A5 staplebound, 36pp Bricks from the Kiln, 2024‘tendentious | neo-semantics’ is a collection of text-sound pieces by Lily Greenham transcribed and (re)typeset from a previously unpublished edition originally written in 1970. Reproduced and revocalised in dialogue with the Lily Greenham Archive at Goldsmiths, this new edition is bookended by excerpts of contextual writings by Greenham — ‘a few remarks’ (1970 / 71), ‘language and its uses: lingua tongue’ (1972) and a ‘post scriptum’ to the essay ‘lingual music’ (1977) — and also punctuated by ‘aphorisms’ and ‘50 words stories’ as structural beats between semantic poems. A tall format hole-punched insert contains a written remembrance by Larry Wendt and a photograph courtesy of Stephen Ruppenthal. Later in 2024 a vinyl record / catalogue co-published with the Badischer Kunstverein, featuring recordings of vocal performances by Anna Barham and Ute Wassermann, will follow.

Edited by Helen Marten, Harriet Moore & Matthew Stuart Paperback, 240pp December, 2024Bricks from the Kiln is an independent publisher of books, editions and a somewhat yearly journal. Co-run by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister between the UK and US, and founded in 2015, its output is largely concerned with explorative yet critically minded forms of writing and language sitting at the intersection of art, design and literature.   Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

Link to the Free Alaa campaign https://freealaa.net/   Paperback, 448pp Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.

Hardback, 512pp Allen Lane, 2024Motherhood 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.

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. DempseyFebruary 19 - March 27, 2010Includes an introduction by Alan Warner Design by Kathi Bestecvsd0039 softcover, 36 pages, 9 x 7 inches

Catalog for an exhibition held at Corbett vs. DempseyOctober 26 - November 30, 2007Includes an essay by John Corbett Design by Kathi BesteSecond edition, reprinted 2012cvsd0017a softcover, 100 pages, 9 x 7 inches

by Rosen Eveleigh with Carlo Canun and Leo SchickButchCamp is back with a limp-wristed view of camp subculture throughout time. This week-to-week calendar lists key events in the butch-camp canon through 30 BC to 2025 — from a big gay kiss-in, to Kermit and Miss Piggy’s breakup, to Margaret Thatcher’s death, to the Last Call at Maud’s… and more. by Rosen Eveleigh with Carlo Canun and Leo Schick

by Niki Elliott, Karen Hill, Jo Johnson, Chris Rowley, and Jon Slade. Edited by Ethan Swan & designed by Matthew Walkerdine. Published by JABS &  The Grass is Green in the Fields for You 190 x 250mm, 352 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024Huggy Bear was a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-1994. Outcast and outraged, they made a howling, squalling mess of punk, all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Huggy Bear was a group that let things be complicated, that considered themselves complicit, but never took that as a reason to surrender. There’s no band more important. Killed (of Kids) is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear. It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers and ephemera from their three year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, encouragement. Throughout Huggy Bear’s lifespan, they rejected major label advances and shunned contact with the music press. Following the band’s final concert, the members largely withdrew from public life. The subsequent 30 years has seen their legend bloom. And just as the warnings and incitements of their music continue to grow in relevance, the curiosity and distortion has also grown. Killed (of Kids) documents the chances taken, the psychic drains, the unique connections and the aftermaths of Huggy Bear. The book is a real reflection of the sharp edges and dissatisfaction and love that has always lived in the songs and the words. It is not a “rock biography.” There’s no swagger or grand narrative. It’s all small delight and protective energy. Drastic liberation. A reiteration of Huggy Bear’s propositions: It is always possible for people to trust their collaborators. It is always possible to make a song (book/painting/poem/dance/etc) about something that you’ve never heard anyone make a song about before. It is always possible to refuse to answer their questions.

Repeater Books, Nov, 2024 240pp   Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a Southend-on-Sea-based writer. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, where she now teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her performance work, comprising sound collage and spoken word with printmaking props, occasions numerous performances both nationally and internationally. She writes for publications including the Darkside, the Leigh Times, and the London Drinker. https://www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.ukAn alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom. Code: Damp is a sometimes-comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on.

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries . . . I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it’s an identity or career. Her voice—which is always more than hers alone—is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge.   Paperback, 200ppDivided Publishing, October 2024 Is it the computerization of the planetOr a loosening of my fidelity to sufferingI don’t understand the intensityI’ve hidden here but I know I despairedOf finding a physical place to keepMy tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoiseWhen you stop looking at them . . .   Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

trans. Lara Vergnaud A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. Annie Ernaux Paperback, 112pp Divided, September 2024 Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

280 p. Paperback Divided, November 2024 "Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .   After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.With an introduction by Colm Tóibín

2xLP; DVD, libretto, large 16p Booklet in printed cardboard box A music drama composed by Sven-Åke Johansson and Alexander von Schlippenbach, performed and recorded at Hebbel Theater, Berlin, 12.11.1994 In the programme, Johansson describes his observations of construction workers who "spend a good part of their lives – when it rains or snows, while changing clothes and so on – in these so-called construction wagons, usually set up in the immediate vicinity of the construction sites." The drama thus at the core employs an approach very typical of him: observing everyday activities and reinterpreting them artistically. What makes it unique is the combination of art forms: (absurd) theatre, dance, song and free jazz all are equal parts. Never, one of these becomes a simple accompaniment of the other. They alternate and mix, eventually leading to a Babylonian confusion that becomes meaningful in itself. Despite or maybe even because of its uniqueness, this opera is one of Johansson's key works. "... Über Ursache ..." was performed three times between 1986 and 1994. The audio recording of the premiere at the Stuttgart State Opera was released by FMP as a standard double LP in 1989. The 1994 audio and video recordings from the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin are presented here for the first time, packaged as a lavish box set with two LPs, a DVD, a 16-page booklet with photos and liner notes by Johansson, Konrad Heidkamp and Peter Ablinger, plus 20-page libretto – an edition that this spectacular work has deserved for a long time.  Cello – Tristan Honsinger Harp – Anne Le Baron Percussion, Drums – Paul Lovens Piano – Alexander von Schlippenbach Saxophone, Clarinet – Wolfgang Fuchs Saxophone - Dietmar Diesner Vocals – Shelley Hirsch Vocals, Accordion – Sven Åke Johansson Libretto-text by Sven-Åke Johansson & Shelley Hirsch Design by Teresa Iten Cover and Drawings by Sven-Ake Johansson

