210 x 290mm, 56 pages, Colour printing, Coil bound, Softcover, 2024 published by Errant Bodies A zine and exercise book about the applied art of questioning, by the writer Cordula Daus and the choreographer Charlotta Ruth.This is the age of the answering machine. Of infinite input fields, of prompts and problem solving, of algorithmic feeding frenzy. But wait. Who/what is behind this text? Have you been reading these lines for real? Are you here?Since 2019 the writer Cordula Daus and the choreographer Charlotta Ruth have explored and trained what might be the last genuinely human quality: how to question, how to make oneself response-able. Together they have created environments, performances, writing exercises and live situations where ideas become material to be touched and processed between people.Questionology – Are you here? is a zine and exercise book for all those who'd like to know more about the applied art of questioning. Unfolding across three conversations, the zine recombines tricks and moves from midwives, Socratic maieutics, witchcraft and malfunctioning technology. In the opening text an anonymous author-mechanism lures the reader into a series of questions trying to grasp what reading is. Secondly, Daus & Ruth meet the sound artist and editor Brandon LaBelle to reactivate elements of the participatory work Questionology – Program for Applied Questioning (co-produced by brut Vienna, 2021). Equipped with new vegetable names and a towel, the three try out different selves and stances including one of the most complicated ones: listening. Thirdly, the artist Erik Valentin Berg joins the conversation to examine the field of artistic research. Together they defend each others' titles, fight over 'useless art' and get caught in a failed thesis scandal. Hope to meet you there!

Edited by Louise E. Carver and Angela Rui.Contributions by Tonda Budszus, Benze De Ream, David Gruber, Eva Jack, Armin Linke, Filipa Ramos, Anton Ripon, Giovanna Silva, Flaminia Veronesi, Ache Wang. published in March 2024   English edition 10,2 x 15,6 cm (softcover) 176 pages (ill.)The glass as a listening device. When used as a listening instrument, a glass is no longer a mere container. By amplifying sounds and voices through a surface, it becomes a conduit between two seemingly distant environments. Like a glass, aquarium walls implement a material and ontological separation between human and marine creatures, highlighting the relationship we have established over time with these living beings, transformed into taxonomical units.In "The Aquarium is a Listening Glass", nine short, non-linear stories—set amid scientific archives, underwater research stations, natural history museums, national aquaria and oceanic infrastructure—evoke the glass as a listening device to present singular relationships between humans and fish that would otherwise go unheard. In this paradigm shift, design plays a fundamental role in conceiving the object (and the book) as a sensory device to glimpse new forms of mediation, to generate alliances, and also to promote the potential for a thriving and vital world.

Sound American is a journal founded in 2012 by Nate Wooley, providing in-depth interviews and essays, Sound American starts from a simple desire to open the doors of experimental music to a wider audience. Sound American believes that music is for everyone and should be shared on the most basic human level. Sound American aims to accomplish this by creating a direct intellectual, social, and emotional bridge that links audiences and artists. Advisory board: David Grubbs, Rebekah Heller, Taylor Ho Bynum, Zeena Parkins, Matana Roberts, and Ken Vandermark.Sound American is also an editorial platform for other print or music projects. Roscoe Mitchell (born 1940 in Chicago) is an American jazz saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist and composer. Co-founder of the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), he is an emblematic figure of free jazz and experimental jazz, at the junction of American free jazz and contemporary European jazz.Sound American #29 celebrates Art Ensemble of Chicago founder and American iconoclast, Roscoe Mitchell. "This special issue is an appreciation of Mitchell's career as an improvisor, instrumentalist, composer, painter, and educator as told by the musicians whom he has affected and through his own words. The issue starts with a rigorously researched and beautifully written overview of the saxophonist's career by Brooklyn-based saxophonist Sam Weinberg. As the reader continues, they will then find insights into Mitchell's work and working methods from a group of future iconoclasts, such as Tyshawn Sorey, Darius Jones, Ken Vandermark, James Fei. Throughout the issue, composer and improvising harpist Zeena Parkins explores Mitchell's work as an educator through a series of interviews with former Mills College students, all of were collaborators in orchestrating and arranging Mitchell's recent works for large ensembles. But the real glory of this issue, one of the half-dozen "artist portraits" that SA has produced over its ten-year history, is the sheer weight of the artist in his own words. For the first time ever, an issue features four interviews with its subject: a previously published conversation on music and saxophone with Bay-Area stalwart, Phillip Greenlief; a talk about living the musician's life with cellist Tomeka Reid and architecture scholar David Brown; a friendly talk on all things saxophone with the radical contrabass clarinetist John McCowen; and a revelatory talk about Mitchell's visual art practice with Chicago writer and gallery owner John Corbett. This last chat leads us into a very special double gatefold color reproduction of some of Mitchell's paintings in celebration and anticipation of his first solo show at the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in early 2024. Although we've done away with our usual recurring articles for this issue—Sites of Formation, People Doing Things, etc.—we had to retain the Exquisite Corpse series, so beautifully developed by Jules Gimbrone and Ka Baird in the last two issues. Afro-futurist conceptualist and composer Jessie Cox rounds this series out with a nod to the previous composers, an homage to the issue's theme, and an eye toward outer space. This is a very special issue, one that is long overdue in celebrating the work of a musician's musician, an artist's artist, a thinker's thinker, and a true cultural treasure."

