Baring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, which have generally reduced it to a set of techniques divorced from social contexts. Drawing on close observation and interviews with Hip Hop pioneers and their students, Rosemarie A. Roberts proposes a framework that opens up new theoretical space for considering collective knowledge formations and collective knowledge production. Roberts argues that the historical, cultural and social experiences of marginalized black and brown bodies materialize in and through Hip Hop dance from the streets of the South Bronx and other urban centers to contemporary worldwide expressions. An Afro-diasporic dance form, Hip Hop dance, she argues, is a provocative and sentient process of resisting oppressive manifestations of race and power. A companion web site contains over 30 video clips referenced in the text.

Maya Dunietz: Root of Two is a 144-page catalog that accompanies an exhibition of the same title, on view at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2022. Designed by Omnivore, this catalogue traverses the career of experimental musician and composer Maya Dunietz, unveiling her multidisciplinary practice that has spanned performance, composition, sculpture and installation, avant-garde theatrical performance, and choir work. Edited by Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center, contributors include Rachel Adams, Chris Cook, Maya Dunietz, Michael Pisaro, Galit Eilat, Ariel Ashbel, Chen Tamir, Sergio Edelsztein, Ran Kasmy Ilan, and Keren Rosenbaum.

“There were two types of culture… Official culture and underground culture. I was always for underground culture.” Rudy Fuchs, Bone cutter and collector  During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film.  Who were they? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Based on years of interviews and oral testimonies, Bone Music continues the story of X-Ray Audio, presenting the stories of the original Bone bootleggers, their customers and persecutors, evoking their spirit of resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment.  Bone Music details how the bootleggers worked, explains their technical processes, and situates their unique discs in a revised history of recorded media with a wealth of compelling new detail.

Format: Paperback Publisher: PLUTO PRESS Published: August 1, 2007 ISBN: 9780745321653 352 pages Sometimes described as ‘the British Brecht’, Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) was a major twentieth-century political artist. This is the first biography of MacColl, and was prepared with the authorisation of his collaborator and widow, Peggy Seeger. MacColl became a communist at fourteen and spent six decades at the cultural forefront of numerous political struggles, producing plays, songs and radio programmes on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Poll Tax. Charting his involvement in radical theatre, his ground breaking radio work in the UK and the USA, as well as his musical influences and legacy, his three marriages, and his relationship with his songwriter daughter Kirstie MacColl, this is a lively account of a much-loved icon of 20th century folk music. Drawing on extensive research, Class Act is a freshly conceived and energetically written account of a highly creative and controversial activist.

We arrived in a fleet of white stretch limos at a clearing in a wood near Woking. Here the K Foundation was exhibiting a million pounds in cash, while Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty circled the perimeter in two orange Saracen armoured vehicles, blasting out Abba's 'Money Money Money' . . .The list of bands and artists Mick Houghton worked with in an illustrious career in the music business reads like a Who's Who of some of the greatest, most influential and downright dysfunctional cult groups of the post-punk era and beyond - Ramones, Talking Heads, The Undertones, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Felt, Sonic Youth, The Wedding Present, Spiritualized and Elastica among them. Often judiciously (or unintentionally) sidestepping the major trends in music - baggy, grunge and Britpop - his reputation for attracting outsiders led to him working with artists as disparate as Sun Ra, Andrew Oldham, Ken Kesey, Bert Jansch, Stereolab, Mercury Rev and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.But the three acts Mick is most closely identified with are Echo & the Bunnymen, Julian Cope (and the Teardrop Explodes) and the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu/KLF in all their guises. Between them, these three played a significant role in shaping the musical landscape of the eighties and nineties, and - as confidant and co-conspirator - Mick was with their chorus along the way, carefully navigating the minefield of rivalries and contrasting fortunes. It is Mick's indefatigable belief that it was always the music that came first, and it is his knack of attracting so-called difficult and troubled artists that makes Fried & Justified such an amusing, honest and insightful tale.

