Books and Magazines


edited by Kate Briggs Sternberg Press, 2023 128ppA 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.

Ella Finer & Vibeke Mascini – Silent Whale Letters

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This comprehensive edition of Russia's greatest modern poet, Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966), includes the complete texts of her major works Requiem, commemorating all of Stalin's victims, and Poem Without a Hero. Akhmatova published her first book of poems in 1912, and in the same year founded the Acmeist movement with her husband, the poet Gumilev. Her intense, highly personal love lyrics were later attacked as anti-revolutionary, and in 1925 her poetry was banned. Gumilev was shot in 1921 for alleged involvement in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and in the years of terror which followed under Stalin, Akhmatova was persecuted for her work along with fellow poets Mandelstam, who died in a camp, and Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide. She was able to publish some work during the war, but in 1946 she again came under attack, this time from Zhdanov, who denounced her with Pasternak and others for trying to ‘poison the minds’ of Soviet youth. These were attacks on her published work. What she was writing – but could not publish – was far more dangerous. For she had entered her years of silence. As she fought for her son’s release from prison, she was writing her greatest poetry: the cycle Requiem, which commemorated all of Stalin’s victims, and Poem without a hero, which she began in 1940 and worked on for over 20 years. All she wrote she committed to memory. Several trusted friends also memorised her poems, among them Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda. She wrote nothing down, and so survived, the people’s conscience, the one who kept 'the great Russian word' alive.Translated by Richard McKane Softcover, 336pp Bloodaxe Books, 1989, 1992, 2006

Anna Akhmatova – Selected Poems

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With contributions by Lasse Marhaug, John Corbett, Gérard Rouy, David Keenan, Karl Lippegaus, and Jost Gebers Brötzmann has always created and still creates the covers of his recordings himself – sometimes also for other musician colleagues – and in the past also often the posters for various FMP projects (Workshop Freie Musik in the Academy of Arts or Total Music Meeting in the Quartier Latin, later in Podewil). Looking at his early posters and record covers it“s striking how fully formed his visual sense was from the very beginning. He had a background from both advertising and Fluxus art and built upon that. Just like his playing, he knew what he wanted to say with his graphic design. The music and visuals were coming from the same place. And there“s no question who it“s coming from. When you see a design by Peter there is little doubt who made it. His work has such a strong character that when we try to copy the style (and many have) it“s obvious who we“re stealing from – so we fail. (Lasse Marhaug) In his graphic endeavors, Brötzmann has in fact made a body of work consistent with his music and his art, an oeuvre that undermines the presumption that design is inherently rigid. More than just the decoration of information, Brötzmann“s five decades of design bear witness to a sophisticated, delicate, and earthy sensibility, along with a dogged sense of internal logic. His record covers and posters are passionate and thoughtful, playful and brutal, basic and human. (John Corbett) This catalog with about 260 works is published to the exhibition at the Bimhuis, Amsterdam, Sept. 2016

Brötzmann – Graphic Works 1959-2016

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23 Sentences from DESERT PLANTS MORTON FELDMAN: Something that is beautiful is made in isolation. CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I try wherever possible to discourage competitive sort of careerism. JOHN CAGE: So that it takes an old fogey like myself to suggest again as Thoreau did all of his life, revolution. PHILIP CORNER: A lot of people hang up to restrictions which are not only in the external institutions. They are in your own mind. PHIL GLASS: The quintessence of harmonic music is in cadence for me. STEVE REICH: You must love music or be a duck. ROBERT ASHLEY: If you record a conversation with fifty people in the United States about their ideas, and if you get into each conversation really deeply, that when you get to the end, you will have one of me, one of Steve Reich, but you will have fifty of yourself. ALVIN LUCIER: But when you stutter, you scan the language. You are scanning your past. JOAN LA BARBARA: You know, instead of trying to direct the voice, I try to let the voice direct me. PAULINE OLIVEROS: I’m aware of my own physiology. And then I’m hearing it as a whole, and I’m aware of the various rates that are going on, the kinds of breaks in concentration that occur and how they are corrected. DAVID ROSENBOOM: What I’m looking at really is the existence of regularly pulsing energy. RICHARD TEITELBAUM: I played the same synthesizer for ten years. Me and it are very close to each other. LARRY AUSTIN: Ives’ main thing, I feel, was the concept of layering and getting us out of the idea that the sounds always had to come from the same place; that is, right in front of you. JAMES TENNEY: I realized in writing these pieces that this was one way to avoid drama, which I’m still trying to find ways to avoid. J. B. FLOYD about NANCARROW: Somebody actually brought up what was going to happen to the piano roles after he died; and he said, “Why? Do you want one?” LA MONTE YOUNG: You can always say that you wanted La Monte Young, but it was impossible. He was so mercenary, he wanted money. CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE: I’m searching for sort of this golden sonority. CHARLES MORROW: The high art itself is a form of power consciousness, that in a way one listens to the high art in the same way that one walks around being a flirt. GARRETT LIST: The only way for a one-world kind of feeling is where each nationality, each locality, has its own strength; so that people don’t need to have to take from another place. FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners. JOHN MC GUIRE: But sooner or later I am sure that I will return to America. BEN JOHNSTON about HARRY PARTCH: He was really willing to be as direct and as simple and as corny as you like, as people are when they aren’t trying to be concert artists."Desert Plants" was a cult book in the seventies because it brought the first information about the US-American composer-performer scene to Europe. Numerous examples of sheet music and entire scores enrich this insight into a time of experimentation that needs to be brought back into consciousness. The book, which has been reprinted unchanged, is dedicated to Carol Byl, who at the time transcribed the tapes largely literally in order to maintain the "stream of consciousness". The cover picture was drawn by Michael von Biel. The edition is accompanied by a CD which makes the surviving sound documents available in restored form as mp3 files, including the famous telephone conversation with La Monte Young. Thus the original voices from 1975 can be heard – a contemporary document.   Walter Zimmermann's interview partners are Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (about Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire and Ben Johnston (about Harry Partch).

Walter Zimmerman – Desert Plants - Conversations with Twenty-Three American Musicians

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Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be “an addict” and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. ‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness.softcover, 345pp Pilot Press, London 2025

charlotte northall – practicing dying

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During the crucifixion Christ is said to have sustained 5 wounds: 1 in each hand and foot from the nails of the cross, and the 5th was formed when the side of Christ was pierced by the sword of Longinus. These 5 wounds became objects of specific veneration in the late Middle Ages and in manuscripts the side wound is usually depicted as a mandorla: an almond/diamond/vulvic shape, generally isolated from Christ's body and oriented vertically on the page. It is the vulvic shape of these images, and their implications, that this publication takes as its focus. Images of the side wound were used as talismans, one could gain magical protections by looking at them, touching, ingesting, or wrapping them around your body, and they are often found on birth girdles: rolls of parchment with magical formulae for easing birth. Mystics of this time speak of drinking from the wound, kissing it, entering it, living within it, and subsequently being birthed from the wound. The vulvic representation of the wound produced a state where Christ was seen as neither fully male, nor fully female, but rather as an unstably sexed figure, asserting a constant fluidity. Through this side wound Christ became a mother, lover, object of erotic desire, and a portal for the whole universe to emerge from. SIDE WOUND: The Female Christ provides an overview of the many ways the side wound has been interpreted historically and includes images and archival information of the numerous manuscripts depicting the side wound.Softcover, Staplebound 128 x 177mm, 36pp Hildegard Press, Canada, 2025

side wound - the female christ

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