Contributions by ROSA AIELLO, GERRY BIBBY, COLEMAN COLLINS, AYANNA DOZIER, ANNIE ERNAUX, AMELIA GROOM, MICHÈLE GRAF & SELINA GRÜTER, MONILOLA OLAYEMI ILUPEJU, ELLEN YEON KIM, BITSY KNOX, DAN KWON, ERIKA LANDSTRÖM, ENAD MAROUF, KATRIN MAYER, AISLINN MCNAMARA, KAMILA & JASMINA METWALY, LUZIE MEYER, VERA PALME, THERESA PATZSCHKE, GEORGIA SAGRI, MAHSA SALOOR, ELIF SAYDAM, MARK VON SCHLEGELL, SIMON SPEISER, ELAINE TAM, C.S. TOLAN, MIKHAIL WASSMER, ANNA ZACHAROFFSibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated. Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.

ISBN: 978-3-9825585-4-715 x 21 cm (softcover; open binding)84 pagesPublished: February 2024Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms. In this essay – or is it perhaps a long love poem? – she dives into the sounding-listening dynamics and reveals them as class relations in which audibility is not an event following an occurrence of sound but a point in an intersectional class structure. With audibility, or rather the lack thereof, comes auditory poverty. And where there is poverty, there is discontent. And where there is discontent, there is potential for an uprising.

256 pagesThread sewn softcoverFirst printing : 2500 copiesSept 29, 2023 Bilingual edition French/English François J. BonnetJohn GiornoDavid GrubbsYannick GuédonLee GambleSarah HenniesHaela Ravenna Hunt-HendrixStine JanvinJoan La BarbaraYoumna SabaAkira SakataPierre SchaefferPeter SzendyGhédalia TazartèsThe voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.

paperback. pp/128Synthesizer Evolution: From Analogue to Digital (and Back) celebrates the impact of synths on music and culture by providing a comprehensive and meticulously researched directory of every major synthesizer, drum machine and sampler made between 1963 and 1995. Each featured instrument is illustrated by hand and shown alongside its vital statistics

paperback// pp.256In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jay Cantor, Robert Gardener, Patricia Hampl, Maureen Howard, Susan Howe, Helene Keyssar, Phillip Lopatte, Vlada Petric, William Rothman, Charles Warren, Eliot Weinberger.  Critics and writers consider nonfiction film both as document and as creative work with strong artistic, political, and moral implications.  In essays by eleven of America's foremost writers, critics, and filmmakers, Beyond Document explores the full spectrum of nonfiction film and its creative possibilities. In addition to Charles Warren's broad introductory history of the genre, the book takes a close look at ethnographic films, cinema-verité, memoir and autobiography, docudramas, essay films, and newsreels, from classics like Night and Fog and Nanook of the North to more recent important work like Film about a Woman Who. . ., Harlan County, U.S.A., Sans Soleil, and Forest of Bliss. Representations of reality are increasingly contested, in courtrooms and in Congress, as well as in art. Asking what the art of film can achieve, Helene Keyssar considers the history of nonfiction films by women; Jay Cantor discusses film investigations of the Holocaust; Patricia Hampl looks at how autobiographical films render experience into narrative; Robert Gardner questions the filmmaker's "impulse to preserve" ; and poet Susan Howe explores structures of mourning in several filmmakers. All the book's essays provide deeply felt understanding of documentary film, and of how we live with, an d within, images.