Published: Duke University PressPages: 160 Published: March 2020The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.   --- “David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” — Ben Lerner “It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” — Will Oldham, music maker "Grubbs uses the set-up to extrapolate many philosophical questions surrounding the materiality of technology, the motivations of the performer, the collapsing of distinctions between different media and musing on the economics of entertainment – all within the crucible of the noble ruin of the recording studio, once the promised land for an aspiring musician and now an expensive obsolescence. . . . A kind of torrent of ideas and anxieties in the form of a visual score pouring forth from his three decades of recording in grungy studios and gilded arts academies all over the world." — Alex Neilson, Record Collector "At times, Grubbs goes into incredible detail: the buttons an engineer presses, the way a space looks, the feelings that arise from playing an instrument. However.just when it becomes almost tedious, such detail proves to be the book's greatest charm. As it progresses, one more fully appreciates how these descriptions illuminate the mindfulness that music-making can beget." — Joshua Minsoo Kim, The Wire "[The Voice in the Headphones] is an experience encapsulated in the space-time of the recording process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the room that not only floats acoustically but also is free from the flow of real time in the outside world. . . . This is an insider’s inside book about an inside experience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal to anyone who’s wondered just what goes on in those sequestered rooms." — George Grella, New York City Jazz Record

Ethnomusicologist Eric Charry's innovative and road-tested textbook is an introduction to Rock and R&B; suitable for general education courses in music and also accessible for general readers interested in a novel approach to gaining a historically rich, yet concise understanding of these genres. The book is organized around a series of timelines, tables, and figures created by the author, and provides fresh perspectives that bring readers into the heart of the social and cultural import of the music. Charry lays out key theoretical issues, covers the technical foundations of the music industry, and provides a capsule history of who did what when, with particular emphasis on the rapid emergence of distinct genres in the music industry. The book's figures distill the history and provide new insight into understanding trends. Over 1000 artists, albums, and songs are included here, such as Muddy Water, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Velvet Underground, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Madonna, Talking Heads, and Public Enemy. Publisher: Wesleyan University PressISBN: 9780819578952Number of pages: 272Dimensions: 203 x 184 mm

Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter's debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Through her mother's death and her father's illnesses, Geter weaves the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord. This collection thrums with authenticity and heart.

There is a story about a meatball which comes out of nowhere, hitting some people’s heads and changing their lives forever. There is a mouse that gets caught while trying to find a cheesy snack. There has been a 100% increase in the cost of rent in Berlin in the past 10 years and no increase in my wages. A bag full of basmati rice. A teacher stuck at work waiting for students stuck at work. There is the price one pays to purchase organic underwear so that their intimate parts are not stifled from nine hours in the office chair. There are 10 missed calls from my mother. There are places to which one cannot return and cities where it is impossible to live. There are fertility treatments that send fish oil straight into the veins two days before and two days after ovulation. The feeling of a needle in the middle of the uterus, which could be due to pregnancy, or due to fear. There is a Master’s thesis which is no Master’s thesis. There is a book that was not intended to be published, that was not intended to be read.Eva Ďurovec works as a software tester 40 hours per week and studies art at the same time. There are not enough hours in the day to complete everything, to comply with everything. And then there is also her desire to have children. The question: how can all of this be reconciled within the profession of artist? Ďurovec investigates the possibilities that arise from different class formats, and asks what we produce and reproduce—with our bodies, through our routines, trapped between the recurring desires and cruelties of daily life. She writes about forgotten dreams, social orders, and fantasizes about what kinds of new models for living together might be conceivable.With an epilogue by Alice Creischer: For me, it is not a diary, as Eva calls it, but an almanac […] that describes the counter- forces that prevent us from suffocating in the face of power. They are the desires and projections that, in this fragile life, tenaciously resist a pull that can be called normalisation. […] All labour relations, whether on the assembly line or in front of the PC, are only part of an exploitation that affects the whole of life and obliterates all projections. The almanac reports on this totality and how it becomes concrete in the everyday life of looking for a flat, wanting children, chronic illnesses and their treatment, relationships and friends. It also reports on the deep need for a spiritual asylum on the run from totality. The asylum lies in the knowledge of a historical continuity of thought and action that is always superior to exploitation. It exposes — often seemingly with ease and as if in a game or joke — the power of exploitation as incapable of creating meaning, as a machine.

