staple-bound published, 2024 by runamok press Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. Shapeshifting is his eleventh book of poetry. His work was in the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has composed and performed music for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre. A collection of prose is forthcoming from Pilot Press.These poems grow out of ‘the hairline fracture/ writ through every dawn’, repeatingly remaking the forms of jackdaw, sycamore, Icarus. Life courses through them, taking the shape of raindrops that slick bodies with ‘a conductive gel razing separateness’. In a gesture that feels as timeless as it is astonishingly prescient, they build, and commit themselves to endlessly rebuilding, a space-time for joy within this ‘hell without echo/ entirely above ground’.ELLEN DILLONThis thorny and beautiful collection of poems is riven with wants realised, frustrations, moments of desire gnarled up. Amongst the delta, the thicket and the mountain, Timothy  Thornton declares an uneasy truce between the bitter and the euphoric.HUW LEMMEYPoems and language as cresting, skirmishing, released-exposed things — I can think of no better writer for our times. Thornton’s work draws upon Bosch-monstrous myths, the quiet undeniablities of folklore and the smarting contemporary moment where calculation and recklessness, the seething and the stark, vulnerability and mischief all pluck at narrative to provide its own omens. Full of consolation, grief, and smaller but pressing, bolting, rootling truths that buck between the reader’s hands, we are lucky to be in shapeshifting’s company, watchful all the while.ELEY WILLIAMS

Paperback 304 pages‘A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea’ Brian Eno ‘As memorable, pleasurable and irrational as all the highest quests’ John Higgs ‘A perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music’ Cosey Fanni Tutti What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn’s colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman’s intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.

paperback. 630 pp. feb 2024A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau's fundamental bass, Riemann's harmonic function, Schenker's hierarchic analysis, Forte's pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman's auditory scene, Terhardt's virtual pitch, Krumhansl's tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt's evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: • Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? • What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

Play for Today: Cornelius Cardew book in collaboration with Middlesex University and M HKA, Antwerp. ISBN 978-0-9558299-1-8This book was published to coincide with Cornelius Cardew: Play for Today exhibition which took place here at Drawing Room. This book was co-published by Drawing Room and MuHKA, Antwerp, in collaboration with Middlesex University. In this 112 page book extracts from ‘Treatise’, ‘Schooltime Compositions’, ‘Nature Study Notes’ and other visual material are interspersed with essays by Michael Parsons (composer, performer and co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra), Andrea Phillips (Director, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London), Adrian Rifkin (Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London), Rob Stone (Senior Research Fellow, Visual Culture Research Group, Middlesex University) , John Tilbury (musician and Cardew collaborator and biographer), international artists’ collective Ultra-red and Grant Watson and a photo-essay by the Otolith Group. These artists, writers and curators pursue and rekindle the questions and contradictions that Cardew’s practice incorporated.

220 pp., pbMaking audible what is usually inaudible, rendering sound visible in an unusual way, and facilitating a spatial experience of sound­—this is what constitutes the pioneering work that makes Alvin Lucier one of the most important representatives of American music in the second half of the twentieth century. The stated aim of the study at hand is the detailed historical and theoretical exploration of Alvin Lucier’s work, with particular focus on his decidedly reflexive experimental aesthetics. The research is thus based on two essential methodological approaches: on the one hand, a musicological study of the genesis of Lucier’s work, and on the other, an aesthetic analysis of the role of the real within Lucier’s aesthetics.Lucier’s experimental compositions are aesthetic reflections that are constantly making reference to the phenomenology of sound, as well as to the perception of perception itself. His aesthetic vision gravitated towards devising minimalist constellations and processes which, due to the withdrawal of the compositional subject, gave expression to an acoustic phenomenon and the unforeseeable idea inherent to it.

The thing about that kind of punk is that it is expansive & it expands you, sometimes in glorious ways… whatever way I took the lesson, punk was disciplining me in the epic trade of survival by any means necessary… An essay on falling in love with your teachers, following them home from school, and the emancipatory potential of DIY culture. ‘Hallelujah!’ — Shola von Reinhold140 x 200mm, 28 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitched, 2023 Jordan/Martin Hell is a black trans (2s) artist, writer, & researcher. He is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2022) as well as many other speculative novellas, hybrid genre, & critical texts in the CV universe. His writing on art, etc. & interviews have appeared in 032c, Real Review, Mousse Magazine, & others.