Hamish Hamilton, 2023 Hardback, 240ppRaw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain. Noreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father's car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she has discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Morecambe Bay, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma. Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life. Noreen's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.

Isobar Press, 2022 120 pages, paperback

Jawbone Press, 2023  Paperback, 288ppAlong with Factory, Mute, and Creation, Some Bizzare was the vanguard of outsider music in the 1980s. The label's debut release reads like a who s who of electronic music, featuring early tracks from Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Blancmange, and The The, while over the next decade its roster would include artists such as Marc Almond, Cabaret Voltaire, Einsturzende Neubauten, Foetus, Swans, Coil, and Psychic TV. For a time, Some Bizzare was the most exciting independent record label in the world, but the music is only half of the story. Self-styled label boss Stevo Pearce s unconventional dealings with the industry are legendary. Sometimes they were playful (sending teddy bears to meetings in his place), other times less so (he and Marc Almond destroyed offices at Phonogram and terrorised staff). Despite this, he was a force to be reckoned with. His preternatural ability to spot talent meant his label was responsible for releasing some of the decade s most forward-thinking, transgressive, and influential music. The Some Bizzare story spans the globe: from ecstasy parties in early 80s New York to video shoots in the Peruvian jungle, from events in disused tube stations to seedy sex shows in Soho. There were million-selling singles, run-ins with the Vice Squad, destruction at the ICA, death threats, meltdowns, and, of course, sex dwarves. For a time, Stevo had the music industry in the palm of his hands, only for it all to slip through his fingers. But he and Some Bizzare left a legacy of incredible music that still has an influence and impact today.

The Gould Collection, 2023Hardcover, 108pp280 x 180mm   The Gould Collection is a series of books that brings together contemporary photographers with writers. The series is published in memory of Christophe Crison, a photobook collector from Paris who died tragically in July 2015 at the age of forty-five. The Gould Collection is co-edited by Laurence Vecten (Paris), Russet Lederman (New York City) and Yoko Sawada (Tokyo).For The Story We Used to Tell, volume seven of The Gould Collection, the human condition, memory and how we view one another shape the pairing of photographs by Chris Marker with a short story by Shirley Jackson. Although seemingly quite different at first glance—Jackson was an American author known for her dark and suspenseful stories, while Marker was a French avant-garde filmmaker and photographer who used experimental techniques—both use ordinary moments to twist time and reality in a psychological examination of human behavior and social interactions. In Marker’s photographs, a selection surveying his work from the 1950s to 2011, which includes images from his Crush Art, Passengers, Koreans and Staring Back series, individuals return the photographer’s gaze in an acknowledgment of the limitations of the medium and the subject’s brief entrapment by the camera. Digitalized in the 1990s and later, inherent in these images is a low-resolution, early digital aesthetic purposefully embraced by Marker. Similarly, Jackson uses the entrapment of two women in a picture in “The Story We Used to Tell” to explore the unknowingness and irrationality of human emotions. Both Jackson’s story and Marker’s photographs purposefully leave many open questions as they probe the human condition within a psychologically malleable and distorted reality.

Blank Forms, November 2024 352pp, paperback Spencer Gerhardt is a composer and mathematician. His music engages constructive, introspective, and romantic traditions. For more than twenty years, Gerhardt has written solo piano music, piano-based songs, and works of minimalism. He studied raga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, piano performance with Sung-Hwa Park, and has collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ankersmit and Charles Curtis. Gerhardt has a record forthcoming on Blank Forms Editions. Gerhardt is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Mathematics at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on algebraic groups, often viewed in connection with problems in finite group theory and representation theory. Prior to his work in algebra, he studied logic and philosophy in the Brouwerian tradition at the University of Amsterdam, where he received a Master of Science. Gerhardt has written about art and music in this context, in particular the philosophical underpinnings of minimalism.Noted composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt presents Ticking Stripe, a groundbreaking collection of essays linking notions of continuity and construction across the boundaries of math, art, music, and philosophy. Gerhardt offers new, and deeply informed interpretations of musical minimalism and the 1960s avant-garde, viewed through the lens of trailblazing artists such as La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Catherine Christer Hennix, Henry Flynt, and Tony Conrad. Ticking Stripe pairs the spirit of L. E. J. Brouwer—a mathematician who brilliantly, and controversially, sought to reconstruct the continuum in his own philosophical terms called intuitionism—with the ambitions of pioneering minimalists who combined continued constructions, idealized processes of introspection, and conceptual world-building with a host of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual concerns. Informed by his own work as a professional mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality. Spanning more than two decades, these essays feature rich historical explorations of minimalist music, writing on contemporary art, and work in logic and algebra, all approached with clarity and technical aplomb.