G.W. Sok co-founded of the internationally acclaimed independent Dutch music group The Ex in 1979. He became the singer and lyricist, more or less by coincidence, since he wrote the occasional poem and nobody else wanted to sing. At the same time he turned himself into a graphic designer of record sleeves, posters, and books. Together with The Ex he was awarded the Dutch Pop Prize of 1991. The band is well known for their energetic live performances, inventive music, and politically outspoken and thought-provoking lyrics. After 1,400 concerts in Holland and abroad, and 25 record albums later, G.W. Sok decided to leave the group at the end of 2008.A Mix of Bricks & Valentines showcases the lyrics G.W. Sok wrote during his three-decade period of Ex-istence. More than 250 songs of agitprop lyrics, poetry, and rantings are included along with an introduction by the author discussing his development as a writer. A foreword by English journalist, author, and musician John Robb (the Membranes, Punk: An Oral History and Death to Trad Rock) puts the work of G.W. Sok into perspective.A Mix of Bricks & Valentines is written with a sharp pen; provocative, creative, and witty, everything punk and art intended to be from the start. And yes, it can be quite loud at times, too.

Publisher: Primary Information 5.5 x 8.25 inches 224 pages Paperback 29 B&W; images Edition of 1000 Second Printing September 2016 ISBN: 9780978869731Rock/Music Writings collects Dan Graham’s influential writings about rock and roll music and its cultural impact. First published in 2009,Rock/Music Writings includes thirteen essays written between 1968 and 1988, most of which were originally printed in small magazines or journals, including Extensions, Fusion, REAL LIFE,and ZG. Graham was a friend and supporter of many musicians active in the No Wave scene that was centered around New York City in the late ’70s. In addition to collaborating with musicians during this period, Graham created “Rock My Religion,” a video that demonstrates parallels between rock music culture and religious rituals, such as Shaker dances and revivalist meetings. The work’s related text, also titled “Rock My Religion,” is included in Rock/Music Writings, along with texts such as “The End of Liberalism,” “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” “McLaren’s Children,” and “Artist as Producer.” These texts examine the lyrics and backgrounds of bands like The Beatles, The Kinks, Devo, The Ramones,  the Patti Smith Group, the Sex Pistols, and Bow Wow Wow, relating them to consumerism and visual art movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Dan Graham is an artist based in New York. Since the 1960s, he has produced a wide range of work and writing that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historical, social, and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. Architecture, popular music, video, and television are among the focuses of his investigations, which he articulates through essays, performances, installations, videotapes, and architectural/sculptural designs. --- Editors: James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff Designer: Karma

A modern epic about the most consequential music culture today, Atlanta rap—a masterful, street-level story of art, money, race, class, and salvation from acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli.From mansions to trap houses, office buildings to strip clubs, Atlanta is defined by its rap music. But this flashy and fast-paced world is rarely seen below surface-level as a collection not of superheroes and villains, cartoons and caricatures, but of flawed and inspired individuals all trying to get a piece of what everyone else seems to have. In artistic, commercial, and human terms, Atlanta rap represents the most consequential musical ecosystem of this century so far. Rap Capital tells the dramatic stories of the people who make it tick, and the city that made them that way.The lives of the artists driving the culture, from megastars like Lil Baby and Migos to lesser-known local strivers like Lil Reek and Marlo, represent the modern American dream but also an American nightmare, as young Black men and women wrestle generational curses, crippled school systems, incarceration, and racism on the way to an improbable destination atop art and commerce. Across Atlanta, rap dreams power countless overlapping economies, but they’re also a gamble, one that could make a poor man rich or a poor man poorer, land someone in jail or keep them out of it.Drawing on years of reporting, more than a hundred interviews, dozens of hours in recording studios and on immersive ride-alongs, acclaimed New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli weaves a cinematic tapestry of this singular American culture as it took over in the last decade, from the big names to the lesser-seen prospects, managers, grunt-workers, mothers, DJs, lawyers and dealers that are equally important to the industry. The result is a deeply human, era-defining book. Entertaining and profound, Rap Capital is an epic of art, money, race, class, and sometimes, salvation.

