This is exactly what we need. Big time. Johannes Rød returns with the massively expanded edition of his essential guide - a monument of discographic research spanning six decades of creative music documentation. 381 pages plus 47 unnumbered pages of label artwork. 185 labels mapped with obsessive detail and passionate advocacy. From the explosive emergence of free jazz in the mid-1960s through ESP-Disk, BYG Actuel, and Actuel, through the European improvisers' movement documented by FMP, Incus, ICP, and Po Torch, to contemporary operations like Clean Feed, Trost Records, Astral Spirits, and Smalltown Supersound. This is not just catalogue information. This is cultural history. Each label entry captures aesthetic vision, cultural context, the networks of musicians and presenters that made each imprint distinctive. Rød understands that free jazz culture has always been about more than just the music in the grooves - from Absinth Records' handpainted sleeves to FMP's iconic covers by Annette Peacock and Paul Lovens, this book documents the visual beauty alongside the sonic radicalism. When Rød's Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl 1965-1985 appeared in 2014, it immediately became the essential companion for anyone navigating the vast landscape of creative music documentation. This 2025 edition is the complete map. Hundreds of catalogue entries. Geographical, cultural, and ideological perspectives spanning American pioneers (Savoy, Blue Note's avant-garde excursions), European explosions, Japanese radicalism (DIW, PSF), Scandinavian innovations (Odin, Circulasione Totale). With a foreword by Mats Gustafsson who writes: "DIG IN, enjoy and start your own research. It is all in front of you! Johannes Rød has created a unique possibility for all of us. It is a deep well of knowledge and music. It is the most FUN ride you can make: into the (un)known world of improvised music!" As Joakim Haugland of Smalltown Supersound notes in his introduction, free jazz has been "the spine of the label, that holds it all together" - always present, always essential. This book is that spine made visible, tangible, researchable. It's information and inspiration in equal measure. In an era when streaming platforms flatten everything into algorithmic sameness, when the physical object threatens to become mere nostalgia, this book reminds us why labels matter - why curatorial vision, aesthetic presentation, and committed documentation are crucial to creative music's survival and flourishing. A landmark publication.A guide to 185 labels  Softcover, 485pp Smalltown Supersound, 2025

Letter from Nobody gathers her “pieces performed by title only, without scores,” along with scores inspired by those pieces and derived from other authors' books, and reflections from the namsan concerts. This book may serve as a record of performances, a commentary on scores, a collection of responses to novels and poetry, a set of poems written through performance, or even a book of scores.  lo wie receives letters sent by nobody—sometimes revising them, sometimes writing new ones to be performed spontaneously in everyday life. She traces and refines the marks left by the passage of time. This title inaugurates the Anti-Music Series by Orolo Books—a series of works that seeks to strip away the hardened shell of “music” as a noun, and to explore what might still live within it as a verb, through speculation and practice.Softcover, 112pp Orolo Books, Seoul, 2025 lo wie composes, performs, and writes within everyday life. She wrote Beckett's Typist (2011) and has been organizing the outdoor concert series namsan in Seoul, London, and Berlin since 2014.

Walking tours of Britain's nuclear power stations, exploring the history of the sites they occupy and their social, ecological, and cultural impact on the landscape.The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion is a journey around Britain's nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the impossible world of nuclear power and weapons.Hardcover, 488pp Strange Attractor Press, 2025

Opening the pages of NOW JAZZ NOW will drop you into the ravenous mind of the insatiable Free Jazz and Free Improvisation record collector.  Here are the infamous and rarified recordings that challenged, advanced and, many times, polarized, the orthodoxy of a music defined by beauty, struggle, and the pure essence of inspiration.  Featuring images of albums, singles, and cassettes direct from the authors’ personal archives in all their loving wear and tear, along with Philippe Gras’ exquisite photos of Free Music legends, this is a book for all adventurous lovers of creative sound, whether they be record collectors, avant-garde Jazz enthusiasts, students of radical culture, or simply curiosity-seekers in wonder to this music’s illustrious history and lineage. The three authors, music writer Byron Coley and musician's Mats Gustafsson and Thurston Moore, share a life-long mutual obsession to record collecting with a distinct focus on the recorded history of Free Music. Compiling their personal archives with a long-running discussion and debate of which recordings could be considered within a list of more than one-hundred releases, they have decided on presenting the works in chronologic order, realizing the music to be preternaturally noncompetitive, non-hierarchical, and of equal value. The gleanings of Gustafsson, Moore, and Coley along with the words of legendary musicians Neneh Cherry and Joe McPhee, will enlighten, delight, amuse, and bemuse all who enter their enthralled streams of appreciation, perception, and, most importantly, unbridled respect and regard for a universe of music devoted to the dignity of freedom and the holistic vibrations of spiritual unitySoftcover, 196 x 268, pp 277, fully illustrated  Ecstatic Peace Library, Dec 2025 By Bryan Coley, Mats Gustafsson & Thurston Moore Foreverlogue by Neneh Cherry

