‘Through their deep attention and engagement with ever-changing surfaces and the materiality of representations, the poems in Artifice open outwards into encounters with the mystical and divine. This startling debut collection offers the reader a set of compasses that orients us towards that which is veiled, the unspeakable and unknown – what more could we ask for?’ – Lucy MercerArtifice, the debut collection by Lavinia Singer, is an exploration of the art of making. Its poems celebrate the artistry of craftsmanship: how works relate to beauty, and how they might inspire or ensnare. They consider issues of artificiality and authenticity, ‘the man-made’ and ‘the natural’. They warn of artfulness, in the sense of cunning or deception. And they wonder at the mystery of art and language, that which resolutely remains unknown or ineffable. For Artifice is as much riddle as revelation, stirring delight and discomfort as it delves into the nature of aesthetics and the creative process. How are works made and how do they make us, in turn? What worlds can be built from words? This book dwells in possibility, presenting an ambiguous space for contemplation, connection and, ideally, hope. --- Lavinia Singer is the author of the pamphlet Ornaments: A Handbook (If a Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with the work of W. S. Graham. Artifice is her first full collection of poetry.

Beautifully designed diary and week-to-view planner filled with historically significant magical and sacred dates from around the world. Drawn from events such as the Buddha’s birthday, esoteric festivals and artistic and occult history, the diary touches on the lives of characters such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ithell Colquhoun, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Jung, Simone Weil, Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Aleister Crowley, George Bataille, Timothy Leary, Hilma af Klint, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, W.B. Yeats and Octavia Butler.   The diary provides full astrological navigation for 2024 with an overview of the year by astrologer Gray Crawford, a birth chart template and guides to moon magic, houses, planets and symbols. A guide to key transits, retrogrades and lunar phases allows you to organise your life in alignment with the astrological weather. A global map showing sacred sites provides inspiration for transformative pilgrimages. Rituals by artists Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Bhanu Kapil, Nisha Ramayya and Himali Singh Soin, and tarot spreads by adrienne maree brown, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and Pam Grossman, offer guidance and space for reflection throughout the year. Additional sources of inspiration include guides to sonic meditation by Pauline Oliveros, sacred spaces by Leila Sadeghee, mushrooms by Ellen Percival, and spellcraft by Bones Tan-Jones, weather by Jay Drinkall and soji cleaning by Zen monk Shoukei Matsumoto, author of the bestseller A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind. To support a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, an appendix contains guides to sacred spaces, healing herbs, acupressure, kriya yoga and daily practice. --- Acupressure by Maria Christofi, Astrology by Gray Crawford, Herbal Remedies by Paige Emery, Kriya Yoga by Rachel Okimo, Korean Ink Illustrations by Jungran Kim, Mushroom Guide by Ellen Percival Prayer Guide by K Allado-McDowell, Rituals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Bhanu Kapil, Nisha Ramayya and Himali Singh Soin, Ritual Spaces by Leila Sadeghee, Seed Bombs by Jenna Sutela, Sonic Meditations by Pauline Oliveros, Spellcraft by Bones Tan-Jones, Tarot by adrienne maree brown, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and Pam Grossman, Weather by Jay Drinkall

In Stolen Life—the second volume in his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten undertakes an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of social death. The essays resist categorization, moving from Moten's opening meditation on Kant, Olaudah Equiano, and the conditions of black thought through discussions of academic freedom, writing and pedagogy, non-neurotypicality, and uncritical notions of freedom. Moten also models black study as a form of social life through an engagement with Fanon, Hartman, and Spillers and plumbs the distinction between blackness and black people in readings of Du Bois and Nahum Chandler. The force and creativity of Moten's criticism resonate throughout, reminding us not only of his importance as a thinker, but of the continued necessity of interrogating blackness as a form of sociality.