Tristan Honsinger : textsJoel Grip : drawings (ink and graphite) and paintings Umdicht Förlag 2021 in collaboration with Topsi Series and Umlaut Records.Printed by Livonia 2021Copyright to the authorsLayout and design : Joel GripThanks to Erik Viklund, Seymour Wright and Tobias Delius for their help with checking files and proofreading, and to Fritz Margull, Norbert, Heino and Marcus for their support.On many levels Tristan Honsinger invites the reader to embark on the trip of embracing, chasing and changing the perception of what is possible. The routines and wisdom retrieved from his 50 years of living in the world of spontaneous imagery within the expression of sound and body are transmitted in a way that is both lucid and ludic. His texts are not about music per se, but they are musical in the sense that they welcome you to take part in the mysterious act of transformation. And in the end you are challenged to lead the trip elsewhere, based on your own associations in being the essence of us. “This book has been written over the course of a couple of months in the spring of 2020 and contains dialogues, aphorisms, songs, poems and short stories, sometimes combined. Counterpointing Tristan’s handwritings are the breezy, chasing and questioning drawings of Joel Grip. These two individuals form one of the most formidable acts in improvisation that I’ve ever seen. It’s a match!” – from the introduction by Antonio Borghini. Compiled by Klaus Kürvers, this book includes the complete discography of Tristan Honsinger‘s issued recordings so far, 1972-2020 : a 15-page directory of treasures from the recent history of modern music.

Co-published by Book Works and DACS, as part of Co-Series No. 21, in an edition of 1,000. Softback, 128pp, printed full colour, 170 x 220 mm. Designed by Simon Kennedy.This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works. Citing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Brisley emphasises the critical importance of error to the creation of his performances: ‘You can say what you’re going to do, you can think about it, you can prepare it, and then when you start, it’s all disappeared because it’s actually meaningless… errors make for where the key value lies.’ The enduring resonance of Brisley’s work lies in its formless and slippery characteristics that resonate so poignantly with our shared human condition.

I grew up watching films with my mum. One of the most affecting was Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. We laughed and cried, whilst watching a mother and daughter, on their respective sofas, watch tv and smoke fags. My dreams are the offbeat moments in these fictions where I smoke with my mum. I yearn for the imperfect feelings of familial harmony in Secrets and Lies, a meal eaten at a table, unacquainted people brought together. It hurts, I said. It’s like the storm in my head broke the thunder directly above my flat, the lightning half a second before. Suppose A Collapse arranges moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other, intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Memoir, poem and essay combine to form a collection of experiences based on the author’s changing relationship with her absent father, extended ‘(non)family’ and mother, while film and art inform the movement between lucidity and a fracturing present. How many times can we fold up our lives into smaller and smaller shapes until there’s no room anymore, only the one that we’re in? Lucie McLaughlin is an artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her work has been published in Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, California, performed at Raven Row, London and exhibited at Lily Robert Gallery, Paris. She is currently on the MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art.

128 x 182mm, 101 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2022  Organising the book’s chronology around the time log of a public event, Anne Tallentire invites us into the activity of plotting a number of (1:1) diagrams of domestic rooms across the emptied-out ICA theatre in London.Upon this joyous illumination of the stains of past productions and mass gatherings appears a new assembly of enactors, who summon the social sediment of the ICA as a spirit of communal activity. This new event butts against the extremities of the room. A laser level and tape measure cut across the seams of dusty bricks, the patchwork painted floorboards, a leftover bass bin, electric cables, and plywood stage to inscribe abstractions of interior spaces in builder’s graphic tape.These ambiguously intentioned drawings gain political purchase when we imagine ourselves residing within the cramped dimensions being unfolded. We remember the premise of our lives upon the buildings that we have subsided into, and those responsible for them. This act of contextual comparison is a key leverage of the book. A socialist motivation that ignites the agency of our collective imagination to participate in the language and critique of housing provision.