Historic pictures from Getatchew's private photo album Getatchew passed away on April 4, 2016 at the age of 81 after a musical career of more than 68 years. As a final tribute The Ex has published this photobook. 168 pages. Four sections of pictures; a selection from Getatchew's private album with historical photos and photos by three very different international photographers — Andy Moor, guitarist in The Ex, Matias Corral and Nick Helderman who came on tour in Europe, America and to Addis Abeba — to document this unique collaboration between Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests.This photobook is the result of what appears to be an unlikely collaboration between Dutch underground band The Ex and Ethiopian saxophone legend Getatchew Mekuria. The Ex fell in love with an old Getatchew cassette from 1972, and in 2004 they wanted to invite him for their 25th Anniversary Festival. They went to Addis to find him and when they met, Getatchew was up for it right away. The result was a fruitful 10-year collaboration with more than a 100 concerts worldwide, plenty of enthusiastic press and two beautiful CD/LPs.In 2014, because of diabetes, he developed serious problems with his legs and couldn't travel any more. The Ex at that point decided to organise a Celebration of Getatchew Mekuria concert series in Ethiopia, including the National Theatre in Addis Abeba. It sold out. 1500 people came and there was a standing ovation. A truly honourable farewell to a great musician. Soon after this, his health began to deteriorate quickly.

published by Tatum Special 216 pp Hardback  edition of 500    Photographs & editing: George NelsonCover design: Charlotte MannA considered meditation on London's contemporary jazz landscape, Scenes is a collection of fly-on-the-wall pictures of its musicians and spaces, from a period when folks got good to the music all over again. The scenes depicted here run the gamut from packed houses to clandestine jams, from the much lauded to the lesser pronounced, allowing for a candid visual exploration on topical themes of multiculturalism, tradition and modernity, age and youth, community and solitude.

published by Cesura//Acceso, Journal for music, politics, and poetics   Cesura was formed in 2014 as a place to think through the politics of music. The first issue was published in 2014. They have since held workshops, talks, radio shows, and put on gigs exploring the politics of music, poetry and performance. http://cesura-acceso.org/Howard Slater's pamphlet A Blind Eye Turned: Notes on Music and Libidinal Economy (Cesura//Acceso, 2016), which looks at the aesthetics of control, alienation and S/M in industrial and experimental music as a critique of libidinal economy.

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.  McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies—particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa—have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

