A new approach to playing and composing music — Hexadic-style! All that the interested player will need is a guitar, a copy of The Hexadic System book — and a regular deck of playing cards (or better yet, our custom Hexadic deck of cards!). Softcover, 4.5"x7", 115 pages, including 70 one- and two-color illustrations. For Errata, Updates on the system, Templates, and a sample of what others have created with The Hexadic System, visit:http://www.sixorgans.com

The first book in Crescent: a new series of contemporary writing.  With a Foreword by Edna Bonhomme Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement? This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.   --- “A reminder that Black feminism can be a promise, even if the world that we have inherited is so perilous. Fugitive Feminism is a bricolage: an intellectual imprint and philosophical harmony between what it means to flee and conjure a world where we are set free.” Edna Bonhomme

Edited and introduced by So Mayer and Sarah Shin Softcover coverm 256pp Silver Press, 2026Celebrated author Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed the rebellions and upheavals of the twentieth century, including women’s liberation, the civil rights movement and anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work fighting for social and environmental justice, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time. Gathering speeches, essays and stories, Space Crone offers new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in her ecological and anti-war concerns, to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe. Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew. Contributors: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh.

Sale! Huge mark down! Please note - this book weighs over 2kg, hence the shipping cost. Hardback Book 240 pages Full-color illustrations and photos 30.7 cm H | 30.7 cm W | 2.5 cm T ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contributors: Le Sony'r Ra, better known as Sun Ra (1914-1993) Irwin Chusid is a journalist, music historian, radio personality and self-described landmark preservationist. He has produced landmark reissues of the music of composer/bandleader/electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel. Chris Reisman is a longtime record collector and proprietor of Hudson Valley Vinyl in Beacon, NY. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “This book contains sacred relics that were heretofore hidden in the personal sanctums of insiders, collectors, and fans who bought a souvenir at a Sun Ra show and kept it. These costumes for Ra grooves are as singular and unforgettable as the Arkestra members’ radiant raiment.” BEN YOUNG “Sun Ra’s vision took in multiple arts, beyond music. Art on Saturn catalogs his printed album covers, with their bold Afrofuturistic illustrations, then presents an endless variety of unique LP sleeves handcrafted by Ra and members of the Arkestra.” ROBERT L. CAMPBELL, co-author, The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra “Sun Ra was an expert at disruption. The Saturns assembled here confront the world with an inscrutable wash of color and astroBlack iconography. They are a surprisingly underdocumented legacy of this angelic visitant’s campaign to alter destiny.” THOMAS STANLEY, author, The Execution of Sun Ra “Another dimension of the Sun Ra story—the art that complements his music and poetry. Saturn Records was groundbreaking, and this book brings out the evolving artistic values of the label and its unique character as a pioneering musician-run enterprise.”Drawn from private collections around the world, this is the first comprehensive collection of the Saturn label’s printed record covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels decorated by Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra. Considered the foremost exponent of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra mastered a wide array of styles that spanned jazz, R&B;, exotica, Afro-hybrids, electronic, big band, solo piano, orchestral, experimental, and chamber works. In his 45-year recording career, he issued an epic number of albums and he was one of the first Black musicians to own an independent label, which he named Saturn, after the planet on which he claimed to have been born. The covers of Saturn LPs, issued from 1957 to 1988, are iconic—some rolled off commercial printing presses but many were hand-crafted. These records were sold at concerts, club dates, and by mail order. As collectibles, original handmade Saturn covers sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. More than just packaging for a slab of vinyl, they are works of art in their own right. Sun Ra: Art on Saturn is the first comprehensive collection of all Saturn printed covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels, decorated by Ra himself and members of his Arkestra. Essays by Sun Ra catalog preservationist Irwin Chusid, noted Ra scholar John Corbett, and Glenn Jones, who in the 1970s signed Ra to a distribution deal that put countless homemade covers into circulation, add unique insights into the interplanetary life and work of Sun Ra and his Saturn partner Alton Abraham. Historians have written extensively about Sun Ra and his music. This book is a tribute to the covers and to the uncredited visual artists and their rich imaginations. From the simple to the baroque to the absurd, the covers that sheathed Ra's discs reflect the tenaciousness of a genius who refused to compromise or relinquish control of his destiny.