A wide-ranging collection of interviews, anecdotes, essays, and ephemera concerning one of the most enigmatic bands to emerge from the 1960s hippy scene. Encyclopaedic in scope, passionate in tone, this book is a minotaur's labyrinth of information about one of the most remarkable groups in 20th century music. Be glad, for everything you need to know is here. (Rob Young, The Wire) First published in 2003 and long out of print, Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending: An Incredible String Band Compendium is the definitive book about the ISB. Containing a wealth of interviews, essays, and ephemera from the band's brief but tangled history, this new revised and expanded edition includes two new pieces by ISB member Rose Simpson on Witchseason Productions' idiosyncratic offices and on recording with the ISB in the Sound Techniques studio, as well as interviews with Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys, folk musician Alasdair Roberts, and Ossian Brown of Coil and Cyclobe. Contributors include Rowan Williamson (former Archbishop of Canterbury), ISB manager and producer Joe Boyd, Andy Roberts, Billy Connolly, and Raymond Greenoaken.

A music-obsessed retrospective, beginning with his childhood epiphany of rock 'n' roll in the early 1960s into an infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave blasting forth from New York City - where he eventually runs off to join a band in 1978. By 1981 Moore would form the legendary and notorious experimental rock group Sonic Youth, who proceeded to record and tour relentlessly for almost 30 years, always progressing, always exploring.Along the way we meet a constellation of artists and musicians who colluded and collided with Sonic Youth including Velvet Underground, Stooges, Patti Smith, Television, Sex Pistols, Clash, Nirvana, Hole, Beastie Boys, Neil Young and a cavalcade of other musical visionaries, as well as figures from the art world - Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Gerhard Richter.Simply put, Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth changed the sound of modern alternative rock music and opened the minds of a generation of artists to new possibilities within the form.

The only book to consider Oi! as a distinct genre within punk rock, What Have We Got? is the story of a musical movement that became a national concern in the eighties and still divides opinion today. Drawing on new interviews with Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, Crown Court, Lion’s Law, The Templars and many more, Simon Spence considers the genre’s inception and noble intentions, how it fell into infamy, and where it lies now. With a growing and formidable audience in the US, Europe, Asia, South America and the UK, Oi! is as alive as it has ever been, and without the far-right associations that plagued its past.

Book Pages: 312  Published: Duke University Press Published: July 2018In The Universal Machine—the concluding volume to his landmark trilogy consent not to be a single being—Fred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon, in which he explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinas's idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendt's antiblackness through Mayfield's virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxton's musical language, or showing how Fanon's form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout The Universal Machine—and the trilogy as a whole—Moten's theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York City was financially and socially bankrupt, but the art and music scene was flourishing. During these years, the downtown New York music scene – no wave, hip-hop, disco funk and club culture – shaped Jean-Michel Basquiat as both a musician and an artist. This catalogue for a travelling exhibition explores how Basquiat’s painting has parallels in his music (sampling, cut-up, rapping), and takes a new look at his production as a writer and a poet in light of his connections with the then-emerging hip-hop culture. This beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue of rarely seen photographs and images sheds new light on Basquiat as a musician, exploring how his art and music are related, and how they reflect on his identity as a Black artist in the United States, the downtown New York music scene, and contemporary culture.

At a time when sales of vinyl records have hit a 25-year high, and analog technologies are providing the kind of extraordinary audio experiences that our increasingly digital world has started to remove, Hi-Fi is essential reading. This unique book explores just how, when, and why the world fell in love with the look, feel, and sound of top-of-the-line audio equipment. Hi-Fi traces this fascinating evolution from the 1950s to today (and tomorrow), taking readers right up to the current renaissance of all things analog and the emergence of cutting-edge designs for die-hard audiophiles. - Format: HardbackSize: 270 × 205 mm (10 5/8 × 8 1/8 in)Pages: 272 ppIllustrations: 300 illustrations

The design, history, and cultural impact of turntables and vinyl technology: the twin powerhouses of the 'vinyl revival' phenomenon Interest in turntables and records is enjoying a renaissance as analog natives and new converts find their enduring style and extraordinary sound inimitable. Revolution, a follow-up to Phaidon's beloved Hi-Fi: The History of High-End Audio Design, explores the design and cultural impact of the turntable, the component at the center of the 'vinyl revival'. An essential book for audiophiles, collectors, and design fans, Revolution showcases the fascinating history of turntables and vinyl technology from the 1950s to today's cutting-edge designs. Written by Schwartz, author of Hi-Fi: The History of High-End Audio Design, who is an audio design expert and passionate about analog music, this book includes 300 illustrations from the world of turntables, from affordable to high-end, and everything in between. An essential addition to the bookshelf for analog natives and those new to the vinyl revival as well as music and design lovers.

