Hold Tight is the book that kick started the 'Grime Library'. Bursting into bookshops in July 2017 to rave reviews and a sold out event at Rough Trade East,Hold Tightpaved the way for Grime-related books such as Wiley'sEskiboy(Penguin 2017), Dan Hancox's Inner City Pressure(4th Estate 2018), and DJ Target's Grime Kids (Trapeze 2018, now being made into a television series). This new edition of Hold Tightfeatures new chapters for 2018, a brand new introduction from Boakye and a brand new cover. Celebrating over sixty key songs that make up Grime's DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it. Both a love letter to Grime and an investigation into life as a black man in Britain today,Hold Tightis insightful, very funny and stacked with sentences you'll want to pull up and read again and again. --- Influx Press, 2018

From the extreme edge of the firmament, Hildegard contemplates the wheel of creation that springs from the heart of God, a cosmological instrument in which mankind resides, described in size and proportions, and in the internal movements of the soul and the body. This is the scenario in the Book of Divine Works. It is a long sequence of ten scenes that invites human beings to climb the road of virginitas, towards the re-composition of their own selves in union with the divine Caritas.The refined miniatures in the Lucca manuscript – reproduced in the central plates of the book with a simple key illustrating their symbolic significance – were produced about twenty years after Hildegard’s death, and provide a masterful illustration of the architecture of her vision. The dialogue with the images from her first work Scivias (A Journey into the Images, Skira 2019) has cast light on the unifying design that connects them, activating a process of figurative re-transcription of the work.Following the sapiential instructions on dimensions and proportions, and inserting the shapes and colours taken from the Scivias miniatures, constructed according to Hildegard’s own instructions, the individual elements described have been redrawn. The use of three-dimensional design has produced vibrant visions of a spherical cosmos, a luminous heavenly vault, a precise anatomy of the human body and the plasticity of the civitas dei (city of God), revealed in the large plates at the end of each chapter. The analysis of the construction lines of the miniatures in the Lucca manuscript and the subtle constructive syllogism of the visions enable us to perceive, outlined in a few brief strokes, the eternal presence of mankind in the heart of God.

Format PaperbackA new edition, part of the Faber Greatest Hits series -- books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century. In Girl in a Band Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth and role model for a generation of women, tells her story. She writes frankly about her route from girl to woman and pioneering icon within the music and art scene of New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as marriage, motherhood, and independence. Filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a remarkable life, Girl in a Band is a moving, evocative chronicle of an extraordinary artist.

Publisher: Faber & Faber Publication Date: 01/04/2021 ISBN-13: 9780571358335  Type: Hardback A definitive insight into the ever-influential world of Mark E. Smith and The Fall, featuring never-before published essays and ephemera from fans, collectors and the artist and band themselves.'Mark E Smith provided me with an alternative education, looping me into Camus, and Arthur Machen, and William Blake, and Can, and dub and old garage punk and rock'n'roll.' Stewart Lee Over a prolific forty-year career, The Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation. Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding; the Fall's worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldn't want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work. Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall's wonderful and frightening world. ---

200 × 130 × 12 mm 176 pages Paperback ISBN:978186189321534 illustrations Published: 01 May 2007Pub: Critical LivesA musical composer who dabbled in the Dada movement, a Bohemian ‘gymnopédiste’ of fin-de-siècle Montmartre, and a legendary dresser known as ‘The Velvet Gentleman’ for his sartorial choices, Erik Satie was nearly unprecedented in technique, style and philosophy among European composers in the early twentieth century. Yet his legacy has largely languished in the shadows of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel. Mary E. Davis now brings Satie to life in this fascinating new biography that demonstrates that his musical innovations reached as far as his influence. Satie redefined the boundaries of the composer’s art, devising new methods of artistic expression that melded ordinary elements and rarefied genres of words, visual art and music. Davis argues that Satie’s modernist aesthetic was grounded in the contradictions apparent in his life – such as enrolling in the conservative Schola Cantorum after working as a cabaret performer – and is reflected in his irreverent essays, drawings and music.Erik Satie explores how the composer was embraced by both the avant-garde and Parisian elite, an experience that immersed him in the worlds of high fashion and cutting-edge modernist art, and subsequently gave him the aesthetic impetus to create the new musical style of Neoclassicism. Satie also crucially employed the power of the image through his infamous fashion statements, Davis contends, to establish his place in the art world, and in this connection between couture and culture, Satie was at the heart of a nascent celebrity culture.A fascinating and informative portrait, with numerous illustrations that include art by Satie himself, Erik Satie reassesses the accepted history of modernist music and restores the composer to his rightful pioneering status.

