200 pp Backstage Books, June 2024   “Loving dissection of the band's early years... smart and thorough"In the words of singer Dave Gahan, Depeche Mode were “a new sort of band from a new sort of town”: Basildon, a radical post-war experiment in design and living; a city of the future that serves as a mirror for Depeche Mode’s stark, electronic ultra-pop. Drawing on a wealth of new interviews with friends and lovers, club runners and church elders, pluggers and producers, early bandmates and key industry executives—including fellow Basildonian Alison Moyet and industrial pioneer Genesis P. Orridge—author Simon Spence brings a fresh perspective to the lives of Dave, Martin, Vince, and Fletch, the place they grew up in, and their place in the rock’n’roll firmament.Part musical odyssey, part cultural history, Just Can’t Get Enough traces the story of Depeche Mode from front rooms and school halls to London fetish clubs and legendary Berlin studios; from the Basildon Arts Centre to Top Of The Pops ; and from their earliest recordings to Black Celebration and the cusp of transatlantic superstardom.

A5, Staplebound, November, 2021 feat Bärchen und die Milchbubis, Burka Band, Gudrun Gut, Haru Nemuri, Östro 430, Radamel and SIKSA.A Feminist Fanzine About Composition and Sound Art, based in Cologne

Sound American Publications announces its 27th issue, THE LIFE ISSUE, a reflection upon the smallness—and largeness—of living amidst a tumultuous, globally-shared moment..The Life Issue contributors include claire rousay, who writes about the many cuts accumulated while learning something new; pedal steel superhero Susan Alcorn recounts a battle with injury; composer Jack Langdon offers Sound American’s second fiction offering, a story of how the pandemic affects a fictional musician, presenter, and listener; composer Lea Bertucci interviews improvising vocalist Audrey Chen about identity, commitment to music, and motherhood; bass clarinetist Katie Porter lets us in on a quarantine’s worth of deep-questioning and the looping beauty of banality.Sound American’s ongoing series, “Sites of Formation”, celebrates the piano, featuring writing by pianists Pat Thomas (on Ahmed Abdul-Malik) and Cory Smythe (on Henri Pousseur), as well as Dr. Douglas Rust on the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata and Sound American’s editor, Nate Wooley on the Vangelis’s keyboard-heavy soundtrack to Chariots of Fire. This issue also includes writing by saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos on NYC guerilla concerts during lockdown and a roundtable discussion from members of the Catalytic Sound collective—Ken Vandermark, Luke Stewart, and Bonnie Jones led by Brock Stuessi—on their work to create a streaming platform as an alternative to Spotify.This issue’s Exquisite Corpse is an elegant, nostalgic site-specific work by composer, flutist, vocalist Ka Baird. The Life Issue also features a world-premiere, sixteen-page set of drawings with introduction by Lebanese-born, Berlin-based artist Mazen Kerbaj. The drawings feature his intimate, aching, everyday trek through multiple shutdowns.As we move on from a generation-defining year-and-a-half, The Life Issue allows some of the artists we love to speak intimately as people: people who happen to make art. Without requiring responses to the great traumas of the last eighteen months, the issues allows them to reaffirm their everyday humanity through the small injuries and victories, the days of nothing happening, and the ways that they try to fit in as small parts of a huge world. A unique issue of Sound American, it reaffirms the journal’s mission of making music for everyone in new and unexpected ways.

Frans de Waard published Vital, a fanzine for electronic and electroacoustic music, from 1987 to 1995. It was a low-budget, Xeroxed publication, bearing the revolutionary instruction: ‘No Copyright Publication. Reprint Now!’ It featured interviews with Asmus Tietchens, O Yuki Conjugate, Merzbow, P16.D4, Pierre Henry, Jim O’Rourke, Brume, Döc Wor Mirran and many others, hosted discussions on copyright, plagiarism and plunderphonics, house music, ambient music, cassette culture and noise, and included contributions from musicians such as Leigh Landy, Godfried Willem Raes, John Duncan, and GX Jupitter-Larsen. Every issue included reviews of cassette releases, LPs, CDs and books. A total of 44 issues were published. Vital moved online in 1995, where it appeared every week since as Vital Weekly.This book is a reprint of all 44 issues and is a lively record of the heyday of cassette culture and industrial music, but also of developments in the wider field of electronic music.