Pages: 384 Illustrations: 32 illustrationsMusical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know American jazz and popular music through the radio, movies, records, and live stage and dance band performances. She was especially moved by the voice of Billie Holiday. In 1962 she and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) left South Africa together for Europe, where they met and recorded with Duke Ellington. Benjamin and Ibrahim spent their lives on the move between Europe, the United States, and South Africa until 1977, when they left Africa for New York City and declared their support for the African National Congress. In New York, Benjamin established her own record company and recorded her music independently from Ibrahim. Musical Echoes reflects twenty years of archival research and conversation between this extraordinary jazz singer and the South African musicologist Carol Ann Muller. The narrative of Benjamin’s life and times is interspersed with Muller’s reflections on the vocalist’s story and its implications for jazz history. --- “Musical Echoes is a wide reaching and important missing link in the development of late twentieth-century jazz. This book needed to be written and deserves to be read with the same patient attention to detail as was poured into it by the author.” — Gregg Akkerman, Journal of Jazz Studies “We get frank and rich recollections by Benjamin of her early life. . . . The sections on Benjamin’s childhood and early adulthood double as something of a social history of coloured cultural and social life in Cape Town before the National Party came to power in 1948. The book contains a rich description of talent concerts, dance bands, jazz clubs, and the impact of radio, records, and cinema on Benjamin’s imagination and musical education. It also deals with Benjamin’s complex racial politics.” — Sean Jacobs, International Journal of African Historical Studies “[A] fascinating biography. . . .” — Bobbi Booker, Philadelphia Tribune “Ibrahim has cited the loss of information as one legacy of apartheid, and the broader context—filling in those gaps—is also key to the appeal of Muller’s meticulously researched book.” — Marcus O'Dair, Jazzwise “Muller . . . does a remarkable job in piecing together Benjamin’s life, work, and significance within the context of post-apartheid history.” — Brian Morton, The Wire “Muller examines Benjamin's experiences with apartheid, her exile from South Africa, and how these experiences helped form her career as a jazz musician. Benjamin's life story is quite colorful, and Muller effectively captures the essence of that story with this call-and-response nature of the presentation and with a writing style that is both engaging and highly descriptive. Recommended. All readers.” — D. J. Schmalenberger, Choice “Muller's biography-plus, of and with Sathima Bea Benjamin, is welcome for many reasons; first and foremost because it spotlights a brilliant architect of song who is far less well known than she should be. But Muller goes further. She challenges still dominant androcentric and Amerocentric jazz discourses, offering alternative frameworks that allow us to consider the dynamics of race, class and gender within whose maelstrom Benjamin shaped her sound.” — Gwen Ansell, Mail & Guardian “Musical Echoes not only introduces a very important vocalist, Sathima Bea Benjamin, to audiences who may not know of her. It also makes a great contribution to scholarship on jazz, world music, cultural theory, and the African diaspora. It challenges us to reconsider and revise the nationalist narratives that characterize much writing on jazz, and it provides a new framework for discussing the production, circulation, and transformation of musical cultures.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday “Sathima Bea Benjamin ought to share company with the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter. . . . [She] never compromis[es] her own musical vision, refusing to either remake herself into an ‘American’ jazz singer or into what the world imagines to be authentically ‘African.’ She is who she is, Sathima Bea Benjamin, South Africa’s greatest jazz singer and one of the best the world has ever known.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, JazzTimes

2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by its incantatory repetitiveness, its flamboyance, and its mysticism, but also by its violence. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad, Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work, which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video, and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols, as well as Tintin creator Hergé. Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles, and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Sacred Bordello is a flexi-cover sewn, full color, 192-page, 11" x 9" book that includes essays, scores, and original photos of performances and installations, providing the most complete documentation of Charlemagne Palestine's art. The included CD features an hour-long recording of a lecture that Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at the ArtNow Centre in Canada. Following the performance of a strumming music concert, Palestine freely speaks about his music and philosophy, involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question-and-answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The CD also includes a previously unreleased multi-layer voice study from the early 1960s.

Publisher: ‎Broecking Verlag Language: ‎EnglishPaperback: ‎472 pagesDimensions: ‎7.44 x 0.95 x 9.69 inchesIn this detailed biography Schweizer is honored not only as a central figure in the development of European free jazz, but also as a committed pioneer for the equality of women in art and society. In her early years, for example, she stood up for the artistic and economic autonomy of artists and fought against discrimination against people on the basis of gender, origin or sexual orientation. The German critic Christian Broecking, who sadly passed away this year, has created an elaborate, diligent work with lots of case studies. What is more, the book consists of many interviews with Schweizer and over 60 contemporary witnesses, which turn out to be insightful as to her life's work. Chronologically, the biography begins with Schweizer’s youth. She grew up in a pub owner’s family in Schaffhausen and after her first attempts on the accordion she discovered the piano and joined the Crazy Stokers, a Dixieland band, at the age of 16. In 1957, that alone was a sensation. Shortly after that she landed in the top ranks at the Zurich Amateur Jazz Festival playing soul jazz and hardbop. The prize was a man’s shirt and a pack of cigarettes - no one could imagine that a woman would be able to win the first prize. Broecking’s biography is diligently and thoroughly researched, it is at its best when it tells anecdotes. One chapter addresses the chronic underpayment of jazz musicians, one deals with "Knitting as Provocation." Time and again, the author inserts digressions to explain a fact even more explicitly and places it in a social context. As a result of Schweizer’s consistent advocacy against apartheid (she has had very good connections to the South African expats in London) and for women's rights, she was part of the so-called Fichen scandal, in which she was surveilled by the Swiss secret service. --- ‎Broecking Verlag, 2021

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.  This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.