A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits – books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century. InThe Dark Stuff, Nick Kent profiles twenty-two of the most gifted and self-destructive talents in rock history. From Brian Wilson to Syd Barrett, the Rolling Stones to Neil Young, Iggy Pop to Lou Reed, he offers intimate portraits that are unimaginable in the world of today's market driven music business.

New printing with new introduction of this definitive study and essential guide to Jamaican Dancehall in the 1980s featuring hundreds of exclusive photographs with accompanying text, interviews and biographies. This book captures a previously unseen era of musical culture fashion and lifestyle. With unprecedented access to the incredibly vibrant music scene during this period, Beth Lesser’s photographs are a unique way into a previously hidden part of Jamaican culture. Dancehall is at the centre of Jamaican musical and cultural life. From its roots in Kingston in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1980s, Dancehall has conquered the globe also spreading to the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Europe and beyond. Dancehall is a culture that encompasses music, fashion, drugs, guns, art, community, technology, and more. Many of today’s music and fashion styles can be traced back to Dancehall culture and continue to be influenced by it today.Born in the 1950s out of the neighbourhood soundsystems of Kingston, Dancehall grew to its height in the 1980s before a massive influx of drugs and guns made the scene too dangerous for many.Dancehall is an essential reference book for anyone interested in Reggae, as well as a unique photographic and textual source book of the musical, cultural and political life of Jamaica. In the early 1980s as Jamaica was in the throws of political and gang violence Beth Lesser ventured where few other dared and this book is never before seen record of the exciting, dangerous and vibrant world of Dancehall. Beth Lesser’s book tells this story from its roots to its heights. Living in Jamaica in the late 70s and early 80s she photographed and documented a cultural explosion as producers, singers, DJs and soundsystems who all made a living out of the slums of Kingston.

This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It's a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker's breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon.Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Kathy Acker's untimely death, Blood and Guts in High School is published for the first time in Penguin Classics, acknowledging the profound impact she has had on our culture, and alongside the authors her work pulsates with the influence of: William S. Burroughs, Cervantes and Charles Dickens, among others.

This book is a time machine.  We’re thrilled to present this collection of photographs by Ruth Bayer, documenting Coil’s first live performances as a band between 2000 and 2002. Ruth was granted unprecedented access to three live London performances – at the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the Barbican – and was present both onstage and during behind-the-scenes preparations. Ruth’s images capture both the method, and the madness, of Coil’s now-legendary live performances, and provide a unique window into this critical, final phase of Coil’s existence.  “I first met John Balance in 1988 at the photo session for the Current 93 album Earth Covers Earth, which I shot on Hampstead Heath in London. He was known to everyone as Geff (his birth name), and he wore a fabulous Hawaiian shirt to the session. That was the first time I photographed him, and the book you are now holding contains the last photos I took of him – and the only photos I took of his partner Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson.” - Ruth Bayer

On the Circulation of Blood was a slowly moving artwork that progressed in a sporadic and circumlocutory fashion through Folkestone during the five months of the Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Conceived and curated by artist Sam Belinfante, the work drew on Folkestone’s history as a fishing community, the piece involved moving and dragging large-scale nets across the town, and hanging them on structures erected at two important sites in Folkstone’s collective past and present: its windswept seaside Amphitheatre, and the historical ‘Drying Grounds’ outside St Peter’s School. The moving and draping of these nets culminated in a set of performances that brought together community groups with artists and musicians. This anthology brings together the work of six composers who created duets for voice and/or percussion for On The Circulation of Blood. It includes an introduction by Sam Belinfante, album liner notes by artist, composer and performer Neil Luck, as well as documentary photography of the performances.

Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what in turn drew John Lennon to visual art? Why, in 1980s West Germany, did Joseph Beuys record a pop single and artists such as Walter Dahn, Albert and Markus Oehlen, and Michaela Melián form bands? What role does utopia play in the pop music and art of Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, and Fatima Al Qadiri? And, vice versa, did dystopias of transgressive imagery and noise lead the artist group COUM Transmissions to make music as Throbbing Gristle? In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Ever since Duchamp’s readymade und Hugo Ball’s sound poetry, the definition of art has widened and dissolved to a point where nearly anything geared toward an art audience can be considered an artwork. Today it has become convention to praise art as a way of questioning conventions, not least in regard to conventional borders between disciplines, media, and genres. However, heroic claims of dissolving borders have become a way of kicking at doors that are already wide open—in a political and economic environment defined by neoliberal deregulation and flexibilization geared toward new markets, and permeating every social and cultural sphere. It has thus become increasingly important to discuss the relationship between different fields of cultural production. This book does just that, looking closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. Historically, these figures provoked cognitive dissonance, but the seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop and art from the 1960s to the present, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while pointing toward radical alternatives.

