Books and Magazines


6 x booklets approx 60 pages each,  127 × 203 mm Softcover collected together in a sleeve Montez Press & London Performance Studios, 2025     Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987). Founded in 2007 by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs, Unfinished Histories is a project to gather the oral histories and preserve the archive of the vital alternative theatre movement in Britain from around 1968 to the early 90s. It shares information gathered through its extensive website www.unfinishedhistories.com as well as through exhibitions, discussions, newsletters, readings and publications, and seeks to encourage new work inspired by this history. From 2023 to 2026 Unfinished Histories is working with London Performance Studios on the project FYFFI: Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion.

Performance texts from the Women's theatre movement – Unfinished histories. Radical rediscoveries, 1969 - 1987

Introduction by Ione Foreward by Laurie Anderson Illustrations by Aura SatzWhat is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination? In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to expand the way she made music, experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by the role that sound and consciousness play in our daily lives, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would eventually lead to the creation of Deep Listening – a practice for healing and transformation open to all, rooted in her musicianship.  Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world. This timely edition brings Oliveros’ futuristic vision – blending technology and spirituality – together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.  Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was a renowned American composer and performer known for conceiving a unique, meditative, improvisatory approach to music called ‘Deep Listening’®. A central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music, Oliveros was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and many awards, including the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, NY; The Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Germany and The John Cage Award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. During her lifetime, Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist.IONE is an author, playwright, director and an improvising text-sound artist. In addition to multiple performances internationally, she has created numerous large music theater works with her creative partner and spouse, the composer Pauline Oliveros. IONE’s memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was a New York Times Notable Book on its publication. She was Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd for 15 years and is currently a Deep Listening Consultant at the Center for Deep Listening, Troy, NY. As Founding Director of The Ministry of Maåt, IONE received the 2019 Arts Mid Hudson Individual Artists Award and a Certificate of Merit from the General Assembly of the State of New York, and was a member of the Kingston Arts Commission for several years. IONE’s most recent opera TOUCH, with composer Karen Power, premiered at Irish National Opera in 2021.Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. She has long-standing interest in compositional practices, in particular those of women in electronic and electroacoustic music, under the umbrella titles of ‘She Recalibrates’, manifesting as a series of film and sound portraits, as well as drawings. She has also made a body of work centred on various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other.

Pauline Oliveros – Quantum Listening

Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians.Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats tells their astonishing story in three extraordinary lives. In The Raincoats' first life, they recorded three full-length albums now regarded as classics and were the first punk band to play behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw. Nearly a decade later in 1992, the band's second life took off when Kurt Cobain's love of the band catalysed their renaissance.In 2001, The Raincoats emerged from their five-year hiatus into their third and ongoing iteration marked by performances in art museums such as New York's MoMA, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery. The Raincoats have and continue to be a singular phenomenon and influence for so many.Featuring exclusive interviews and never-before-seen images from The Raincoats' archive, Shouting Out Loud is the ultimate, authorised biography of this pioneering group of women - and the must-have account of a legendary band that holds a vital place in twentieth and twenty-first century sonic history.Foreword by Greil Marcus  Hardback, 400pp White Rabbit, July 2025

Audrey Golden – Shouting Out Loud - Lives of the Raincoats

Hardback Spcecial Edition, 264 pages Strange Attractor Press, Nov 2024 15.39 x 3.18 x 21.29 cm   "An extraordinary LP begets an extraordinary book. Two-Headed Doctor is about spectral America, the porosity of identity, racial drag, syncretic spirituality, nocturnal transmissions, fantastical fabulation. No one listens more deeply - or more hemispherically - than David Toop; no music writer is more entrancing or contagious."- Sukhdev Sandhu  Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm Mac Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.

David Toop – Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-Gris

Softcover, 120pp BFI Film Classics, May 2025   Elena Gorfinkel is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017); co-author with John David Rhodes of The Prop, (2025); and co-editor of Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (2011), and Global Cinema Networks (2018).Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film, Wanda (1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner's wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon release, winning the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. Today, Wanda is considered one of the most notable films made by a woman director and a core work of American independent cinema.Elena Gorfinkel's study of this singular film traces Loden's creative process and unconventional approach to filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, including scripts, interviews, production records, oral history, and previously unseen ephemera, she examines the film's de-dramatised aesthetic, one that rebukes the artifice and “slickness” of Hollywood. Gorfinkel considers Loden's craft in her framing of cinematic time, manipulation of gesture, voice, and posture, narrative ellipsis, and in her use of location and non-professional actors. Providing an account of Wanda's exhibition and reception in the 1970s and after, she traces the film's feminist legacies, and its lasting influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists and writers.

elena gorfinkel – wanda