Emblem is the debut collection from Lucy Mercer, winner of the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. Emblem revitalises this forgotten hybrid form in the present as a frame to contemplate the obscurities of motherhood, faith and the interior. In ghostly conversation with the sixteenth-century emblematist Andrea Alciato – a witness to a lonely time – the poems are carried forward by a non-linear dream logic of metaphor and similitude, speaking pictures who remain silent and a focus on an adjacent imaginal world. As well as reusing images from Alciato’s emblem book, the poems fixate on alternating relations between text and image that blur into relations between mind and body, child and mother, red and green, past and present, public and private, the living and the dead.

The sixth instalment of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.

Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature’s status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

We explore the production and sustained interest in one of the most incredible racing game franchises of all time: WipEout. Speaking to the lead writer, developer and composer, our lead article delves into the evolution of the game, the story behind its music and the movements that it helped to inspire. 🪡 Unravelling a beautiful thread… 🪡We’re proud to present a farewell interview with the creators of the innovative experimental electronic label Noumenal Loom. Responsible for masterpieces by the likes of Giant Claw, Holly Waxwing and Broken Spear, Isa and Holly guide us on a trip down memory lane and offer words of wisdom for aspiring labels.🪐 Music of the spheres… 🪐Insight into a project that has brought the sounds of the cosmos down to earth for us to enjoy, we find out more about the Messier collection.AUX: christtt A special magazine-exclusive edition of AUX, where Business Casual owner and purveyor of incisive plunderphonic odysseys gives us his picks. This edition also features reviews of Nondi_, Lauren Bousfield, Simple Syrup, MANAPOOL and Null Object!

Convened by Will Harris, Siblings is a roundtable conversation between four poets on writing communities, real and imaginary siblings, and first encounters with poetry. Thinking through the lyric mode’s wayward directions — speaking sideways to peers and siblings, writing vertically to parentage, lineage, literary histories — these four poets talk to each other as makers and friends about the possibilities that poetry enables now. I grew up with dual realities, with the knowledge of another reality occurring elsewhere, and I carried that with me. Poetry was, finally, my way to access alternative realities – both at the same time! – and to speak beyond them...

Fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author and contributions by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry. In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert – the only extant public document related to the massacre of those African slaves – Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

#contemporarycomics #comicart #poetrycomics #musiccomics #noaudienceunderground #graphicpoetry #graphicpoem #experimentalcomics #freejazz #noisemusic

Adorno and the Aesthetics of Postwar Serial Music is the first book-length study of the relation between Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics and postwar serial music. Adorno’s extensive writings and lectures about serialism, his first-hand knowledge of the technique, and his personal acquaintance with leading serial composers did much to shape his philosophical work. That work, in turn, influenced postwar composers, and the signs of this influence are clearly visible in the compositional theory and aesthetic ideas of the period. This book presents a detailed examination of these ideas, and places them in their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts. It will enable a better understanding not only of serial music and aesthetics, but also of Adorno and his aesthetic theory. As such, it will appeal to composers, music historians, philosophers, critics, and anyone interested in the aesthetics of modernism.

Cage & Consequences brings together analytical essays by scholars of different disciplines, artists“ contributions, and conversations with composers and associates of John Cage. They represent the diversity of Cage“s spheres of influence on the following generations of artists, as well as his significance for musicology, art theory, and media studies. The contributions are presented in their original language, English or German.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the most influential and prolific composers of the twentieth century. His legacy extends far beyond his extensive catalogue of musical works to his achievements as a pioneer of electronic music, as a writer and thinker on music, and as a teacher. In this volume, various aspects of Stockhausen“s legacy are discussed, including his influence on the creative work of others, and the influences he likewise derived from some of his closest associates. Central theoretical tenets of his work are revisited and new evaluations made regarding the significance, impact and potential of Stockhausen“s contributions in this area. Compositions discussed in the volume extend across the whole span of the composer“s life, with several essays dealing explicitly with the musical, conceptual and theatrical background to Stockhausen“s work from the opera cycle LICHT onwards. Interdisciplinary in approach and drawing on a number of recent studies of Stockhausen“s music, many of which are not otherwise available in English, the volume is a significant contribution to Stockhausen scholarship which—looking forward—provides new impetuses for the future understanding of his musical legacy.

This book is the first pictorial monograph about the Korean-German composer Isang Yun, who was born in southern Korea in 1917 and died in Berlin in 1995. It was first in Germany, with influence from what around 1960 was then the avant-garde that he developed an individual musical language of his own. A little later Yun was drawn into the field of tension between political advocacy motivated by humanitarian, societal concerns and responding to ideological incitement, between imprisonment, torture, and reparation. It was in his compositional work that he found a place of refuge. His music proceeds from the primacy of melody and the sustained tone, which he found preformed in the traditional music of his native Korea and then succeeded in developing heterophonically and spatially. The resultant works were characterized by unusual intensity and rich tone colors.

