Books and Magazines


The second Norient book «Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World» introduces you to a contemporary world of distinct music, sounds and music videos. Niche Music from Johannesburg to Helsinki, Jakarta to Los Angeles that speaks of a changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of North versus South, West versus East. Edited by Theresa Beyer, Thomas Burkhalter, and Hannes Liechti   Scholars, journalists, bloggers and musicians from Bolivia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Switzerland and forty-six other countries discuss artistic expressions that may not make big headlines yet, but anticipate major changes to come. Produced in oftentimes small studios from Jakarta to La Paz, Cape Town to Helsinki, these works experiment with the new possibilities of the Internet age and illuminate new spaces beyond the confines of commercialism, propaganda, and bigotry. They foresee a changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of North versus South, West versus East. Discover this through a collage of articles, interviews, quotations, photographs and lyrics. - music and money, music an loneliness, music and war, exotica, gender, sampling-culture, post-digital pop - Punk in Bolivia and Indonesia, Electronic Music in Egypt, Underground Pop from South Africa and Nigeria, Rap in Pakistan, Serbia, Chile and Ghana, Noise Music from Israel, Seapunk and Vaporwave from the US, Post Digital Pop from the UK, Neuer Konzeptualismus, and much more. contributions by Aisha Deme, Jenny Mbaye, Wayne Marshall, Cande Sánchez Olmos, John Hutnyk, Thomas Burkhalter, Andy Bennett, Theresa Beyer, Sandeep Bhagwati, Hillegonda C. Rietveld, Ali Haider Habib, Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Martin Daughtry, Hannes Liechti, Derek Walmsley, Elijah Wald, C-drík Fermont, FrankJavCee, Florian Sievers, Percy Mabandu, Louise Gray, Nabeel Zuberi, Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Julio Mendívil, Oliver Seibt, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Emma Dabiri, Jonathan Fischer, B Camminga, Sonja Eismann, Michael Rebhahn, Eduardo Navas, Adam Harper, and many more.edited by Theresa Beyer, Thomas Burkhalter, Hannes Liechti Softcover, 504ppNorient Books, Bern, 2015Languages: English (75%), German (24%), French, Italian (1%)

visions of a new world – seismographic sounds

The new Norient book Home is Where the Heart Strives explores what place means in relation to music and sound. 85 contributors from 38 countries map their sonic landscapes of migration, war, queerness, and home through essays, poems, articles, artworks, photos, and songs. From a metalhead smuggling banned tapes across the Syrian border to an oasis in the mountains of Bogotá where people gather to vogue, we are looking for places where differences don’t dissolve but resonate.   with contributions by Lendl Barcelos, Bananamonkey, Basil Anliker aka Baze, Marina Benetti, Persis Bekkering, Birds WG, Penelope Braune, Thomas Burkhalter, Kadallah Burrowes, Sinatra Chumo, Juliana Cuervo, Sumangala Damodaran, Domingos, Rana Eid, Ronja Falkenbach, Faravaz Farvadin, Šejma Fere, Vera Fonseca, Chandra Frank, Sally Garama, Dennis Gupa, Rehab Hazgui, Sizo Hlope, Hitman Kaht, Umi Hsu, Ibaaku, Andra Ivănescu, Bruce Johnson, Devangana Kalita, Paul Kammies, Raphael Kariuki aka djrPH, Karun, Anahid Kassabian, Paola LaForgia, Sasha J. Langford, Lutivini Majanja, Chris McGuinness, Elia Meier, Luigi Monteanni, Zahra Motallebi, Jesse Munene, Isaac Abraham Williams aka Isaac Mutant, Natasha Narwal, Janina Neustupny, Saba Niazmand, Kai Oh, Shaahin Peymani, Vinzent Maria Preuẞ, Nazifah Raidah, Philipp Rhensius aka Alienationist, Urs Rihs, Rami Sabbagh, Tanasgol Sabbagh, Sergio Salazar, Justin Oliver Salhani, Jacek Szczepanek Nate Sloan, André Santos, Diana Santos, Ali Sayah, Tillman Severin, Martin Stokes, Studio Flux, Anubhuti Sharma, Majd Shidiac, Jorgé Aarón Silva Rodríguez, Thasil Suhara Backer, Suvani Suri, Gisela Swaragita, Pjotr Tkacz-Bielewicz, Shzr Ee Tan, Wiwi Tri, Fujiko Urdininea, Maria Uthe, Ujif_notfound, Upendra Vaddadi, Abhishek Vidyarthy Singh, Johann Voigt, Elijah Wald, McKenzie Wark, Arief Wibisono, Ytasha Womack, Kimihiro Yasakaedited by Philipp Rhensius, Janina Neustupny, Thomas Burkhalter, Hannes Liechti, and Vinzent Maria Preuß    Softback ,16.5 × 23.5 cm, full colour, 314ppNorient Books, Bern, July 2025

home is where the heart strives

Optically Suspicious is a publication by Matrijaršija on the life, work, and cultural and artistic activities of the Union of Graphic and Typographic Workers of Yugoslavia. The book is the result of research in the Union’s archives in the Printed Material Collection of the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. Matrijaršija reconstructs the forgotten history of the leftist graphic and typographic workers by studying the Union’s posters and leaflets, which bear witness to their rich artistic and cultural programme realised between 1920 and 1941. The book offers engaging theoretical discussions on the importance of cultural and artistic (self-)organisation and the significance of solidarity among workers in the printing industry. The members of the Matrijaršija collective bring this history to life in a series of collages, visual poems, plays, and short stories. Optically Suspicious is the first volume in the ‘tehnika’ series, which focuses on the technical aspects of radical publishing practices. The volumes in the series will discuss the ways in which radical and independent publishing practices introduce entirely new forms of printing, typography, design, distribution and content. Edited by Rab-Rab Press, Matrijaršija and Baraba, the aim of the series is to deal with the actuality of the fluid form of revolutionary printing “techniques” and to develop and connect them with contemporary publishing practices. Conceived, designed and printed by Matrijaršija, Optically Suspicious is entirely manufactured with risporint and is the expanded edition and translation of the first Serbo-Croatian version published in 2022 in collaboration with the Museum of Yugoslavia. Founded in 2014 in Belgrade, the autonomous cultural centre Matrijaršija is a collective focused on printmaking and independent publishing. With over a decade of experience in screen printing and five years in risograph printing, it promotes experimental techniques and practices, as well as alternative forms of artistic organisation.Pocket-sized Hardcover  Rab-Rab,

Matrijaršija – optically suspicious

"Wesley Brown is a writer's writer. His dialog in Blue in Green is remarkable. He knows the varieties of the American language in and out. We get fascinating portraits of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Clark Terry, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Eartha Kitt, and others. An insider named Freeloader provides comic relief. Before the salespersons dictated trends in Black literature, a major publisher would have published this book. Thanks to Blank Forms and other midsize presses, the Black literary tradition, whose fictional standards were set by Brooks, Wright, Himes, Polite, Bambara, and others, is alive."—Ishmael Reed "Wesley Brown attempts a difficult thing with this book: He attempts to walk inside the consciousness of Miles Davis at a very complex point in his very complex life. Beaten by police for smoking a cigarette outside Birdland, married to a brilliant and accomplished dancer, leading a sextet that has genius at every station, and fending off demons that are co-authors of his being, Brown's Miles is a man who is troubled and proud. This novella is lyrical, insightful, and beautiful."— A. B. Spellman "Blue in Green is a gorgeous jazz composition. In love and in torment, Miles Davis and Frances Taylor are co-creators and lead soloists. Brown surrounds them with an ensemble of brilliant friends, rivals, and mentors: Monk, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Katherine Dunham, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt. All have their say—shrewd, ebullient, dissonant. When I closed the book, I wanted to begin it all overagain: see, hear, and re-experience every note of Wesley Brown's wonderful prose music."—Margo JeffersonWesley Brown narrates the day when trumpeter Miles Davis was assaulted by the New York Police Department. A dramatic and humorous story, told from multiple perspectives including that of Frances Taylor, Davis's wife, and the musicians in Davis's bands: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis. The latest work from the veteran novelist called "one hell of a writer" by James Baldwin and "wonderfully wry" by Donald Barthelme, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis's temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse— reckons with her disciplined upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he's left behind. --- Wesley Brown (born 1945) is an Atlanta-based writer and educator whose work spans fiction, poetry, biography, theater, and film. His oeuvre is distinguished by its attention to the musicality of speech and its balance of humorous, ironic, and political engagement with American history. In 1956, while a student at State University of New York at Oswego, Brown joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, moving south to register voters with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party near the Tennessee border, where he first began to write poetry. After an arrest at a demonstration in Jackson, Mississippi, he graduated college and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1968, where he became an active member of the Black Panther Party before returning to his native New York City to join writing workshops led by Sonia Sanchez and John Olliver Killens. In 1972 he was arrested as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; in a statement to the draft board he quoted the Panther's Ten Point Program, adding, with his signature use of idiomatic expression, "If you can't relate to that, you can walk chicken with your ass picked clean." He served an eighteen month sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which informed the writing of his recently reissued first novel, Tragic Magic (Random House)—edited by Toni Morrison and released to wide acclaim by writers including James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, and Ishmael Reed in 1978. His short fiction and essays have been published widely, from movement publications such as Liberator to glossies including Essence. For twenty-six years Brown taught literature and creative writing at Rutgers University in New Jersey. During this time he was involved with the National Association of Third World Writers; co-edited celebrated collections of multicultural American literature, authored the historical novel Darktown Strutters (Cane Hill, 1994) and award-winning plays including Boogie Woogie and Booker T. (1987) and Life During Wartime (1992); and wrote, with Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, the screenplay for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996). After retiring, he relocated to New England, where he taught at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts and Bennington College in Vermont, and authored his third novel, Push Comes to Shove (Concord Free Press, 2009), and the short story collection Dance of the Infidels (Concord ePress, 2017).

Blue in Green - Wesley Brown

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones French paperback with flaps, 336 pagesFitzcarraldo, September 2025   Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels, three short story collections and has been translated into more than fifty languages. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, in Jennifer Croft’s translation. She is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. House of Day, House of Night is her fifth novel to appear in English with Fitzcarraldo Editions. Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 International Booker Prize.

olga tokarczuk – house of day, house of night

Monolithic Undertow alights a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers. It traces the line from ancient traditions to the modern underground, navigating archaeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub-bass, avant-garde eccentricity, sound weaponry and fervent spiritualism. From Neolithic beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, cone shattering dubwise bass, Hawkwind's Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust and Ash Ra Temple; the hash-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Melvins, seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow explores the power of the drone - an audio carrier vessel capable of evoking womb like warmth or cavernous dread alike.In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration. The drone requires neither chord nor band, representing - via its infinite pliability and accessibility - the ultimate folk music: a potent audio tool of personal liberation. Immersion in hypnotic and repetitive sounds allows us to step outside of ourselves, be it chant, a 120dB beasting from Sunn O))), standing front of the system as Jah Shaka drops a fresh dub or going full headphone immersion with Hawkwind. These experiences are akin to an audio portal - a sound Tardis to silence the hum and fizz of the unceasing inner voice. The drone exists outside of us, but also - paradoxically - within us all; an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel... Paperback, 464pp White Rabbit, Feb, 2022

Harry sword – Monolithic Undertow - In search of sonic oblivion

Effects 4 orbits around holes. Holes draw our attention to the periphery, the edges of the visible, bringing to the fore what typically disappears into the margin. The issue explores holes in the psyche and the body, political and philosophical holes, holes in architecture and geology, holes as destructive as well as productive, holes as grave-pits, holes as birth-canals. Effects 4: Holes includes new essays on holes by Richard Boothby, Lorens Holm, Ani Maitra, Tabitha Steinberg, Noel W Anderson, Hilary White, Tim Martin, Jeffrey Stuker and Christopher Page; interviews with artists Paul Pfeiffer and Mary Helena Clark on holes and their work; new poems on holes by Daisy Lafarge and Christopher Carlton; and artworks the mobilise holes and voids by Eric N. Mack, Milano Chow, Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, Adam Putnam, Carolee Schneemann, Clementine Keith-Roach, Jess Gough, Patricia Treib, Lyndon Harrison, Natalia Romik, Lakshmi Luthra and Nnena Kalu.Softcover, 240 × 180 mm, 218 pp.Full colourEffects, 2025  https://effects-journal.com/about Effects is a journal of art, poetry and essays. It is devoted to thinking about aesthetic effects, their social and philosophical histories and contemporary lives. Effects was founded in 2018 by Christopher Page and Orlando Reade and is currently edited by Clementine Keith-Roach, Lakshmi Luthra, Christopher Page, Matt Rickard, Jeffrey Stuker, Florence Uniacke and Jan Tumlir.

Holes – Effects Journal No. 4