Mina Loy (1882–1966) was one of the most iconoclastic figures in modernism. A groundbreaking poet, she also left an indelible mark in painting, drawing, prose, art criticism, and fashion. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable is the first book to examine the full scope of her extraordinary career, demonstrating Loy’s transformative impact on the visual arts as well as the literary avant-garde of the twentieth century.Presenting dozens of Loy’s paintings, drawings, and constructions alongside selections of her poems and writings, this book gives a comprehensive overview of the complex images and objects Loy created and situates them in the larger context of her life and work. It explores Loy’s pursuit of truth and beauty, arguing that her engagement with the emphatically “unbeautiful” materials of the Bowery—such as rags and bottle caps—reflects her questioning of truth. The book positions Loy within the broader context of surrealist art; sheds light on her relationships with influential figures such as Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, and Wyndham Lewis; and addresses Loy’s enduring relevance today.Featuring rare and previously unpublished artworks, Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable reveals this visionary artist’s extraordinary contributions as an image-maker, writer, and cultural arbiter, introducing her work to a new generation of readers and charting new directions in art history, women’s studies, poetry, and modernist studies.Published in association with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

X4 CD + DVD + Book edtion of this amazing collection! Long out of print. One copy onely The year 2007 saw one of the most remarkable findings in the long treasure-hunting history of Die Schachtel: the complete set of recordings of the early manifestation (1967-1969) of one of the most legendary improv group of all time, the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Rescued by the private archives of Walter Branchi, one of the original founding members -- alongside Franco Evangelisti, Ennio Morricone, Ivan Vandor, Roland Kayn, Egisto Macchi, Mario Bertoncini, and John Heineman -- the tapes were then restored in their entirety. Only a part of them were published in a CD-only boxset in an edition of 500, titled Azioni 1967-1969, which also featured a DVD with the original film Nuova Consonanza shot by Theo Gallher during the rehearsal and concert that the group held on March 19th and 20th, 1967, at the Galleria darte Moderna in Rome. Spanning from free-jazz to total abstract noise to wild electronic sounds, their music was -- and remains -- one of the most dynamic, original, and uncompromising expression of a period defined by intense experimentation and musical bravery, anticipating experiments to come in years following. Or, to put it simple, They were utterly unique," as per the words that John Zorn, who expressively wrote for this edition. To mark the ten-year anniversary of its original release, Die Schachtel present Azioni/Reazioni 1967-1969, the complete cycle of improvisations -- which includes thirteen additional, never before published pieces -- taken from the original tapes. Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

240pp, 234 x 142paperback with flapsFirst published 2013, reprinted 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2022.This is a unique and important collection of interviews with contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work. From its early origins in wildlife sound and in ethnographic research, field recording has expanded over the last few decades into a diverse range of practices which explore and investigate aspects of the lived environment, from the microscopic to the panoramic, through the medium of recorded sound. These conversations explore the fundamental issues that underlie the development of field recording as the core of their activity. Recurring themes include early motivations, aesthetic preferences, the audible presence of the recordist and the nature of the field.

The ninth issue of We Jazz Magazine, "Oisters" for Petter Eldh. 128 pages, 170 x 240 mm in size and printed on 140g Edixion paper with laminated 300g Invercote covers. All articles presented IN ENGLISH: Petter Eldh by Peter Margasak, Oren Ambarchi by Daryl Worthington, Sven Wunder by Markus Karlqvist, Robyn Steward by Dave Waller, Jason Moran by Rui Miguel Abreu, Darius Jones by Stewart Smith, Carlos Garnett by Andy Thomas, Discaholic column by Mats Gustafsson, Black Fire by Danny Veekens, reviews, plus more.