The Hungarian-Swiss pianist Géza Anda (1921-1976), together with Annie Fischer, György Cziffra and György Sebök, is regarded as one of the most important personalities of 20th-century pianism to emerge from the great tradition of the Hungarian school. Anda’s interpretations of the Classical, Romantic and modern repertoire, especially of the piano concertos of Mozart and Bartók, have long been regarded as authoritative. As a teacher, he had a lasting impact on subsequent generations of pianists. The Concours Géza Anda, founded in Zurich in 1979, has achieved worldwide renown while successfully continuing Anda’s legacy as an artist and a pedagogue. This book, published by the Géza Anda Foundation in Zurich to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Géza Anda’s birth, offers a panorama of his life, work and legacy based on many biographical documents, some of which are presented here for the very first time.

The phenomenon of “graphic” scores has been a subject of fascination, controversy, and a flourishing of artistic talent since its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War. The scores of that age, despite their compelling visual presence, nevertheless remain elusive: the means of performance are obscure, and they resist conventional analysis. This study reconsiders graphic scores from the perspective of Information Theory, derived from studies of “ergodic” texts: the ergodic score requires non-trivial effort from the participants in its realization, becoming a cybernetic object that challenges our beliefs about what music is, how it works, and where to find its meaning. The sounds of a musical performance are the field in which a larger metamorphosis takes place: like the labyrinth, the journey to the heart of ergodic scores entails both risk and transcendence. This study illuminates ergodic scores from their theoretical foundations: the abstract theory of how they work, the history of exemplary figures from the postwar avant-garde—including such luminaries of the art as Yoko Ono, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Anestis Logothetis, Pauline Oliveros, and John Cage—and concrete analysis of selected repertoire. Using pioneering theoretical insights—and with the benefit of original archival research, interviews with the artists themselves, and decades of experience as a composer and performer of graphic scores—the author establishes one of the great attainments of the twentieth century as a living art.

This unique book, also containing never before published the 1949 Harvard Lectures, is Schnabel's last foray into public discourse and represents his most mature view of music and its function in society at large. It highlights the importance of understanding tradition and highlights the profound impact Artur Schnabel had, both as a performer and teacher upon future.  "Values in art are always fluctuant, and no decrees or measures will ever arrest their motion. Within the boundary of our civilization, only a few, perhaps only one, of the several departments we have referred to under the collective term "Music" are commissioned with the supply of such artistic values. By this I mean that not all music belongs to those values although all of it goes by that one term "Music." It is different in literature, or the pictorial arts, or architecture. A clown's gabbling is not spoken of as literature, a billboard is not called a still life, a portrait, or landscape, and a filling station or hot dog stand not architecture. We have, I repeat, unfortunately, no such differentiation in regard to music. It is all called "Music,"from the cheapest to the most sublime. If someone tells you that he loves music, you do not know whether he refers to trash or to treasures. If he tells you that he loves books or paintings, it is fairly clear that he speaks of a category addressed to some sort of discrimination."

Image Text Music by writer and editor Catherine Taylor is a series of textual and photographic essays that explore our encounters with the place where the visual meets the verbal. Taylor riffs on and subverts Roland Barthes’ classic 1977 essay collection, Image Music Text, using his title as playful points of departure for her thinking about the nature of image-text works and the music that might be made at their intersection. These meditative and analytical essays pose vital questions about the psychological and political possibilities for image-text works. Taylor rejects overarching statements about medium or genre in favour of observations of the particular to reveal broader ways of reading that are at once familiar and disorientating. The reflections in Image Text Music are at once critical and celebratory, dystopian and utopian, investigative and contemplative, didactic and dreamlike. They are visions of visions of the world that ultimately ask: as we shuttle between linguistic and visual modes of meaning-making, what is the purpose of reinventing forms if not to reinvent ways of living?

The cult periodical Little Joe, published as a limited-edition zine from 2010 to 2021, challenged the mainstream narrative of film history with a rebellious, queer perspective. Rather than reviewing new releases, it explored forgotten and overlooked films and celebrated a diverse spectrum of cinema – from obscure art films to porn to Hollywood classics – as worthy of critical debate. Stubbornly print-only, Little Joe was notoriously hard to find, privileging word-of-mouth distribution akin to the films it championed. This volume, compiled by editor-in-chief Sam Ashby, brings together the best of its previously elusive texts and proposes a new, alternative cinematic canon drawn from the fringes of taste and style.  This volume features essays, in-depth conversations, short stories and archival discoveries from a host of queer and allied writers, artists, filmmakers, and academics, including John Waters, Sarah Schulman, Douglas Crimp, William E. Jones, Erika Balsom, Jeremy Atherton Lin, John Greyson, Elizabeth Purchell, Liz Rosenfeld, Peter Strickland, Ira Sachs, Terence Davies, Shu Lea Cheang, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Abdellah Taïa, Marlene McCarty, John Cameron Mitchell, Rosa von Praunheim, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Jenni Olson, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, Desiree Akhavan, and Andrew Haigh.

In recent years, new techniques in molecular biology, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have transformed scientific understandings of Earth’s oceans, offering new models and maps of their surfaces and depths. At the same time, fresh political, cultural and philosophical approaches to the seas have increasingly turned to detailing how human history and impacts are legible in our world’s waters. This volume features contributions from a range of scholars concerned—scientifically, socially, and ethically—with Earth’s oceans today.

A long-distance correspondence reflecting on the infravoice of a blue whale and other so-called "silent" subjects. An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects. As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation. As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power? Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs). They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons.