For 60 years, Cecil Taylor’s music marked the farthest boundary of avant-garde jazz. His volcanic piano improvisations, delivered with astonishing technical command and unrelenting power at marathon length, were regarded as the ultimate in free jazz. But Taylor was much more than that: He was one of jazz’s (and America’s) great composers and arrangers, developing a unique and instantly recognizable compositional voice and a radical method of transmitting his ideas that in effect taught the members of his ensembles to speak an entirely new musical language. In the Brewing Luminous is the first full-length biography of Cecil Taylor. In the Brewing Luminous takes the reader from his birth in 1929 to his death in 2018 and beyond. It provides detailed analysis of his extensive body of work, which encompassed solo performance and ensembles of every size from duos to big bands, and included work meant to accompany dancers and theatrical performances. It also explores his poetry and the broader milieu of which he was a part. Taylor was not an island; he was a fixture on the New York cultural scene and welcomed with open arms in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. And he did not work in isolation — his bands were crucial collaborators, and his music was impossible to imagine without the contributions of players like alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, bassist William Parker, and drummer Andrew Cyrille, all of whom and many more are discussed here as well.

From Lawrence English  "I am ceaselessly fascinated by how memory operates and, I’m regularly struck by how individually subjective a collective experience can be when recalled by its participants. Lynch’s Lost Highway comes to mind here, specifically Bill Pullman’s character Fred Madison who says “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Like Madison, I can’t help but sense that memory takes shape through an accumulative process that reflects how each of us have lived (and maybe even wanted to live) up to that point in time.  Going back to listen again to these recordings of which I was a part with David and Akio, I was surprised by what elements had stayed with me and what others had slipped into the eternal greying of my mind. I have vivid recollections of listening to a Lyre bird before recording the pieces together at Witches Falls. I remember both Akio and David finding musicality in decaying palm fronds. I remember Akio’s voice, amplified through his Analpos, bouncing off the stones and trees. I remember David’s flute, so quiet in the pitch black of the night forest as to appear like a hushed tone of wind or a distant animal calling. I also remember trying to match my modest hand held electronics with the pulsing and pitching of the insects around me.  Reading David’s text, which is included in the book published alongside this edition, he recounts several things I had forgotten. Conversations about memory, ironically enough, had vanished from my mind until reading his words. I also didn’t really remember my role as tick surgeon, removing a living insect from David’s ear. I do remember his cooking though, as does Akio (captured aptly in his drawings), no doubt a testament to David’s improvisational culinary expertise.  Breathing Spirit Forms represents a distinctive exchange between friends and collaborators. Tamborine commands a special presence and encourages a deep patience from those who are willing to give time to its varied environments. For the three of us, we were fortunate to share these moments together, fleeting in our lives as they might be, to sense the mountain’s unique qualities, to respond to them through our exchanges and to form memories (as disparate as they might be) we carry forward with us in time."

