Fugitivity pervaded American slavery, propelling slaveholders into acts to prevent the self-liberation of enslaved people. The paradox of free and slave states simultaneously enabled the freedom of uncaptured runaways and criminalized the act of seeking freedom with sanctions and state laws that controlled slave travel. A central paradigm of this counteraction to freedom was runaway ads. Fugitive slave advertisements illuminated the flight of the absconder. Within the brevity of ad lines, lives of the enslaved were laid bare in descriptions of physical scars, character depictions, labor competences, and speculations about their destinations, which often revealed kinship ties. With no definitive way of knowing the plight of particular runaway slaves, the poems in Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound reimagine and reconstruct narratives through ekphrastic responses to runaway ads and other documented artifacts. Embodying the aesthetics of the poetic forms haiku and tanka, poems in this collection embark on an inquiry into the natural world experienced by the enslaved. This approach extends beyond the traditional Zen-inspired approach to haiku writing. For the enslaved, nature was captivity. Runagate is a cartographic exploration into those who found courage in bondage and who gave their lives to build our country.

Softcover, 256pp Duke University Press, 2001In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Softcover, 448pp Duke University Press, 2001Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell's odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there." Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell's openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to “uncuration”: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding, 48pp Varamo Press, November 2022, series Gestures  In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’ Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Tunes transcribed from recordings and annotated by Francis Collinson Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Paperback, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  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.

Made in Kilphedir in South Uist in the year 1983 Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Softcover, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  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.

Softcover, 104pp Granta, 2024Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.

Softcover, 60pp, Risograph printed Old Hair Comix, Glasgow 2024Look 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

Softcover, 12x19cm, 224pp Varamo Press, Brussels/Oslo, January 2025    After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together. Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

Hardback, 544pp   White Rabbit Press, March 2025Volcanic Tongue presents the first ever collection of multi-award-winning author David Keenan's music writings. Keenan has been writing about music since publishing his first fanzine, inspired by The Pastels and by Glasgow (and Airdrie's) DIY music scene, in 1988. Since then, he has written about music for Melody Maker, NME, Uncut, Mojo, The New York Times, Ugly Things, The Literary Review, The Social and, most consistently, The Wire. Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the record shop and mail order that Keenan ran with his partner, Heather Leigh, in Glasgow from 2005-2015.Volcanic Tongue features the best of his reviews, interviews and think pieces, with exclusive in-depth conversations between Keenan and Nick Cave, members of legendary industrial bands Coil and Throbbing Gristle, krautrock legends like Faust, Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, German auto-destructives Einstürzende Neubauten, as well as discographical analysis of the back catalogues of groups like Sonic Youth and musicians like John Fahey, extensive writings on free jazz and obsessive in-depth digs into favourites like Pere Ubu, Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd, Sun Ra, guitarist and vocalist John Martyn and many more. It is an essential addition to any music fan's bookshelf.This first collection of his legendary criticism functions as an extended love letter to the revolutionary music of the 20th century and the incredible culture that sustained it.

Edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson Marion Schmid is Professor of French Literature and Film at the University of Edinburgh. Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge.   Paperback, 160pp Legenda, 2019  Chantal Akerman was one of the most significant directors of our times. A radical innovator of cinematic forms, she was at the forefront of feminist and women’s filmmaking. In the 1990s, she developed an important installation practice and began to experiment with self-writing. Focusing on Akerman’s works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media. From her documentaries ‘bordering on fiction’ to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman’s work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.

Hardback, 7.10(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.00(d), 280pp A24, December 2024     This book is jam-packed with over 100 kid - and adult - approved movie night recommendations that span decades, countries, and genres, with chapters for Preschoolers, Little Kids, Big Kids, and Tweens, featuring an introduction by Julian Shapiro-Barnum, host of Recess Therapy; an illustrated symbol system that flags age-inappropriate elements like scary characters or bad language; special sections dedicated to beloved genres and directors; fun activities and how-tos, including “How to Watch and Talk About Movies”; and a family film tracker to log your loves, likes, and mehs.

Paperback, A4, 80pp smallest functional unit, 2025Welcome to the fourth edition of Graphème: a collection of scores by composers and artists intent on sharing and collaborating with performers in the realisation of adventurous and creative sonic experiences.The pieces presented in this edition range from simple to complex. Some are more open to freedom of interpretation and some are more specific, but all are offered in the spirit of collaboration with the performer who interprets the work.The scores within this volume draw on compositional concepts that are as varied as they are imaginative. Featuring photo-montage, graphs, illustration, timelines and grids, each piece offers the performer the chance to explore their own interpretation of the structural frameworks suggested by the composer. Representing kaleidoscopic approaches to sound and the gestural organisation of materials, these works, each different in their own way, share a sense of cooperation with the performer, which, while becoming more prevalent in contemporary music, is still quite removed from the more traditional relationship between composer and interpreter.The thematic and timbral materials offered for exploration are a true collage of ideas, motives and themes. They represent a meeting of creative initiations and responses, composed with rigour and, often, humour.Time is also represented in multi-faceted ways, whether linear, spatial or cyclical, offering the performer various ways to navigate the ideas: to overlay concepts of time as well as material, contributing to a kind of open and imaginative expression of time, material and space.Each composer’s score can be seen then, as a starting point, suggesting ways to begin: works unfolding as they are performed — often neither fully concrete, nor free of form or trajectory.Today more than ever it seems we need to reassess what it means to create, to collaborate and to find new ways of working together. These ideas of music composition and performance move towards new models through which we can truly come together as creative forces, not only with reflection and refinement, but also with spontaneity and freedom.The works in this volume, as in the previous three volumes, are here to be performed. Play them, explore them and realise them in any way you find imaginable. We are excited by the possibilities of performers creating a collaborative space between the composer and – in the rendering of these works – with audiences and listeners.

