Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas. --- hey say we aren’t built for it. This species or another.Crewcut & fatigued, a swollen head on the box says thin-lipped,When most people talk about killing,they are like virgins talking about sex. Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas. ‘VIRGINS is a mnemonic playlist in the washer-dryer drum-hum of trial and error; the experiment in Poetry of poetry’s worldliness, debauchery, and angst. If we “walk the broken line,” as JD suggests, it’s something we do together through underground and under-resourced subculture formations. These are poems to take with you and read aloud in transit, in public spaces, or quietly to your ride and die comrades. These are poems for the real ones.’ — Ziddy Ibn Sharam Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. They live and work in Berlin, and have received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery, London, and Volksbühne, Berlin, among others. Drawing on personal experiences as well as history and counter histories, their work addresses the fallibility, adaptability and vulnerability of living being, societies and technologies: the condition of being a body caught in the structures of the social and material world.

‘Etchells makes the comic and cosmic collide. There’s richness in the debris.’ — Jonathan Meades   ‘Micro, macro and all metaphysical states in between, Amends holds our sensory world through death, breath and the first person present tense.’ — Maria Fusco ‘Tim Etchells explores how our 21st-century maladies—the technologies that multiply but cannot meet our desires, social humiliation, the accumulation of capital—have infected our words. He finds a way through by testing language to antic destruction: rehearsing our stupid desires over and over like a playground game, or setting our crap proprieties against sublime acts of god. Amends is a relentless, bleak and funny liturgy against the debasement of how we address ourselves to ourselves, to each other and the world.’ — Jennifer Hodgson  ‘I want to apologise for being drunk at the eclipse…’ Amends by Tim Etchells is a selection of texts haunted by performance but written for the page. In three uncanny acts, Amends exhausts the inauthentic languages of device, correction and apology, while remaining deeply sorry. Tim Etchells is an artist and writer whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. Living and working in London and Sheffield, he has produced major commissions for public spaces and exhibited in museums and galleries in many international contexts. Etchells is the leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment.

Format: 210 x 285 mm100 pagesColourInterviews with:CHRISTIAN BLANDHOELMARTÌN ESCALANTERUSSELL HASWELLCAMPBELL KNEALETINE SUREL LANGEGREG POPEJOE POTTSMARIAM REZAEIEDWARD SOL

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music.Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes or their impact on the neighborhoods around them.Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you’ll find that they’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish. The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves.Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays and scenesters (including members of Peter, Paul and Mary; White Zombie; Moldy Peaches; Sonic Youth; Treacherous Three; Cro-Mags; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Suicide), writer, historian and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place examines how these scenes came together and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.

Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animals communicate by soundWhat is the meaning of a bird's song, a baboon's bark, an owl's hoot, or a dolphin's clicks? In The Voices of Nature, Nicolas Mathevon explores the mysteries of animal sound. Putting readers in the middle of animal soundscapes that range from the steamy heat of the Amazon jungle to the icy terrain of the Arctic, Mathevon reveals the amazing variety of animal vocalizations. He describes how animals use sound to express emotion, to choose a mate, to trick others, to mark their territory, to call for help, and much more.What may seem like random chirps, squawks, and cries are actually signals that, like our human words, allow animals to carry on conversations with others. Mathevon explains how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher the ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in these sound signals, and what this information is used for in daily life. Drawing on these findings as well as observations in the wild, Mathevon describes, among many other things, how animals communicate with their offspring, how they exchange information despite ambient noise, how sound travels underwater, how birds and mammals learn to vocalize, and even how animals express emotion though sound.Finally, Mathevon asks if these vocalizations, complex and expressive as they are, amount to language. For readers who have wondered about the meaning behind a robin's song or cicadas' relentless "tchik-tchik-tchik," this book offers a listening guide for the endlessly varied concert of nature.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton's band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists-musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists-passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame.In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra's participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.

When Juan Atkins said he wanted to land a UFO on a track, what kind of place would he be landing it on?... Via the psychogeographies and cartographies of South London by way of ‘Ghettoville’, South and West Chicago’s ‘Teklife’ and East London’s ‘Eski’ — what Brar’s analysis does is highlight and connect the race/class intersections that are so often overlooked in mainstream coverage of music. - Lee Gamble Brar propels us through landscapes of sound and sense at once utterly familiar and strange. We emerge from this book with a shocked recognition that we as urban residents are living in contexts that both exceed the ways in which we understand them yet which penetrate our very core as metabolism, infection, and vibration. The book is one of the most accomplished demonstrations of the critical importance of black study and its capacities to articulate urban life in unprecedent ways.   - AbdouMaliq Simone Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiments with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Brar foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life. Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of Blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Brar rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary Black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in Blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism. Dhanveer Singh Brar Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter, and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. He is lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at University of Pennsylvania and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.