At last: the long-awaited box set surveying The Shadow Ring's prolific, decade-long existence. Eleven CDs, one DVD, and a more than 450-page book featuring a detailed biographical essay, hundreds of photographs, ten interviews, a complete discography with lyrics, and rarely-seen ephemera. The Shadow Ring (1992–2002) presents a comprehensive overview of the work produced by British musicians Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, and later Tim Goss over the course of a decade. Throughout their legendary ten-year run, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of teenagers in the port town Folkestone, were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. The group have left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7-inches, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic. Collected here for the first time are The Shadow Ring’s live cuts, rarities, and complete commercial releases, spread out across eleven CDs and a DVD, accompanied by an nearly five-hundred-page book that includes a monographic biographical survey, more than one hundred color photos, a comprehensive discography with transcribed lyrics, and a selection of zine appearances, fliers, postcards, and other miscellanea. In aggregate, this significant collection not only plums the depths of the band and its attendant lore, but reveals a vivid minor history of mail-order networks, bedroom recording sessions, cross-USA couch-surfing, and encounters with fellow travelers such The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Charalambides, Richard Youngs and the No-Neck Blues Band. Where is the connecting thread between Ralf Wehowsky and Squirrel Nut Zippers? Inquire within. The roughly 200 songs in this set trace the band from its earliest days recording in Lambkin’s parents’ house (SHP Studios), through its brooding mid-period, garnering word-of-mouth notoriety that peaked with the trio turning down an invitation to tour with Pavement, to a string of increasingly uncompromising experiments with electronics, voice, and tape. Although the band’s sound morphs considerably during this time period, from spartan beginnings using pots and pans as a drum set to their ultra-deconstructed latter-day approach, certain core sensibilities are apparent throughout: brash youthful rawness, wry and morbid lyricism, stripped-down angularity, and a penchant for atmospherics. This boxset, featuring every record and single, and buttressed by twenty-nine rarely-heard recordings, including proto-Shadow Ring projects such as the Cat & Bells Club and Footprint cassettes, and their unearthed final CD-R Darren Harris Reads Graham Lambkin, presents the first opportunity to hear this arc in full. The ebbs and flows of the band—their schoolboy beginnings, initial successes, first shows and tours, life milestones, and Lambkin’s gradual development as a solo artist—are painstakingly detailed in a sizable band history-cum-Künstlerroman by Blank Forms artistic director Lawrence Kumpf, illustrated with candid photos, sketches, letters, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera. The music and videos can speak for themselves, but taken as a mass, this collection makes sense of the group’s utter uncanniness without comprising one iota of their mystique, bringing something new to the table for completionists and the uninitiated alike.  The Shadow Ring: Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris, Tim Goss Audio transfers and remastering: Graham Lambkin with Daniel Martin-McCormick and Jade Guterman Mastering: Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering, Bonn, Germany DVD mastering: C. Spencer Yeh Design: Lucas Quigley

I wasn’t questioning what I thought was happening though. I also thought I knew the extent of it: the voice. Thought that the ghost might on some days be something that attached itself physically like a node on my vocal chords, or was vocal chords, the extra thick ones I’d need to produce that sound, like in films about puberty you get shown in science classes in school.Roy Orbison in Ruins stages an imagined correspondence between a young hospitality worker on a road trip, and the musician David Berman. Unfolding over a series of four unanswered letters and karaoke interludes, we learn that our narrator has been possessed by the voice of Roy Orbison. Accompanied by her chorus of Roys, she slowly transforms into his image as she writes about dreaming, leisure time, haunting and ventriloquism from the rest stops, bars and motels of Florida.

Ltd Edition 32 page zine with FREE download featuring the essay by ROBIN PURVES in which he discusses 4 pieces of drone music through time, starting with the composer La Monte Young's "Trio For Strings", Joan La Barbara’s Voice Piece: One Note Internal Resonance Investigation; ‘Bass Pulse in Open Air’ in Floating Frequencies: Intuitive Synthesis III – Phase Two by Eleh; and Keiji Haino’s ‘Wisdom That Will Bless I, Who Live in the Spiral Joy Born at the Utter End of a Black Prayer’. "..in discussing these works, the following questions will be considered: What do these works mean? Do these works mean? If they can mean, in what ways do they bear their meanings? What are they for if they do not mean?  

TALKER is an interview zine about performance. Issue #12 is a conversation with Agus Nur Amal PMTOH Agus uses household objects for storytelling performances and creates art objects to share ideas, knowledge, conflict resolutions and trauma healing. Collaborating with artists, photographers, videographers, and educators, he aims to entertain and educate through various methods. This interview traces the formation of his performance practice following his graduation from the theatre faculty at the Jakarta Institute of Arts and return to his hometown Weh Island (Aceh, Sumatra) where he researched and studied the art of Acehnese storytelling. We also discuss his involvement in community empowerment activities, trauma healing and peace building projects throughout Indonesia. His work was featured in a major exhibition in Kassel, Germany as part of Documenta Fifteen in 2022. Previous issues of TALKER have featured Ian White, Kate Valk, Richard Maxwell, Sue Tompkins, Spalding Gray with Kathy Acker, Dora García, Jo Fong, Paul Maheke, Clifford Owens, Barby Asante, Gustav Metzger and Miranda July. This issue is supported by a Connections through Culture UK-Southeast Asia 2022-2023 Grant from the British Council.

