Books and Magazines


191 x 248mm, 292pp, perfect bound, B&W; printed interior onto gloss stock, B&W; printed cover onto Colorplan stock with fluro sticker affixed, 2024 TGIGITFFY—037 / September 2024Asparagus Piss Raindrop (the book, this book) gathers a (near) complete history of the crytpo conceptual science fiction anti climax band of the same name. Active between the years of 2012 — 2017 and broadly based in Glasgow and its experimental music scene, the group performed at gigs, festivals, artist-led spaces and institutions internationally. Gathered here are artefacts and evidence of the group’s activity up to the original date of publication, including but not limited to scores, email correspondence, reflective texts, photographs, drawings and planning documents. Across more than twenty chapters, significant, durational projects are surveyed alongside the partial, speculative and improvisatory. Asparagus Piss Raindrop’s work arises from the questions: How can we do things otherwise? What musical forms arise from and inform our daily experience? Performances typically draw on such things as recycled children’s games, group therapy, shapeshifting, declarations of ridiculous texts, geology, architectural intervention, gender theory, site specificity and slug reproduction. Asparagus Piss Raindrop re-publishes the August 2017 edition of the book, which was produced in a limited run with Publication Studio Glasgow and Good Press, and includes a new chapter on the group’s final performance R&R; Rat Race at the Witch Hazel School from November 2017.

Asparagus Piss Raindrop – Asparagus Piss Raindrop

Published: Tochnit Aleph published in April 2016 English edition CD + 20 pages booklet (21 x 29,7 cm)Dorothy Iannone tells her Fluxus Story in a Berlin recording from 1979. “There, Maciunas and I looked deeply but impassively into each other's eyes, not knowing then that we would meet again on these pages. Perhaps he was thinking, ‘Who is this woman?'. Perhaps it might even have amused him, somewhere far back in his mind, to know that I am she who is the Fluxus woman artist who is not the Fluxus woman artist.”Dorothy Iannone Limited edition of 270 copies.   For more than six decades, American artist Dorothy Iannone (1933, Boston–2022, Berlin) attempted to represent ecstatic love, the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure. Today her oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist's books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female sexuality, and political and feminist issues. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou declared as early as in 1972, "She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation." A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.Active from the 1960s to the early 2020s, her work has been recently exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2022); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); the Serpentine Pavilion, London (2018); the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2017); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunt, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2014); the New Museum, New York (2009).

Dorothy Iannone – A Fluxus Essay

Published: Nero Presspublished in May 2024 English edition 16 x 23 cm (softcover) 76 pages (ill.)A new poem composed by the legendary dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti. New Book is the title of a new poem composed of three existing poems re-edited by Simone Forti. As reading this poem, one moves forward with wonder amid everyday memories, recollections of life, a sense of civic duty, glimpses of a precarious world, the beauty of nature, melancholy, a rage to live.   American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance. Forti emigrated from Italy with her family via Switzerland to Los Angeles in 1938, where she subsequently studied for four years with choreographer Anna Halprin and has since spent most of her life. She joined the experimental downtown art scene in New York during the emergence of performance art, process-based work and Minimal Art and spent a fruitful time in Rome in the late 1960s, where she used the spaces of L'Attico to study and perform. Her work is seen as a precursor of the famous Judson Dance Theater—a group of artists experimenting with dance, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—and Minimal Art, although she prefers to be referred simply as a "movement artist."Forti has worked with artists like Dan Graham, Robert Whitman, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg and composers like Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, and La Monte Young.

Simone Forti – New Book

amaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting.Norman C. Stolzoff brings a fan’s enthusiasm to his broad perspective on dancehall, providing extensive interviews, original photographs, and anthropological analysis from eighteen months of fieldwork in Kingston. Stolzoff argues that this enormously popular musical genre expresses deep conflicts within Jamaican society, not only along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion but also between different factions struggling to gain control of the island nation’s political culture. Dancehall culture thus remains a key arena where the future of this volatile nation is shaped. As his argument unfolds, Stolzoff traces the history of Jamaican music from its roots in the late eighteenth century to 1945, from the addition of sound systems and technology during the mid-forties to early sixties, and finally through the post-independence years from the early sixties to the present. Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a general introduction for those interested in dancehall music and culture. For the fan or musicologist, it will serve as a comprehensive reference book.

Norman C. Stolzoff – Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

Archive Books, 2021 published in February 2021 English edition 13 x 20 cm (softcover) 264 pages   ISBN : 978-3-948212-11-7 EAN : 9783948212117A collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman.   The book investigates his legacy beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic and the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music. By trying to complicate, deny or expatiate on the notions of the harmonic, tonal hierarchy, the triadic, or even the tonal centre, Eastman's compositions explore strategies and technologies of attaining the atonal. One might be tempted to see Eastman in the legacy of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and others, but here too, it is worth shifting the geography of minimal tendencies and minimalism in music. It is worth listening and reading Eastman's music within the scope of what Oluwaseyi Kehinde describes as the application of chromatic forms such as polytonality, atonality, dissonance as the fulcrum in analysing some elements of African music such as melody, harmony, instruments and instrumentation.   This publication constructs a non-linear genealogy of Eastman's practice and his cultural, political and social relevance, while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.   ---   Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism. He was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music.   There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic—undoubtedly also one of the most powerful. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned—including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.   ---   Edited by: Federica Bueti, Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Contributions by Antonia Alampi, Rocco Di Pietro, Kodwo Eshun, Federica Bueti, Sean Griffin, Sumanth Gopinath, Jean-Christophe Marti, Josh Kun, Elaine Mitchener, Malak Helmy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Marie Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, Berno Odo Polzer, Pungwe, Christine Rusiniak.   ---

Julius Eastman – We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal – Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith, musician and a member of The Scratch Orchestra, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians. Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians’ interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith’s music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK.The book will introduce new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew.Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book is edited and co-published by Pykë-Presje, a collective from Prizren, Kosovo.The book is commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina.

From Scratch – Albanian Summer Picaresque