"Grundy has produced a notable contribution to the field of American literary and cultural studies not only in its attention to Umbra, but also in its attention to the complexities of how we approach and understand literary movements." - Journal of Beat Studies "Grundy (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) chronicles the Umbra poets, historical moments (for instance the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965), and the rise of black nationalism, investigating them-and the literature that came out of this period of awakening-with equal thoroughness ... Grundy is also an excellent close reader of poetry. Though Grundy is an academic, there is no academic jargon in this well-researched, clearly presented study. He does an excellent job of dealing with the complexities of this history and how it informed the period." - ChoiceA vital hub of poetry readings, performance, publications and radical politics in 1960s New York, the Umbra Workshop was a cornerstone of the African American avant-garde.Bringing together new archival research and detailed close readings of poetry, A Black Arts Poetry Machine is a groundbreaking study of this important but neglected group of poets. David Grundy explores the work of such poets as Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton and how their innovative poetic forms engaged with radical political responses to state violence and urban insurrection. Through this examination, the book highlights the continuing relevance of the work of the Umbra Workshop today and is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American poetry.

Edited by: Alejandra Luciana Cárdenas. Contributions by: Alexandre Herbetta, Ana Ruiz Valencia, D’Andrade, Daniela Avellar, Fabián Ávila Elizalde, Paulo Antonio Kalankó, Reiko Yamada, Rui Chaves, Nora Castrejón, Teresa Díaz de Cossio, Vered Engelhard. This book was published within the framework of the third edition of the festival Radical Sounds Latin America. English / Spanish 224 pages19.5 x 13 x 2.5 cmHardcoverISBN: ‎ 978-3000704116This second volume of Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal was published within the framework of the third edition of the festival Radical Sounds Latin America. The nine essays presented here articulate and explore soundscapes and sonic stories from Latin American, but also multispecies, intersectional approaches, indigenous ontologies and positions that contend with the Western vocabulary, while also engaging with the ethical dilemmas of our age.  -Daniela Avellar “An Amplified Echo, a Carbonated Resonance”-Vered Engelhard “Sonic Cartography in the Rímac Watershed: On the Contemporaneity of a Pre-Columbian Acoustic Ecology”-Ana Ruiz Valencia “Resounding Epistemologies of Conflict: Auralities in Colombia’s Historical Memory”-Nora Castrejón/Fabián Avila Elizalde “¿Un arte sonoro menor?: Dosis de escucha (2018) y El aula de los ruidos (2019)”-Alexandre Herbetta/Paulo Antonio Kalankó “Indigenous and Anticapitalist Sounds: Musical Practices to Pollinate the Brazilian Caatinga”-Rui Chaves “32 instrucciones para escuchar con/en una epidemia global”-Teresa Díaz de Cossio “Listening for Alida Vázquez: A Life in Electronic Music between Migration, Race and Gender”-Reiko Yamada “On Temperament and Tempering”-D’Andrade “Noise Vivarium: Spectral Radicalism”

1 April 2024 9781789148596 220 mm x 172 mm | 360 pages 113 illustrations Paperback | £20 World Rights: Reaktion An immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its fanzines. Zerox Machine is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its associated fanzines from 1976 to 1988. Drawing on an extensive range of previously unpublished materials sourced from private collections across the UK, Matthew Worley describes and analyses this transformative era, providing an intimate glimpse into the hopes and anxieties that shaped a generation.Far more than a showcase of covers, this book examines the fanzines themselves, offering a rich tapestry of first-hand accounts, personal stories and subcultural reflections. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Matthew Worley captures the spirit and essence of British youth culture, not only shedding new light on a pivotal movement in music history but crafting a unique alternative history of Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

Publisher Wendy's Subway City Brooklyn, NY, United States Year 2023 Pages 128 p. Dimensions 25.5 x 33 cm. Cover Paperback Binding Perfect Binding Process Offset Printed Color Black-and-White Edition Size 1000 ISBN 978-1-7359242-5-0 JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis’s 2021 essay “The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.