The history of India's first electronic music studio founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad by David Tudor. Subcontinental Synthesis explores the history of India's first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad with the support of the composer David Tudor. The essays and writings unravel the narrative and context surrounding the studio as well as the work of the Indian composers who created groundbreaking recordings during its four years of activity. The texts reflect on the role of electronic music within a post-independence India, considering its interconnections with experimental design, radical pedagogies, and the international avant-garde, as well as the encircling conditions of Western ideological soft power within the global expansion of Modernism. Contributors include Frances Morgan, Matthew Williams, Geeta Dayal, Shilpa Das, Alexander Keefe, Paul Purgas.

Trance has been the flag for electronic music across the globe during the nineties and early zeroes. The sound’s trademark optimistic and euphoric aspects has brought some of the most compelling musical pieces of its time, and undoubtedly had a significant influence on future electronic music to come. Yet, its historical significance has been highly overlooked. Hypnotised is the first encyclopedia to cover the global trance movement during its most prolific years. The 322-page book spans a near-complete discography of supposedly essential albums, labels and releases, alongside exclusive photos and in-depth interviews with influential artists and label owners.

Selected cassette tape and vinyl artwork from experimental electronic music of the 1980s. Touching on industrial, noise, new wave, minimal, drone, sound art, ambient and more. A visual archive of the xerox scanned imagery, disorderly type and hand illustration used to present the decade's boundary-pushing music and abstract compositions. 132 pages 120 x 160mm 115 gsm recycled natural paper

“Ideal as an immersive primer for the curious or an in-depth affirmation of Hawkwind’s influence and impact for fans.” Record Collector“… meticulously researched, entirely engrossing…” Wire“… a tour de force… uniformly provocative and insightful…” The Quietus“… an impressive guided tour of the band’s peak years.” Uncut“…terrific… the footnotes deserve their own book.” Shindig!“… in-depth… intriguing… intelligently written.” Classic Rock  Hawkwind are like no other band. Their influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative musics—from psychedelia, prog and punk, through industrial, electronica and stoner rock—and they continue to inspire devotion from fans around the world. They’ve been positioned as heirs to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain’s answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. They’ve defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that’s uniquely their own.For a generation of young people growing up in an age of paranoia, with the planet on the brink of economic, ecological and nuclear catastrophe, Hawkwind offered a radical vision of sci-fi-inspired escapism. As commentators asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond, fanning the flames of mainstream resistance. In Days Of The Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. Rejecting the accepted narrative that views the band as one long lysergic soap opera, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind were and how enduring their legacy remains. Profusely illustrated with rare and previously unseen archival material, Days Of The Underground will rewire your perceptions of Hawkwind forever.

Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. “This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny—a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.”—from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective.

In this heavily illustrated compendium, the legendary British experimental band Coil tell their story in the present tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established itself as a shape-shifting doyen of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since its untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil's albums were multifaceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil's story in the present tense, and from their personal perspectives.Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn't take root. Not only a worm's eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century's evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.A milestone in Coil's evolving posthumous history, Everything Keeps Dissolving contains a number of previously unseen drawings, photographs and other images by, and of, the band.About the editor:Nick Soulsby is the author of Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil (Winter 2022), Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019), Swans: Sacrifice And Transcendence (2018), Thurston Moore: We Sing A New Language (2017), Cobain On Cobain: Interviews & Encounters (2016), I Found My Friends: The Oral History Of Nirvana (2015), and Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana In The Shards Of Incesticide (2012). His words feature in an upcoming book on artist Marc Hurtado and The Abrahadabra Letters by John Balance/Anthony Blokdijk. In 2014 he curated No Seattle: Forgotten Sounds Of The North West Grunge Era with Soul Jazz Records, he wrote the liner notes for the re-release of We Are Urusei Yatsura (2022), and also the oral history of Fire Ants for the reissue of their 1993 EP Stripped.

Before he got involved in this whole "film" thing, Harmony was a prolific zine artist. Though distributed in minor quantities (and sometimes given away to homeless people), word has travelled to Drag City HQ of their greatness. They're filled with funny/creepy musings, fake celebrity gossip and found art. This collection contains all the zines bound as one book. Includes MY FRIEND OR SHEEP BOY ADULTHOOD ADULTHOOD 2 OH DEATH WHERE IS THY STING FOSTER HOMES AND GARDENS HUMOR POCAHONTAS MONTHLY HUMER