EHRalso works to track the trajectory of their influences, explicating a reverse current that runs counter to the mainstream. Written over a period of six years and first published in 2003, the book flits between John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson of Coil’s original Threshold House in Chiswick and the old boys’ school they later moved to in Weston-super-Mare to Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound’s goat farm and visionary art environment in Cooloorta in Southern Ireland to the roof of a house in Muswell Hill where David Tibet of Current 93 receives a vision of Noddy crucified in the sky. From there it moves further back and faster; to eye witness accounts of early Whitehouse performances; to the formation of Throbbing Gristle and the birth of industrial music; to the last moments of the visionary painter Charles Sims; to Angus MacLise, ex-of the Velvet Underground, casting his poem Year as a work of elementary magic; to Shirley Collins, AE Housman and Denton Welch’s visions of England in eternity.Long out of print and with the first edition demanding serious money from collectors, this much-anticipated expanded edition comes completely redesigned, with many new and previously unseen photographs and ephemera. It also comes with two new chapters, a final summing up of how the Reverse has changed gear since the book was first published and a new Chapter Zero entitled Crime Calls For Night where Keenan presents a daring argument that traces the transgressive urge that animates industrial culture all the way from Palaeolithic cave art through rock n roll and punk rock and up to contemporary noise music.About the AuthorDavid Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past 20 years. From 2005 to 2015 he co-ran Volcanic Tongue, an online retailer and magazine dedicated to the enthused presentation of contemporary underground music. His debut novel The Comfort Of Women will be published by Strange Attractor in 2016.

David Keenan - England’s Hidden Reverse Book

Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. “This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny—a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.”—from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.

Boogie Down Predictions - Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism

In this heavily illustrated compendium, the legendary British experimental band Coil tell their story in the present tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established itself as a shape-shifting doyen of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since its untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil's albums were multifaceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil's story in the present tense, and from their personal perspectives.Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn't take root. Not only a worm's eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century's evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.A milestone in Coil's evolving posthumous history, Everything Keeps Dissolving contains a number of previously unseen drawings, photographs and other images by, and of, the band.About the editor:Nick Soulsby is the author of Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil (Winter 2022), Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019), Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence (2018), Thurston Moore: We Sing A New Language (2017), Cobain On Cobain: Interviews & Encounters (2016), I Found My Friends: The Oral History Of Nirvana (2015), and Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana In The Shards Of Incesticide (2012). His words feature in an upcoming book on artist Marc Hurtado and The Abrahadabra Letters by John Balance/Anthony Blokdijk. In 2014 he curated No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds Of The North West Grunge Era with Soul Jazz Records, he wrote the liner notes for the re-release of We Are Urusei Yatsura (2022), and also the oral history of Fire Ants for the reissue of their 1993 EP Stripped.

Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil

Edited and introduced by Edna Bonhomme and Alice Spawls. With contributions from:  Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams. Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex. The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology. Paperback OriginalPublication: 12 November 2023Extent: 220 pages 

AFTER SEX