American visual artist and scholar Joseph Grigely (born 1956) here brings together writings, lectures, interviews and documentation of his work spanning 40 years. Deaf since the age of 10, his art and writing have long questioned and made use of various modes of communication—photographs, handwritten notes, lipreading, newspaper headlines, paintings and TV captions—to examine and scrutinize the ableism embedded in cultural and media production.Otherhow interrogates modes of access and analyzes how issues of accessibility and their resolution provide a benefit to everyone, not just the disabled. Chapters devoted to art, access and advocacy underpin the interconnected nature of these issues. Letters of complaint, faxes and emails, unpublished op-eds, exhibition proposals, statements on equality and access: each provides a glimpse into how Grigely’s work has been shaped by—or constructed from—the "tangled process" of opening access.The book is rounded out by a series of visual inventories: collections of images that document failures of access or, in the case of the obituaries, highlight those who had a disability or were activists working to establish greater access for those with disabilities.Softcover, 19.56 x 3.3 x 25.15 cm, 400pp Primary Information, 2026

Joseph Jarman (1937 - 2019) was a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist best known as a founding member of trailblazing avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jarman was responsible for the Art Ensemble’s signature face paint and elaborate costumes as well as the pioneering theatrical and multimedia elements of their shamanistic performances, which could include dance, comedy, performance art, surreal pranks, and—notably—the recitation of Jarman’s poetry. In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman’s Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman’s flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman’s photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience’s consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago’s South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement. --- With a new preface by Thulani Davis and an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards  “Joseph Jarman, a musician of rare poetic gifts, was also a remarkable poet. Black Case, a lost treasure of the Black Arts Movement, combines protest against injustice with heart-breaking introspection and fierce commitment to the Great Black Music tradition to which Jarman contributed with gentle yet mighty force.” —Adam Shatz “Joseph’s recitation of ‘Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City’ (from Black Case) moved me to set the words of this poem for Baritone Voice and Orchestra and became part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s standard repertoire. Joseph had a bold and passionate creative spirit. I feel privileged to have shared the stage with him.” —Roscoe Mitchell "'Though in reality all the words are music themselves' is the reality to which all poetry aspires, whether in verse or prose, theory or story, criticism or craft. Joseph Jarman always knew that for black musicians, which is to say black speakers, exile is our public holiday. We live through that. We live through that. Black Case is all and everything in this regard. 'Whats to say,' he says, is that 'we sing because/we love you/because we/love you/because/we love/you.' We are loved beyond judgment by the music, he says, and we say thanks." —Fred Moten   Softcover, 142 pp Blank Forms, New York, 2019

The focus is on new compositions, innovative performance formats, influential festivals, and aesthetic, social, and technological developments in 20th- and 21st-century music. Essays, interviews, analytical texts, and reviews offer different perspectives on contemporary music as a living practice—between artistic experimentation, critical reflection, and theoretical classification.Edited by Christopher Fox, Ed Cooper, and Celeste Oram Softcover Magazine, 144 pp.ISSN 0040-2982

Edited by Margaret Busby   Paperback, 6 x 9 in, 688 pp  Nightboat Books, New York, October 2025     Jayne Cortez (1934–2012) was an African American poet, performing artist, publisher, and activist who remains widely celebrated for her political, surrealist, and dynamic innovations in language, lyricism, and visceral sound. Taking a stand against discrimination, exploitation, and ecological devastation, Cortez’s work and life probed those issues poetically and politically. As a multifaceted artist, she published a dozen volumes of poetry, including On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems (2008); The Beautiful Book (2007); Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002); Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1997); and Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1982); Poetic Magnetic (1991); Firespitter (1982); Mouth on Paper (1977); Scarifications (1973); and Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares (1969), performed her own poems with music on ten recordings, and was the driving force behind several international conferences that combined her artistic and political concerns.A long-awaited, comprehensive collection of renowned poet and performance artist Jayne Cortez’s poetry. Like the jazz rhythms that inspired and punctuated her practice, Jayne Cortez improvised her way through and across disciplines, bridging poetry and performance with music and the visual arts to create a unique body of work. Consciously rupturing the boundaries between art and politics, Cortez’s practice uneasily fits within literary movements of the 20th century, residing everywhere and nowhere between the Black Arts Movement, Surrealism, feminism, and early performance art. As intersectional as it is interdisciplinary, her work is consistently visceral and fearless, acting as a powerful expression of collective rage on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed. In the words of historian Robin D.G. Kelley, “her poetry was never ‘protest’ but a complete revolt, a clarion call for a new way of life.”