#10 is a conversation with Barby Asante. Barby is a London-based artist, curator, educator and occasional DJ. Her work is concerned with the politics of place, space memory and the histories and legacies of colonialism. The work is collaborative, performative and dialogic, often working with groups of people as contributors, collaborators or co-researchers. This issue focuses on her live work, from South London community intervention Noise Summitto her intricate, iterative project Declaration of Independence. The interview explores the crucial role of ‘contributor-performers’ and the challenges of presenting performances online.

TALKER is a self published interview zine about performance by musician, artist & writer Giles Bailey --- Issue #5 of Talker features a transcript of an event hosted by the writer Kathy Acker at the ICA, London in February 1987 in which the performer Spalding Gray discussed his work. A founding member of the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray gained fame for his autobiographical monologue performances. At the time of this conversation he had just completed filming Jonathan Demme’s movie adaptation of his work Swimming to Cambodia, a performance in which he describes experiences surrounding a trip to Southeast Asia to play a small role in the film The Killing Fields (1984). In this dialogue with Acker, Gray focuses on the process of developing work and compares his experience of writing with making live performance. --- That even was part of the ICA’s IN CONVERSATION series which paired up writers to talk about their practices. ---

TALKER is a self published interview zine about performance by musician, artist & writer Giles Bailey --- Issue #7 of Talker features a conversation with director, choreographer and performer Jo Fong. Though her background is as a dancer, performing as part of Rosas, Rambert Dance Company, Mark Bruce Company and National Dance Theatre Wales among many others, she also works across film, theatre and the visual arts. Her own work is distinguished by an open, self-aware process and an innovative and expansive approach to research and rehearsal. This interview begins with her ongoing project Ways of Being Together, a series of workshops, discussions and performances centered on the idea of belonging. Jo goes on to share insights into her working methods and discusses her complex relationship to dance, the difficulty of speaking and the impulse to do so. ---

TALKER is a self published interview zine about performance by musician, artist & writer Giles Bailey --- Talker issue 4 features a conversation with the artist Sue Tompkins. Tompkins is based in Glasgow and at the heart of her practice is a unique treatment of language. This finds form as typed works on paper, installations, paintings and live performances. The interview focuses on how the performances are made and the live situations in which they are experienced. They discuss and speak about movement, migraines, parenthood and a desire not to leave the visual world. ---

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

 In 2024, Bozar-Centre for Fine Arts, Jeu de Paume and CINEMATEK will pay tribute to Akerman by organising the first major exhibition on the Brussels artist. This book accompanying the exhibition features people who were closest to Akerman and can offer unique insights: the people who worked with her or were inspired by her.   Filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman was one of the most fearless filmmakers of her generation. Her work blurs the boundaries of time and space, of film and art. It can be seen in cinemas and museums worldwide. She may be largely unknown to the general public, but she is revered by cinephiles, visual artists and filmmakers. The impact of her oeuvre on world cinema became abundantly clear when Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was named best film of all time by British magazine Sight and Sound.

Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward come together for a moving anthology, edited and organized by the late, revered poet June Jordan. First published in 1970, soulscript is a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the most eloquent voices in the art. Selected for their literary excellence and by the dictates of Jordan's heart, these works tell the story of both collective and personal experiences, in Jordan's words, "in tears, in rage, in hope, in sonnet, in blank/free verse, in overwhelming rhetorical scream." Soulscript features works by Jordan and other luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Gayl Jines, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Claude McKay, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Richard Wright, as well as the fresh voices of a turbulent era's younger writers. Celebrated spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin, an original cast member of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, has also added an introduction that speaks to Jordan's legacy, helping to further cement soulscript as a visionary compilation that has already become a modern classic.