From the very beginning, the blues has had a close connection with the LGBTQ community. There is a long and decorated history of so-called ‘dirty blues’ songs, stretching back beyond the earliest attempts to capture the blues on record. The 1920s and 30s saw the release of dozens of raunchy, bawdy blues recordings aimed at a knowing LGBTQ audience. Queer Blues tells the story of the pioneering LGBTQ composers and entertainers that wrote, performed and recorded these wonderfully outlandish, life-affirming songs and chronicles, including: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Josephine Baker to Frankie ‘Half-Pint’ Jaxon and many more. This is the definitive account of the LGBTQ trailblazers of early blues and a fascinating consideration of the intersection between music and LGBTQ history, from the award-winning Darryl W. Bullock.

Along with its long-lasting influence on music, art, fashion and culture, the punk explosion in the late 1970s also fuelled a thriving underground press. A physical representation of punk's DIY attitude, fanzines rebelled against established forms of expression, surviving outside of the mainstream media and providing a voice for a generation. Punkzines features interviews with leading figures from the scene, including fanzine editors, bands, DJs, promoters and journalists, to provide exclusive anecdotes from this momentous period. Fully illustrated throughout, the book showcases original and rare artwork from celebrated fanzines such as Sniffin' Glue, Bondage, 48 Thrills, Punk, Jamming!, London's Burning, Ripped & Torn and many more. Punkzines is the definitive visual guide to a crucial part of British and global subculture.

“...some ekphrastic evening, this’ll be both criticism and poetry and failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between.”So writes poet, critic, theorist, and MacArthur fellow Fred Moten in his latest poetry collection perennial fashion presence falling. Much like the poems found in The Feel Trio (Letter Machine 2014), which was a National Book Award finalist, and All That Beauty (Letter Machine, 2019), the poems here present Moten’s “shaped prose” on the page and the dizzying brilliance of both polyphonies and paronomasia. Within this collection, the poems hold an innate quantum curiosity about the infinitude of the present and the ways in which one could observe the history of the future. Poems beget poems, overflowing and flowering, urging deeper etymological investigations. In perennial fashion presence falling, Moten approaches the sublime, relishing that intermediary space of microtonal thought.

Published: Atlas Press, 2014 ISBN:978-1-900565-66-0 Pages:224pp, Type: illustrated hardback with decorated endpapers.Edited and introduced by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville. Dismissed as an eccentric by many, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on 20th- and 21st-century music. His compositions include, among other works, the ubiquitous Gymnopédies, the Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear and the Dadaist opera Relâche. In later life he gathered about him Les Six, the cream of the new generation of French composers, and his influence has since continued to widen; John Cage and the New York School composers hailed him as “indispensable”, and more recently certain of his pieces have been seen as prefiguring both minimalist and ambient music. The appeal of his writings, however, goes far beyond their musical value. He is revealed as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement with which he collaborated to some extent). These poignant, sly and witty texts, often as short as his briefer musical pieces, embody all his contradictions. Included here are his “autobiographical” Memoirs of an Amnesic; the gnomic annotations to his musical scores (For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale… I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa’s Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious and elaborately calligraphed “private advertisements” found stuffed behind his piano after his death. Satie referred to himself as “a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)”, and added: “My humour is reminiscent of Cromwell’s. I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite.” He died as he lived: “without quite ceasing to smile.” This is the largest selection of the writings of Erik Satie yet to appear in English.