Marcel DuchampBeatrice WoodHenri-Pierre Roché --- Edited by Sophie SeitaElizabeth Zuba, Contributor  The Blind Man and rongwrong were seminal New York Dada magazines edited and published by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood in 1917. This facsimile edition, introduced by Sophie Seita, celebrates the 100th anniversary of their publication. The box set also includes a two-color offset reproduction of Beatrice Wood’s poster for The Blind Man’s Ball (1917) and a letterpress facsimile of Man Ray’s The Ridgefield Gazook (1915). Translations of the French texts by Elizabeth Zuba accompany the facsimile reprints. The Blind Man and rongwrong were part of a network of little magazines that introduced audiences to avant-garde movements in art and literature; they featured contributions of poetry, prose, and visual art by Mina Loy, Louise Norton, Robert Carlton Brown, Erik Satie, Walter Arensberg, Francis Picabia, Alfred Stieglitz, and others. The Blind Man was the first print publication to circulate an image of Duchamp’s “Fountain” (photographed by Stieglitz) after its rejection from the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, presenting a public challenge to the accepted definition of art during this time.

Book sewn with open spine. 170 x 239mm. 192pp. 1+1 Pantone 546C, 120 gsm offset paper inside, 300 gsm offset paper covers. Texts by:Johan Arrias, Elsa Bergma, Nadine Byrne, Erik Carlsson, Scott Caza, Jon Collin, Mats DimmingNiklas Fite, Marta Forsber, Joel Grip, Mats Gustafsso, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Isak Hedtjär, Karin Hellqvist, Per Åke Holmlander, Martin Küche, Andreas Hiroui Larsson, Anna Linda, Eva Lindal, Kajsa Magnarsso, Sten Sandell, Em Silé, Marja-leena Sillanpää, Susana Santos Silva, Mattias Ståhl, Cara Tolmie, Elena Wolay, Torbjörn Zetterberg.Photos by Mats Äleklint.Bilingual: English & SwedishI left London eight years ago today. It was time to go. I was completely exhausted by the job I’d been doing — running the concert programme at Café OTO — and couldn’t really imagine finding something better to do there whilst simultaneously being pushed further out of the city by the crazy cost of living. Stockholm seemed to be the best option. We could get somewhere affordable to live. I got a grant that paid off my debts. And so we moved.I always rejected the idea that I would start some kind of OTO-equivalent here in Stockholm, but that hasn’t stopped me trying to imagine what such a place could be. There is a special confluence of things that makes OTO work in its own strange way and there is little point in trying to copy it. But one thing I keep coming back to are the windows onto the street. Everything that happens there is visible (and often audible) to the outside world. There are no secrets. The windows suggest an opening to and connection with. That it is possible to participate. I decided that my fantasy space would also need to have such windows out to the street and it would be called Fönstret (The Window). A physical space will remain fantasy, but I decided to make Fönstret real, to make space via a series of online and physical publications, and do if but a small cut of the work that a physical space might do. At the same time, I’d been reading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, trying to think through the meaning of such spaces and the meetings and relationships they facilitate. How informal, unaccredited knowledge is made through these connections and what/how much that means for how we live in the world (as artists, as people). For the first of these missives, I made three short ‘portrait’ films where the subjects talked about someone else or some place else: Lisa Ullén about Fylkingen, Leif Elggren about Lennart Af Larsson and Raymond Strid about Roland Kejser. I also asked a whole stack of people I felt have some connection to Stockholm if they could write something along these lines. It should be someone or place they knew personally rather than a remote influence, but that otherwise they could be as loose as they liked with the brief. 29 people took me up on the ask and these contributions have finally been collected in a book — a mix of memoir, oral history, love letters, and poetry — a small window into a small part of Stockholm. Forever grateful to everyone for their honesty and for trusting me with their texts and happy to now make them available to the outside world. — John Chantler, Stockholm