Eating the Archive by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh offers a stunning portrait of life in the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, where Qasmiyeh was born. The poems examine even the harshest aspects of the camp with tenderness, pondering existential questions about time, family, language and identity. A mother’s blurry photograph, a father’s sharpened knife, blood stirred into watery lentils and other glimpses into Qasmiyeh’s upbringing enrich this raw and profound collection.

544 page English/German Edition. In 2002 Christian Wolff was a guest composer at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and during the course of the festival he was interviewed by Christopher Fox and by James Gardner. Fox's interview took place before an audience in the Lawrence Batley Theatre on 25 November; Gardner's interview was recorded in private in the George Hotel, Huddersfield on 27 November, and edited excerpts from that recording were subsequently used in a programme produced by Radio New Zealand. The conversation presented here has been compiled by James Gardner from his transcriptions of the two interviews and presents a wide-ranging discussion of Wolff's musical preoccupations across every phase of his compositional career, from the early piano pieces of the 1950s, to his involvement with indeterminacy in the 1960s, to the political concerns evident in his music after 1970, to the works of the last three decades in which indeterminate and determinate methods of composition are combined.

Expanded new edition of this 1969 classic. 244 pages, English/German edition. There must be no victors, not even in the arts… This was the credo Dieter Schnebel shared with artists like John Cage and remained faithful to his whole life. The arts and the world, music and everyday life – these were no contrasts to the composer, church minister, musicologist and teacher who had been born in Lahr in Baden. He created a new open concept of work which left boundaries in space and time behind and saw the composer as creative trigger, not as completer of the work. As Schnebel understood the performance situation as a truly democratic event, he brought street noise into the concert hall. In the 1960s, the first performances of his early works, which could only be vaguely described by the notions of concept art and fluxus, were surrounded by scandal. The more Schnebel understood music as almost unconditioned action in experimental and archetypal situations, the more the performer emancipated him- or herself from the composition. No longer did the performer function as servant of an oeuvre completed in itself, but rather the moment when the music was produced became the true content of the work. ‘Not the tones or other acoustic elements make up the musical material but rather the processes of their production,’ Schnebel once outlined his approach. This reading and picture book does not offer literature or eye-catching art for the eyes. Rather, MO-NO is music – a music to read; more precisely: music for one reader. The reading of the book is intended to stimulate music in the listener’s head, so that in being alone in reading – mono –; one becomes the performer of music, makes music for oneself. This book partly contains texts intended to mislead into the hearing and linking  of passing sounds. “Notice what’s coming in from outside – wind, water, rustling trees – rolling traffic, signals –voices, twittering birds, barking dogs – or that? – gradual change from one to the other – at the same time different transitions erratic, gentle – that’s how it sounded some time ago, yes ...” In part, the texts describe sounds that can only be  imagined, that is imaginatively generated by the reader: “A silence – where nothing more can be  heard from outside – maybe the tranquility of vast expanse – above the clouds... ocean...” “a piercing and penetrating sound that smears – with the touch of an English horn (in a sad way). Is it the sound of the dentist’s turbine drill, that drives into you... Let’s leave it and go into the microglissando sound of a crane fly that whirs around your head at night ...” Furthermore, the book contains notes – admittedly not the kind one is used to (which one could play), but rather those which are only revelaed through observation and thus lead to the imagination of unreal sounds. Some notes awaken the illusion of sounds in the room through perspective, others are deformed and distorted; yet others show a certain inner life, as if some of them grew in tones – small sounds, so to speak mini-sounds. On one sheet is a composition (“Umrisse I”) consisting only of composed pauses, whereby composed silence is offered. So the book wants to guide the reading listener (the listening reader) to the music of the sounds that  surrounds us, but also to put her/him on the trail of that imaginary music that is constantly forming within us, namely growing out of real as well as unreal sounds. (Dieter Schnebel)