In late 1983, Frans de Waard published the first edition of De Nederlandse Cassette Catalogus, listing all known, independently released cassettes in The Netherlands up to that point. No images, no descriptions, just a list. In the following years, three more editions were published and then De Waard ceased producing these booklets. This book contains all four catalogues, along with a 100-page selection of ‘source material, articles from Vinyl, Muziekkrant Oor, De Nieuwe Koekrand, the complete one-off K7 fanzine, along with letters, flyers and label information.This book includes an English introduction to the background of the various catalogue editions, as well as translations of the instructions on how to consult the catalogues. Otherwise, the rest is in Dutch. The front cover is an homage to The International Discography Of The New Wave by Martha DeFoe and B. George, which was itself the direct inspiration for me to compile the first edition.

Adam Morris spent more than twenty years at the coal face of the music industry. In 1979, he co-founded the DIY label Malicious Damage Records, releasing post-punk classics by Killing Joke as well as the highly rated John Peel favourite, “Agent Orange” by Ski Patrol.  He worked for two years as an unpaid tour manager for Killing Joke, an experience that later led him to tour manage the reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry, who paid him. He moved from the label into distribution, working in imports and exports where he bought and sold thousands of records from labels like Beggar’s Banquet, 4AD and Alternative Tentacles (Dead Kennedys). He distributed On-U Sounds for Adrian Sherwood, called at Dr Alimantado’s house for breakfast and represented Big Black and Sub Pop Records in Europe.  In 1988 he founded Mr Modo Records, which collaborated with many of the new MIDI based electronic music producers evolving on the scene at that time. This included Coldcut, 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald. He formed the alliance WAU! Mr Modo with Youth and Dr LX Paterson and became manager of The Orb when that group formed.  At one point he was known as the “Peter Grant of Ambient House”.  Ambient house (or chill out music) was a highly influential genre of the new electronic dance culture that achieved global domination from the end of the 1980’s.  Chill Out was a forerunner for what is now known as EDM. Adam became the first manager to take a MIDI based act on a coast to coast tour of North America. At the time, the main stream music industry saw no long term future in MIDI. They could not see how you could play EDM live or tour it globally. In doing their sell out American tours, The Orb pioneered the way forward and proved most of the music industry wrong.  In 1994, Adam lost his “job for life” on his 40th birthday and was ostracised by most of the biz. At that point, he began the first draft of “Losing It,” a fictional account of some of his working experiences inspired by the novels “Spinal Tap” and “Trainspotting.” He described his effort as “Spinal Tap for ravers.” He completed that in 1996.  Little did he know then that it would take another twenty six years before his stories made it into print. But it did. Its a trip, a mad ride to oblivion, but also a warning to us all.

From 1984 to 2015, Korm Plastics released cassettes, vinyl and CDs. Following a brief hibernation, Korm Plastics relaunched in 2019 as a book publisher. The first book was a re-issue of Frans de Waard’s memoir of working for Staalplaat, This Is Supposed To Be A Record Label, previously published by Timeless Edition in France but unavailable for several years. The success of the second edition led to the publication of new books, which include reprints of fanzines (Vital, De Nederlandse Cassette Catalogus, BOH, Neumusik, Nul Nul, some with CDs), an English translation of a book about punk in the Netherlands (1976-1982), a book about The Legendary Pink Dots’ first ten years, Adam Morris’ fictionalised account of working for Killing Joke and The Orb, a catalogue of ten years of Modelbau (also with a CD), a collection of letters between Coil’s John Balance and Anthony Blokdijk, and Freek Kinkelaar’s musings on music.Korm Plastics founder Frans de Waard teamed up with designer Alfred Boland for this, their latest publication, The Annual. For a long time both had wanted to publish a magazine, which eventually became what they hope will be a regular yearbook with ‘everything you never knew you were interested in’. They invited their authors (present and future) to contribute an article, which led to a wildly diverse selection. From the history of turntablism, a 1985 interview with Roger and Brian Eno, a report on the Groningen punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Truus de Groot about her formative years, Kubus Kasssettes, vinyl hunting in Trinidad, the Perversita festival in 1989, concerts that ended in riots, Willem de Ridder’s Radiola Improvisation Salon, Ultra in Eindhoven, Gary Scott meeting Florian Fricke, Killing Joke/Joy Division, The Slits, contributions by GW Sok and Harold Schellinx and more. Illustrations by Miss.Printed, short interludes by Freek Kinkelaar and Frits Jonker, plus a comic strip by Bertin.