** English/German edition. Large format **The first comprehensive publication on his work focuses on Conrad Schnitzler "intermedia" work between Düsseldorf, West Berlin and New York in the late 1960s to 1980s. During this period, the Joseph Beuys student and sculptor Konrad Schnitzler developed into the Zodiak founder and electronic musician of Kluster and Tangerine Dream, into the busy video and performance artist "Konrad von Berlin" and finally into the internationally connected sound artist and musician Conrad Schnitzler.Contributions by Alexia Ciosses, Geeta Dayal, Gregor Jansen, David Keenan, Florian Meier, Stefan Schneider and Linnea Semmerling bear witness to Schnitzler's importance at the intersection of visual art and electronic music, cassette culture and mail art, video and performance, action and installation, which transcends borders in every respect. “I’m a performer, performance artist, intermedia artist—not multimedia, but between the media. I tend to see the word ‘musician’ as a derogatory term.” For Schnitzler, “intermedia” literally meant working between media with simple technical equipment. He treated his sound and video creations not as finished works, but as intermediate stages, set pieces, or momentary states that would unfold their potential in a continual series of new audiovisual constellations. He highly valued the political, economic, and artistic independence of his work.  In the early 1970s, Schnitzler bought his first synthesizer, the affordable and portable EMS Synthi A. With this monophonic, analog device, he was able to create his own electronic sounds, albeit only one at a time. That wasn’t enough for Schnitzler, and so he recorded the individual sounds on different cassette tapes, which he could then play back and mix. While the sparse instrumentation of his early concerts consisted of only the synthesizer and two cassette recorders, over the course of the 1970s he developed a performance practice with up to twelve tape recorders. He also continuously expanded his sound spectrum by recording found sounds from his surroundings and other synthesizers on cassettes and adding them to his sonic universe. This is how the format of the cassette concert, which he invented, came about as a unique combination of composed, improvised, and conceptual music.  Kluster (Konrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius), Klopfzeichen, 1970 (produced by Conny Plank)- Schnitzler’s ear was shaped by the sound of the bombs during the war and the noise from the factory where he completed his apprenticeship as a machinist. He was determined to transform these industrial soundscapes into art, and to this end he developed his own electroacoustic instruments consisting of modified classical musical instruments and homemade noise makers, whose sounds he electronically amplified and altered. “Back then I wanted to replay what I knew from my time as a machinist—the noise from the factory buildings—with instruments. I didn’t want normal scales, nor could I play them. That was my freedom: not being able to do anything. Sometimes it got out of hand and turned into music.” Schnitzler released an enormous amount of acoustic material in the 1970s and 1980s, deliberately disregarding the mechanisms of the music market. Whether his tracks were released on vinyl or cassette, on a label with professional distribution, or as a private release usually simply depended on whether he had requests from music labels or galleries. Pieces were often released in multiple editions and different versions—for example, on cassette in the early 1970s, as a video soundtrack in the late 1970s, and finally on vinyl in the 1980s.

With an Introduction by David Harsent and Afterword by Gareth Evans.   Returning to the island of Samos during the summer of 1979, where he had spent long periods of exile throughout his life, Greek poet Yannis Ritsos composed a remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, written at a rate of about 10 a day: the Monochords, each line an essential observation of a moment; a personal archive of time past, present and future. In London in 2020, during a period of Covid confinement, artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio began responding to Ritsos’ words through linocut images: an experiment in entering the space opened by each poem, rendering it in line and shape; a daily ritual that accompanied her along a strange year of exile from life.

‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen HatherleyPleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

When originally published in 1974, Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz was the first examination of the new music of such innovators as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jost studied the music (not the lives) of a selection of musicians, black jazz artists who pioneered a new form of African American music, to arrive at the most in-depth look so far at the phenomenon of free jazz. Free jazz is not absolutely free, as Jost is at pains to point out. As each convention of the old music was abrogated, new conventions arose, whether they were rhythmic, melodic, tonal, or compositional, Coltrane's move into modal music was governed by different principles than Coleman's melodic excursions Sun Ra's attention to texture and rhythm created an entirely different big bang sound then had Mingus's attention to form. In Free Jazz, Jost paints a group of ten "style portraits", musical images of the styles and techniques of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, the Chicago-based AACM (which included Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago), and Sun Ra and his Arkestra. As a composite picture of some of the most compelling music of the 1960s and '70s, Free Jazz is unequalled for the depth and clarity of its analysis and its even handed approach.

This outstanding biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and record-session guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. Today his anti-idiom of “Free Improvisation” has become the lingua franca of the “avant” scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore among his admirers.

When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd.More than any previous '60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd's White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake - the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well.As well as the '60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: everyone from the great jazzman Coleman Hawkins to the folk diva Sandy Denny, Lonnie Johnson to Eric Clapton, The Incredible String Band to Fairport Convention.