An essential compendium on the work, life and legacy of the transgressive autofiction pioneer The American author Kathy Acker was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Working through a tradition spanning Bataille, Burroughs, Schneemann, French critical theory and pornography, she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems and novellas from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, among them the classics The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Blood and Guts in High School and In Memoriam to Identity. A truly pioneering postmodernist, plagiarist and postpunk feminist, Acker continues to inspire generations of writers, philosophers and artists, from her contemporaries such as Dodie Bellamy, Avital Ronell, McKenzie Wark and Chris Kraus to younger writers such as Bhanu Kapil and Olivia Laing.Get Rid of Meaning is the first comprehensive publication to synthesize art and literary perspectives on Acker’s work. It shows Acker’s own visual sensibility in her cut-up notebooks and her use of mail-art idioms, and orients her emergence within the 1970s art scenes in New York and California populated by Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Constance DeJong, among others—artists who made innovations in performance, of which Acker would make use. Also included is previously unpublished material from Acker’s personal archive and other collections, including correspondence, her library and various personal effects. Contributors include: Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, Anja Casser, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick, Claire Finch, Johnny Golding, Anja Kirschner, Chris Kraus, Sylvère Lotringer, Douglas A. Martin, Jason McBride, Karolin Meunier and Kerstin Stakemeier, Avital Ronell, Daniel Schulz, Matias Viegener and McKenzie Wark.

Back in print after two decades, Junglist tells the compelling, comic, stream-of-consciousness story of four young Black men coming of age among the raves and Jungle music scene in London during the 1990s.Layered with poetic verse, prose and humour, this cult classic of underground British fiction documents the rollercoaster ride of a weekend spent raving during Jungle's cultural takeover in the summer of 1994. Jungle, with its booming basslines and Jamaican patois, burst from the pirate radio stations and mixtapes into cavernous clubs, pulling a generation of Black British ravers with it.Originally written as a way to document street culture as it became a feature of London, charting a time when working-class kids, both Black and white, merged to dance as ''one family'', Junglist is both a testament to Black British sound system culture and a rawthentic account of inner-city life.

Beginning at the start of the new millennium in the council estates of inner London, Inner City Pressure tells the full story of grime, Britain’s most exciting musical revolution since punk. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, grime’s teenage pioneers sent out a signal from the pirate radio aerials and crumbling estates of London’s poorest boroughs that would, 15 years later, resonate as the universal sound of youthful rebellion, as big in the suburbs as in the inner city. By 2018, the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Skepta have long since become household names. But have the conditions that produced this music now gone forever? What happens to those living on the margins when those margins become ever-smaller spaces? And what happens to a rebellious, outsider sound when it is fully accepted by the pop cultural mainstream? Inner City Pressure tells the astonishing story of a generation dancing, fighting and rioting against the forces gentrifying the capital.

Inflamed Invisible gives its readers singular insights into the dynamic field of sound as art. David Toop shares his profound knowledge that is based on decades of experience as an astute writer, innovative musician, and great friend of fellow artists. I savored every page of this extraordinary publication.   Barbara London, Yale School of Art  David Toop is a consummate collector of sounds. In Inflamed Invisible he uncovers compositions in the most unlikely corners of the creative arts, hearing sound in the works from art world luminaries such as Francis Alÿs, Gilbert & George and Picasso, through to more expected stalwarts Christina Kubisch, Alivin Lucier and Akio Suzuki. This wide-ranging collection of essays explores new ways of thinking about music and its performance that has been part of Toop’s practice since the 1970s and has led him to become one of the most sought after essayists on sound.   Caleb Kelly, UNSW Art & Design In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art. Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works. Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible. Spotify and QR Codes This is a book about music, and we wanted to bring the print text to sonic life. We have compiled a series of web links to take you to recordings of the music, musicians, and artists David Toop describes, as well as to artists’ websites. We have placed codes in the margins, so you can listen to the music written about as you read. These codes can be scanned by a smartphone camera. On some phones, the built-in camera app will automatically recognise a code. On other phones, you would need to download a QR code reader app. We have endeavored to find online as much of the music as possible, whether the pieces have been commercially released or not. Many of the links take you to the Discogs database. There, there are links to videos and audio on YouTube. Some links take you to the artist’s gallery website or personal site. For the music that is commercially available, we have compiled an Inflamed Invisible playlist on the Spotify music streaming service. The playlist is accessible. Individual tracks from this playlist are seen as Spotify codes in the margins. To scan these, please download and use the Spotify app on your phone. Select the magnifying glass icon to search, then select the camera icon and scan the code. Atau Tanaka, Sonics Series Editor