Tenement Press, October 2021 408pp   An anthology publication,featuring contributions fromJohn Akomfrah;Chloe Aridjis;Dennis Cooper;Laura Mulvey;Chris Petit;Mania Akbari;Elena Gorfinkel;Juliet Jacques;Ben Rivers;Dan Fox;Sean Price Williams;Adam Christensen;Stewart Home;Stephen Watts;Tony Grisoni;Gideon Koppel;Astra Taylor;Miranda Pennell;Gareth Evans;Adam Roberts;Tai Shani;Anna Thew;Xiaolu Guo;Andrea Luka Zimmerman;William Fowler;Athina Tsangari;John Rogers;Shama Khanna;Shezad Dawood;Damien Sanville;& Stanley (& Winstanley) Schtinter.The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

(eds.) Sanja Perovic,Rosa Mucignat,Jacob McGuinn, & Cristina Viti, with Dominic J. Jaeckle& Benjamin PickfordTenement Press / No University Press #1978-1-7393851-3-2247pp March, 2024 English/ FrenchAssembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

200pp   May, 2024, Goldsmiths Press - Sonic Series   hardbackThe emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall—Take This Hammer shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to transformations in popular music. Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.

Including interviews with Tame Impala, Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO, Roger O'Donnell of The Cure, Gregg Araki, Slowdive, Labrinth, Nancy Whang, Teenage Engineering, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), Geneva Jacuzzi, Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco, Tim Gane of Stereolab, Avey Tare, TV Girl, Jessy Lanza, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Nation of Language, Bibio, The Blaze, Sg Lewis, Bob Baker Music Archives.  The third compilation of Synth History interviews in tangible 'zine form! A 200+ page high quality 'zine featuring a curated compilation of interviews with legendary and modern day pioneers.

Published by Mousse and Podere Trafonti Texts by Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Adam Khalil, Isabella Rjeille, and Yann Chateigné TytelmanDesign by Maximage   2024English / Italian136 pagesHardcover, 19 x 26 cmISBN 978-88-6749-598-6 Histories of Predation traces Marie Kølbæk Iversen's critical reimagining of subjectivity and cultural history, from Mirror Therapy (2015–16) and Io/I (2015–19) to Histories of Predation (2022–) and the performance project Donnimaar (2017–). Interrogating the demographic and aesthetic homogenization of the mid-nineteenth-century Danish nation-state and the ensuing forced forgetting of divergent identities, the book offers a deep-time view on processes of nation building by probing the geopolitical "mythologics" they hinge on.

Featuring  Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort.    The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more.

Trade Paperback9 inches x 11 inches400 pages, 387 ImagesThe story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, resolutely DIY rock and roll jams. Published for the first time in English, the book features the collective’s members telling their own story, accompanied by a vast archive of photographs, newspaper clippings, posters, flyers, album covers, and paintings. With its in-depth oral history and rich visuals, this book provides valuable insight into over five decades of internationally-renowned musical and countercultural innovation.

paperback, august 2022The first collection dedicated to David Bowie's acting career shows that his film characterisations and performance styles shift and reform as decoratively as his musical personas. Though he was described as the most influential pop artist of the 20th century, whose work became synonymous with mask, mystery, sexual excess and ch-ch-ch-changing genres, Bowie also applied his genius to the craft of acting. Bowie’s considerable filmography is systematically examined in 12 scholarly essays that include tributes to Bowie's performance craft in other media forms. Classic films such as The Prestige and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, cult hits Labyrinth and The Man Who Fell To Earth, as well as lesser-known roles in The Image, Christiane F. and Broadway hit The Elephant Man are viewed, not simply through the lens of Bowie’s mega-stardom, but as the work of a serious actor with inimitable talent. This compelling analysis celebrates the risk-taking intelligence and bravura of David Bowie: actor, mime, mimic and icon.

A 100-page hardcover compendium of David Berman's (Silver Jews) best-loved black and white cartoons, priced for the laughter-adjacent commuter bus-and-train reading crew. The New Yorker missed out, don't you do it too! “The drawings are pitched into some rudimentary space of public art, a place we might think of as between and below Gary Larson and Raymond Pettibon.”

We Jazz Records is a label based in Helsinki releasing cutting edge jazz music on vinyl + additional formats.The eleventh issue of We Jazz Magazine, "Oni Puladi" for Carla Bley. 128 pages, 170 x 240 mm in size and printed on 140g Edixion paper with laminated 300g Invercote covers. All articles presented IN ENGLISH. Carla Bley by Stewart Smith, Gondwana Records by Debra Richards, [Ahmed] by Seymour Wright, Amirtha Kidambi by Ayana Contreras, Ruth Goller by Daryl Worthington, Abdul Wadud by Pierre Crépon / David Neil Lee, François Jeanneau by Bret Sjerven, Mette Henriette by Debra Richards, Nduduzo Makhathini by Rob Garratt, Discaholic column by Mats Gustafsson, We Jazz Festival 2023 photo essay by Julius Töyrylä, album & live reviews, plus more.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  faber, 2014  originally published 1972 Edna O’Brien (born December 15, 1930, Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland) is an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter  Edna O'Brien's haunting spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts her (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind in a narrative voice of blistering, radical originality.