Basta Now. Women,Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 2,371 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)Softcover, 455pp Permanent Draft, 2025, 2nd edition

Views from the Seven Ionian Islands is an exercise in patience, contemplation, and the shifting perspectives that accrue with time and distance. Slowly unfolding across 10 years and thousands of miles—shifting between Greece, Japan, Israel, and Paris—it takes multiple forms, each element in conversation with other voices, places, and moments.Assembled in this release are two distinct but interlocking suites of music. The second of these—centered around a series of field recordings made a decade ago on the Greek island of Kythira, interwoven with instrumental interludes—was the first to be recorded. Here, it is preceded by a collection of lushly beautiful recordings made by Soloveitzik with a large ensemble in Jaffa in 2023, completed after revisiting and revising his impressions of Kythira in light of the intervening years.The accompanying book includes two texts from Tom Soloveitzik, Impressions from the Islands and Views from the Seven Ionian Islands - Revised Version (2016-2023); an incisive essay on the work by the writer and composer Derek Baron; and a transcript of correspondence between Tom Soloveitzik and the painter Masha Zusman, who has made the island of Kythira her home for a number of years. Together, they reflect on questions of creativity, landscape, home, and what it means to record—in images, words, sound, and memory. A dozen full-color images of Zusman’s paintings illustrate their conversation.As views proliferate and overlap, disparate perceptions and perspectives are superimposed. Views from the Seven Ionian Islands reveals a careful attention to the nuances that distinguish past from present, near from far, and memory from perception—and perhaps most importantly, the person one once was from the person one has become—but it retains a deep faith in the continuity between them. In a world increasingly characterized by a profound sense of dislocation—geographic, temporal, moral, aesthetic, and political—Soloveitzik’s work confirms his commitment to the enduring sense of connection to be found even in the midst of this shared displacement.     Book & CDR Suppadeneum, Arizona, August , 2025

Dark Rides is like the best carnival dark ride you've ever been on: funny and frightening, short and shocking. Dark Rides is a collection of stories about gay teenagers growing up in a small city in Canada in the 1950's.   There's a different kid in each of the stories: the kid that loves Hank Williams, the kid that works at a haunted hayride, the kid that thinks he's Caligula and so on. They don't meet, but they share similar attributes: they're all named Derek McCormack, and they all fall for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Published for the first time in 1996, Dark Rides was Derek McCormack's first book. This thirtieth anniversary edition features new illustrations and a foreword by Lisa RobertsonSoftcover, 110pp Pilot Press, 2026

Softcover, 94pp Autonomedia, Brooklyn, Spring 2025 “Matthew Shipp has created a beautiful testament filled with reflections, insightful analysis of his music and of the creative music scene. As every time his fingers touch the piano, he taps into the pure spiritual world from the eyes of the musician who is down in the trenches and standing on the pulpit. This book is full of personal stories and anecdotes that resonate with truth and a poetic honesty that goes beyond Jazz. It goes right to the heart.” –William Parker “Reading Matthew Shipp is like hearing him play: one is left spellbound. The essays, poems, meditations, reflections gathered here are the work of a true polymath, a clairvoyant who understands that “mystery” neither baffles nor conceals. It illuminates. And what Shipp illuminates are the core elements of this thing we call jazz: vibrations, universal energy, breath, pulse, silence, chromosomes, logos, language, and angels. This book will forever change how we hear, see, and feel music.” –Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original   Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings is a collection of essays and prose poems from acclaimed pianist and visionary Matthew Shipp. Downbeat magazine has described Shipp as “the connection between the past, present and future for jazzheads of all ages” and as “a musician who deserves a place of choice in the jazz piano pantheon.” Shipp has written essays for a number of fanzines, blogs and magazines over the years and this collection touches on many subjects, including jazz, sports, the psychology and spirituality of improvisation, and 1980s New York dance culture. Introducing this book, visual artist and poet Yuko Otomo places Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings in the pantheon of books by artists writing about their art, lauding it as “a meticulously descriptive record of his creative process’s physical/metaphysical/alchemical mystery itself seen from the inside,” with “a peculiar and unique quality which does not exist in any art writing.”