N.H. Pritchard didn’t see the fruit of his labor during his lifetime, but now is recognized as a predecessor of the Rap and Language poets. -Ishmael Reed   Norman Henry Pritchard was born in New York City in 1939 and studied at New York University and Columbia University. His work has been published in two collections: The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970 (1970) and Eecchhooeess (1971). His poetry was featured in the journals Umbra and The East Village Other, performed on the jazz poetry compilation New Jazz Poets (1967), and anthologized in The New Black Poetry (1969) and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969). Pritchard taught poetry at the New School for Social Research and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary. He died in eastern Pennsylvania on February 8, 1996.   Paperback, 152pp Primary Information, October 2024The Mundus is Norman Pritchard’s magnum opus, a mysterious work that is both visual and poetic, literary and mystical. The work was composed between 1965 until at least July 1971, a six-year period during which the author refined and reworked its pages, seeking out new literary forms alongside personal transcendence. As Pritchard mentions in a letter to Ishmael Reed in 1968, “Literature in and of itself doesn’t seem to have a broad enough scope for me anymore.” Despite its ambitions and grand scope, The Mundus has gone unpublished for over fifty years. Subtitled “a novel with voices,” The Mundus combines Pritchard’s earlier poetic innovations with his growing interest in theosophy, exploring a spiritual terrain he enigmatically dubbed the transreal. Appropriately, this lost masterpiece represents some of Pritchard’s most challenging work, with the text proceeding in small leaps and sublime fractures, stuttering across the page with sonic and visual momentum as it threads through an immersive, textual mist comprised solely of the letter “o”. Pritchard found early success with his books The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS, experimental texts that, in part, bear the imprint of the avant-garde arts, music, and poetry communities of the late 1960s, in particular the Umbra group, a collective of Black poets of which he was a leading member. But The Mundus finds Pritchard at his most radical and revelatory, putting forth a profound act of negation, while it delves readers into a primordial soundscape populated by language’s essential building blocks. An early pillar of Black poetics and a world unto itself, The Mundus must be sounded out not only with the mind, but also with the mouth, body, and soul.

Softcover, 18 × 15 cm, 202 pp Blank Forms, 2021Interviews by Alan Licht with Vito Acconci, ANOHNI, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, the Dream Syndicate’s Karl Precoda, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Adris Hoyos, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Alessandra Novaga, Tony Oursler, Lou Reed, Kelly Reichardt, The Sea and Cake, Suicide, Michael Snow, Greg Tate, Tom Verlaine, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan. Introduction by Jay Sanders. For the past thirty years, Alan Licht has been a performer, programmer, and chronicler of New York’s art and music scenes. His dry wit, deep erudition, and unique perspective—informed by decades of experience as a touring and recording guitarist in the worlds of experimental music and underground rock—have distinguished him as the go-to writer for profiles of adventurous artists across genres. A precocious scholar and improvisor, by the time he graduated from Vassar College in 1990 Licht had already authored important articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and Charlemagne Palestine, and recorded with luminaries such as Rashied Ali and Thurston Moore. In 1999 he became a regular contributor to the British experimental music magazine theWirewhile continuing to publish in a wide array of periodicals, ranging from the artworld glossies to underground fanzines. Common Tones gathers a selection of never-before-published interviews, many conducted during the writing of Licht’s groundbreaking profiles, alongside extended versions of his celebrated conversations with artists, previously untranscribed public and private exchanges, and new dialogues held on the occasion of this collection. Even Lou Reed, a notoriously difficult interviewee, was impressed. Alan Licht is a writer, musician, and curator based in New York City. He is equally known for his guitar work in the underground rock bands Run On and Love Child and in the experimental groups the Blue Humans and Text of Light. He has released eight solo guitar albums and more than a dozen duo and trio records of improvised music. Licht is a contributing music editor at BOMB magazine and his essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Parkett, the Wire,the Believer, Sight & Sound, and many other publications. He is the author ofAn Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, an extended personal essay about coming of age as a rock fan and musician;Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, the first full-length study of sound installations and sound sculpture to appear in English; and Sound Art Revisited,an updated version of the latter, published last year; and he is a co-author of Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, a collection of interviews with Will Oldham,andTitle TK 2010–2014, a compilation of concert transcriptions, with Cory Arcangel and Howie Chen.

Softcover, 456pp Penguin, 2026Motherhood is a political state. Helen Charman makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s.When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo.In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them, too.Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Paperback, 80pp Nightboat, 2024Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.