English-German Edition, 655 pages (!) collection of writings about ideas concerning music by American composer Robert Ashley. For nearly forty-five years, composer robert Ashley has pursued his vision of opera in the face of near complete indifference from the American mainstream culture industry. Ashley’s experience parallels that of other American indepen-dent avant-garde figures such as Terry Riley, Alvin lucier, and Pauline Oliveros. like these composers, Ashley uses notation only to the extent that it conveys his ideas to a longtime “band” of collaborators (which includes singers Jacqueline Humbert, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, and Joan La Barbara, along with engi-neer/mixer Tom Hamilton). like Oliveros, Ashley is also keenly interested in performance as ritual; for the past three decades he has composed operas that rely upon the inflections and rhythms of American english and are set against the backdrop of a largely static “electronic orchestra.” Although much of Ashley’s work is conceived for television, only the seven-part Perfect Lives (1977–83) has been completely realized in its intended medium, and it has never been shown on American networks. Now, as Ashley enters his eighties, a european musicolo-gist—ralf Dietrich—has taken on the task of gathering Ashley’s essays, sketches of pieces, and program notes into one volume.    This bilingual collection—with verso pages in english and recto pages in ger  -man—is divided into four parts, the first three of which are arranged in roughly reverse chronological order. ordering the collection in this way arguably serves two purposes: First, it helps familiarize readers who might be unfamiliar with Ash-ley’s work with an overview of his aesthetic and how it was shaped by changes in technology, collaborators, and economic realities. second, by laying out the various guiding “threads” through Ashley’s career, one is better able to follow the divergent strands as they stretch back into his past work.    The first section, “Towards a New kind of opera,” begins with a detailed “musical autobiography”—Ashley’s recollections of changes in the American contemporary music scene over his long career—and is followed by a series of essays that establish the groundwork for Ashley’s brand of music theater. one distinctive strand running through Ashley’s varied compositional career is the drone, appearing in early pieces such as the In Memoriam series from 1963 as a “reference sonority,” and also found in the recent operas in the form of a sustained harmonic backdrop or “cloud” that the singers use to establish the modality and inflection (contour) of their singing. A second unifying factor is a preoccupation with numbers and predetermined “formulas,” revealed in great-est detail in Ashley’s discussion of the individual “templates” in Perfect Lives. in this work, each episode has a characteristic visual structure (composition of images, distinctive colors, times of day, camera angles / movements, and so on), which also occurs in a fractal-like self-similar fashion within each episode—in other words, each episode is itself made up of seven sections that follow the same procession through the templates, and some sections of some episodes are further subdivided into seven subsections. The thorough descriptions of Ashley’s working methods—illustrated with fragments from his sketches and production notebooks—are especially valuable, since almost none of this music is published in conventional score format.    The second section, “Discovering the musicality of speech: mills College,” focuses on the works composed during Ashley’s tenure at mills College in oak-land, California, from 1969 to 1978, a period during which Ashley “stopped composing” in order to “make music.” (This is a fine distinction—Ashley did in fact create several works during this period, most notably the nearly one-hour In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (1972–73), as well as perform with the sonic Arts union, a collective that also included composers Alvin Lucier, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma.) originally brought to mills to build an electronic music studio, which soon developed into a public access studio, Ashley soon drafted a plan for a master’s level degree program in elec-tronic music and recording media (one of the first in the nation), leading to the creation of the Center for Contemporary music at mills College. Ashley taught composition and served as director of the Center, but became dissatisfied with the work: “Teaching musical composition is impossible, i think. . . . i thought of myself as a ‘provider.’ Whatever anybody thought they needed for their music, i tried to provide it. This was a convenient way out” (316).    Today, he acknowledges the period at mills for having changed his music profoundly: “i became thoroughly immune to scores. Nobody working at the Center wrote scores. Circuit diagrams, yes. Computer programs, yes. Tacti-cal plans for making a concert, yes. scores, no” (316). one fascinating piece from this period is “The remote boundary illusion,” one of four “hypothetical computer-controlled installations” called Illusion Models (1970). This piece uses sensors to locate a listener ’s position in a darkened room and interactively change the sound mix in such a way that the listener cannot determine the size of the room as he or she negotiates the space. Though “hypothetical” in 1970, this aural-spatial illusion uncannily anticipated virtual-reality technological breakthroughs of the 1990s.     The book’s third section comprises a number of essays and sketches from Ash-ley’s involvement in the oNCe Festival (1961–66) and oNCe group (1964–71). unfortunately, many of the oNCe pieces were documented either sparsely or not at all. Nonetheless, of particular interest are the pieces Combination Wedding and Funeral (1964), which directly inspired the “Church” episode of Perfect Lives,and The Trial of Anna Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity (1968), whose “interrogation dialogue” format foreshadows much of Ashley’s later work. There are also a number of interesting “conceptual pieces” from this period, verbal scores showing the influence of Fluxus figures such as la   monte Young, george brecht, and Dick Higgins. These include Rock Soup(1972), an outdoor performance piece for two or more keyboards powered by automobile batteries and triggering various automobile horns, and Spaghetti for a Large Number of People (1973), which outlines the steps for a spaghetti-and-salad potluck dinner.      The book’s substantial final section collects the program and liner notes for all of Ashley’s major works, from The Fox (1957) to Ashley’s 2006 opera Concrete; a list of works (complete up to 2009) rounds out the volume.    many of the writings in this volume have been previously published, but are hard to find, having first appeared in small limited-press european journals or program notes from Ashley’s live performances. Ashley’s newer contribu-tions made specifically for this volume are thoughtful and penetrating; in one particularly striking passage, he describes the new-music recital as creating an artificial museum culture while stifling any prospects of offering the specta-tor a transformational ritual experience: “it could have been juggling or a live porno act. Whatever it is, you are not a part of it. You have been a watcher. . . . You have simply been distracted from what is outside. You do not have more of a musical life. Your life is not more musical” (56). The fragments of sketches and notebooks are essential for those who wish to understand how these performances are realized, or to revive long-unperformed works. in as-sembling this compendium, ralf Dietrich has obviously benefited from a close and long-term cooperation of his subject; one hopes that, in turn, Ashley will benefit from the additional exposure that such a collection will bring to his impressively original body of work. (Kevin Holm-Hudson, University of Kentucky)

English-German Edition in two volumes 906 pages. These lectures, discussions were within the last years of Feldman's life, he died in September 1987, these were 1985 to 1987, for the "Nieuwe Muziek" in Middleburg, and the topics, subject matter runs the entire cornocopia of post war music, modernity, complexity, post-modernity, post-truth, post metaphysics. The discussion(s) are with all top-recorgnized composers Kaija Saariho, Iannis Xenakis, pianist Geoffrey D. Madge, Louis Andriessen, and not-so-well-known composers but important nonetheless as Konrad Boehmer and Bunita Marcus, Feldman's companion.Feldman was always a very engaging talker, conversationaist, he primed himslef with into-the-night discussions at the Cedar Bar in New York City, speaking with great painters de Kooning, Franz Kline, Pollock, Marc Rothko, Philip Guston his close friend.There is much anecdotal shibboleths here as well, as when a student who came to Alban Berg, and after some hours was not examining the student's composition. Berg said something like "how can you be a composer and not smoke cigarettes?". Time spent with Stefan Wolpe was also productive, right out of high school, and the house concerts of his works and others.