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)

TELLING INVENTS TOLD is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes. It includes the influential essay "Whose History?" alongside texts from works such as "Light Reading" and "Pictures on Pink Paper," together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective. An important figure at the London Film-Makers Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists. Lis Rhodes was important figure at the London Film-Makers Co-operative, and a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.   "Whose history? It is hard to think of a question more central to our moment, or an artist who has posed it more insistently and urgently than Lis Rhodes. Her films comprise one of the most radical rethinkings of experimental film and politics of the last 50 years; they are like flashbulbs, exposing the physiognomies of power in the cracks of everyday experience. Her writing is both an integral part of her extraordinary filmmaking and a continuation of it. Partisan and sceptical, lyrical and hopeful, it is a voice of resistance to reality as it has been told or sold to us." (Professor Mike Sperlinger, Oslo Academy of Fine Art)Softcover, 336pp The Visible Press, 2019

Nine enigmatic, chilling and moving short tales in this first ever collection from David Rudkin, writer of Penda’s Fen, The Ash Tree, Artemis 81 and numerous other television and stage productions.     “Rudkin’s intense spiritual, intellectual, psychological and emotional investigations excavate in the interstices between certainties… For readers and followers of Rudkin’s singular trajectory over many decades, this diptych of story constellations, as ancient, present and prescient as anything in his oeuvre, are unexpected but truly welcome gifts, manifestations of a lifelong enquiry that is among the most charged and profound these islands have witnessed.”From the foreword by Gareth EvansIllustrated by Zoe Taylor Forewrod by Gareth Evans Available in a strictly limited, high quality hardback edition of 500. All copies come with a bookplate signed by the author.   Hardcover, 264 pp Strange Attractor Press, December 2025

Within today's intensely polarized environment, in which social and political debate often tends toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is mostly placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of speaking out, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and social transformation. To listen is to extend the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized, and the known. In addition, listening affords more egalitarian and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of empathic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other, us and them. Listening is an embodied power, it may open and hold, it may support and heal, and it may afford escape as well as compassionate action.The Listening Biennial Reader draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and ecological proposition, a creative practice, and research method. This includes contributions by curators and artists from the first edition of The Listening Biennial, presented in 2021, along with a number of key scholars who offer critical reflections on cultures of listening. Listening emerges as a creative and critical force, or wave of attention, that contributes to maintaining the diversity of our social, creaturely adventure.Edited by Rebecca Collins and Brandon LaBelle. Contributions by Miguel Buenrostro, Wanda Canton, Rebecca Collins, Henry Ivry, Nanna Hauge Kristensen, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, Sara Mikolai, Mhamad Safa, Luísa Santos, James Webb.   Hardcover, 17 x 24 cm Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2025

A poignant consideration of the material aspect of sound and how it fundamentally shapes our experience of the world, both in its presence and absence. From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being. He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings. He considers the consequences of the commodification of sound in the digital era. And he looks at what’s at stake in trying to preserve the world’s dwindling quiet places.Hardcover, 115pp Yale University Press, January 2026

'He spoke about music in its pre-cultural state, when song had been a howl across several pitches, [when] musical performances must have had a quality something like free recitation; improvisation. But if one closely examined music, and in particular its most recently achieved stage of development, one noticed the secret desire to return to those conditions.'- Thomas Mann Doctor 'Faustus' 'We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them.'- Cornelius Cardew 'Everywhere, the orthodox systems of our times anticipate the careful and clear presentation of ready-worked-out on-tap outcomes, throughout our lives. Said systems seldom afford focused vantage on the vagaries, protean problems, the awkward wealth, of investigation itself. Generally, the on-goings of development are hidden, edited or simply unseen; what has been developed over time is rendered public, honed for appreciation after the fact, variously knowable, reproducible and endorsable qua final product or record.'- Seymour Wright Percussionist Eddie Prévost co-founded in the 1960s the seminal improvising music ensemble AMM. In this book he presents a very personal philosophy of music informed by his long working practice and inspired by the London weekly improvisation workshop he first convened in 1999. Perhaps controversially, this view is mediated through the developing critical discourse of adaptionism; a perspective grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature. Music herein is examined for its cognitive and generative qualities to see how our evolved biological and emergent cultural legacy reflects our needs and dreams. This survey visits ethnomusicology, folk music, jazz, contemporary music and 'world music' as well as focusing upon various forms of improvisation - observing their effect upon human relations and aspirations. However, there are also analytical and ultimately positive suggestions towards future 'metamusical' practices. These mirror and potentially meet the aspirations of a growing community who wish to engage with the world - with all its history and chance conditionals - by applying a free-will in making music that is creative and collegiate.Softcover, 235pp Copula, Harlow, UK, 2011