paperback/ 240ppIn Deathlife, Anthony B. Pinn analyzes hip hop to explore how Blackness serves as a framework for defining and guiding the relationship between life and death in the United States. Pinn argues that white supremacy and white privilege operate based on the right to distinguish death from life. This distinction is produced and maintained through the construction of Blackness as deathlife. Drawing on Afropessimism and Black moralism, Pinn theorizes deathlife as a technology of whiteness that projects whites’ anxieties about the end of their lives onto the Black other. Examining the music of Jay-Z; Kendrick Lamar; Tyler, the Creator; and others, Pinn shows how hip hop configures the interconnection and dependence between death and life in such a way that death and life become indistinguishable. In so doing, Pinn demonstrates that hip hop presents an alternative to deathlife that challenges the white supremacist definitions of Blackness and anti-Blackness more generally.

paperback. 280ppIn Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.

paperback  350 pages | 103 color plates | 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 | © 2023Punk Art History examines punk as an art movement, combining archival research, interviews, and art historical analysis. Marie Arleth Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art figures from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, including Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, and Hugo Kaagman. The book also features email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Many of these artists shared materials from their private archives with Skov, who examines a wide range of media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 mm films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, and street art. She also discusses scandalous and spectacular public events like the Prostitution exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which spurred walkouts and political debate with its graphic content, and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West Berlin, a festival of “ingenious dilettantes.” Skov’s analysis reveals that punks saw themselves as the “rear-guards,” a rejection of the notion of progress inherent to the term “avant-garde.” After all, why would a “no future” movement want to lead the way for a culture they saw as doomed?

LISA BARG (Montreal, QC) is Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. She is currently serving as Co-editor-In-Chief of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. paperback  288 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 17 b&w; photos, 14 figuresQueer Arrangements is a new study of Billy Strayhorn that examines his music and career at the intersection of jazz and Black queer history The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.

'If you want to know the real Baldwin, this is the book to read' Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious MonkJames Baldwin is an icon of liberation who created some of the most important literary works of his time, including the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and If Beale Street Could Talk. Here, Bill V. Mullen celebrates the life of the great African-American writer and activist. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, James Baldwin was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the US war against Vietnam, the Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ+ rights. Mullen pays homage to Baldwin's truly radical approach to his life, writing and activism. Constantly in struggle for an anti-racist, emancipated world, Baldwin's philosophy and politics were ahead of their time, predicting many of today's movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human. Publisher: The University of Chicago PressISBN: 9780226830094Number of pages: 248Weight: 426 gDimensions: 229 x 152 x 20 mmAn expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing “human” musicality from its “merely mechanical” simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the “human or machine” logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries.

“Grundy’s is an excessive and generous critical project. Many of his prose texts begin by looking at a minute formulation otherwise gone by unnoticed or unanswered, to spiral outwards into wide-ranging digressions, so as then to return to the minute textual detail – as a technique of demonstrating how wide-ranging and important that detail had been in the first place, not just to the text but to THE WORLD, in explosive compression.”—Lisa Jeschke A5, 220 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2022PRESENT CONTINUOUS is a collection of hybrid essays, written during the recent covid pandemic, moving between criticism and poetic prose, between visual and textual expressions of the present moment and a future that still has a past to resolve. From the initial announcement of the lockdown to Black Lives Matter protests to a “second wave” of restrictions and the issue of police violence, Grundy’s writing offers, in the words of Richard Owens, “a quality, a shade of incredible intelligence and intuitive imagining that cannot be reproduced”. "The world in art and poetry will begin with a world anew", commented the late musician and poet Henry Grimes. In these "expositions of harmony and theory", David Grundy strives to imagine that new world.

June 2023179 x 115 mm257 pagessofboundA Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

Pbk, 6 x 8 in. / 324 pgs / 83 color / 24 b&w.; December 2023The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki and more.   At the centerpiece of Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures is a career-spanning, twenty-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, remixer, and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish’s childhood in Chicago’s South Side, sculptural training, and collaborations with Moodymann, Rick Wilhite, and Omar S, and explore how the social movements of 2020 have reshaped his practice and dance music at large. This volume also includes an illustrated discussion between Dhrupad singer Amelia Cuni and sound artist/tuning theorist Marcus Pal, covering Cuni’s years studying voice and dance in India, her interpretations of John Cage, and collaborations with the likes of Terry Riley and Catherine Christer Hennix—accompanied by deeply researched essays from Cuni on Hindustani classical music and avant-garde performance. Finally, the collection features reminiscences from composer and performer Akio Suzuki and musician Aki Onda on Fluxus pioneer and Taj Mahal Travellers founder Takehisa Kosugi, with newly translated criticism from Kosugi.