Redefining the counterculture as a time of Acid Communism, Acid Detroit diverges from most books on the Sixties, which centre on California, to show that Detroit was an unequalled hotbed of radical activism, urban unrest and sonic innovation. Considering Detroit’s unique mix of people and cultures and enduring sonic legacies, it covers everything from incendiary garage rock, to European-influenced techno and experimental hip-hop crews, intertwining the artist’s lives and works with the city’s rise and decline, from its establishment as an industrial powerhouse to the high point of Motor City, into its decline and tentative rebirth. A mind-expanding tour through time and space that explores the lost possibilities, histories and hidden potentials of the city, Acid Detroit reveals a history of resilience and transformation hidden in the shadows of the abandoned factories and warehouses of the Motor City.

This collection pairs a selection of stories from lost authors with notes on the case recognising the importance of the auditory sense on our whole experience of the horror medium. Editor Manon Burz-Labrande’s research is treading new ground, and is presented in the collection in an engaging and exciting way alongside each tale which brings a new understanding to the concept. Darkness now was around me – and sound. I seemed to stand in the centre of some yelling planet, the row resembling the resounding of many thousands of cannon, punctuated by strange crashing.The violent peals of a disconnected bell in the night; a trudging footfall in the hush of an abandoned manor; the whisper of a deathly voice in the ear: uncanny sounds remain the most frightening heralds of danger and terror in supernatural fiction. Gathered here are fourteen tales which resonate with the unique note of fear struck by weird happenings experienced through the aural sense.Divided into four sections exploring noises from invisible presences, ghostly voices, possessed technology and the power of extreme levels of sound or silence, this collection pulses with pioneering pieces from B. M. Croker, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton and M. P. Shiel alongside haunting obscurities from the British Library collections.

This new collection in the Tales of the Weird series brings together stories from classic horror writers alongside perhaps unexpected writers who were influenced by the cultural fascination with Pan. …and then the music was so loud, so beautiful that I couldn’t think of anything else. I was completely lost to the music, enveloped by melody which was part of Pan.In 1894, Arthur Machen’s landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking the sinister resurgence of the pagan goat god. Writers of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, such as Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Margery Lawrence, took the god’s rebellious influence as inspiration to spin beguiling tales of social norms turned upside down and ancient ecological forces compelling their protagonists to ecstatic heights or bizarre dooms.Assembling ten tales and six poems – along with Machen’s novella – from the boom years of Pan-centric literature, this new collection revels in themes of queer awakening, transgression against societal bonds and the bewitching power of the wild as it explores a rapturous and culturally significant chapter in the history of weird fiction.

Study of the public art collective Smokehouse Associates, whose abstract works transformed New York’s Harlem community in the late 1960s Between 1968 and 1970, the artist collective Smokehouse Associates transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures. Established by William T. Williams and including Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose, Smokehouse grew to encompass a range of creative practitioners united around the revolutionary potential of public art. Though relatively unknown today, Smokehouse was ambitious in its scale, community engagement, and interaction with the built environment. Published over fifty years after the collective’s founding, Smokehouse Associates offers the first critical examination of the group’s work. Eric Booker provides a historical overview of the collective; Charles Davis II and James Trainor delve into contextual histories of public art, urban design, and architecture; and an artist roundtable moderated by Ashley James presents critical reflections. With previously unpublished images and ephemera and a rich chronology, Smokehouse Associates serves as a sourcebook that expands the narrative of public art and social practice in the United States to include the contributions of artists of African descent.

A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask. With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.

A book collecting interviews, artwork and texts of New Zealand underground sound artists from fanzines in the years 1991-1999. Interviews with: Alastair Galbraith, A Handful Of Dust, Omit, Bruce Russell, Gate, Surface Of The Earth, Sandoz Lab Technicians, The Dead C, Witcyst, Roy Montgomery, Dadamah, Dean Roberts, Peter Stapleton, The Garbage And The Flowers, Clare Pannell, Kim Pieters, Thela, Bill Direen, Dress, Flies Inside The Sun. Texts by Noel Meek, Bruce Russell, Seymour Glass (Bananafish) and Nick Cain (Opprobrium). Cover illustration by Stefan Neville (Pumice).

published in November 2022English edition12 x 17 cm (softcover)84 pages (ill.) An investigation into the current social architectures that determine the perception of the notion of "evil"... and the production of figures that embody it. What is evil? How is it categorized, understood, and used as a tool? Surveying recent examples of "evil" which have taken hold in mass culture, Notes on Evil examines the mechanisms by which societies construct new enemies in a collective bid to rid themselves of their problems, usually culminating in largely superficial or aestheticized purges. Do societies necessarily need to create evil villains in order to function? And is the villain's role best understood as that of a court jester, who symbolically appears to mock the sovereign, while actually reinforcing their position of power? Artist and writer Steven Warwick reflects on the overlapping social architectures which frame our current discourse on good and evil, ultimately charting a path beyond our present climate of reductivism, false binaries, and collective impasse.Steven Warwick is a British artist, musician and writer residing in Berlin. His practice includes durational performance installations, plays and films using the construction of situations and language. He also makes music under his own name, and previously as Heatsick. His writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Urbanomic, Artforum, Spike and Electronic Beats and has co-authored a book released on Primary Information.

First publication of new pieces by composer and musician Mica Levi titled ‘star star star’. The collection debuts 7 new works developed over the recent months by Mica and a working group of performers during a residency at Oto. Using written text instructions, speech rhythm techniques and visual cues, these pieces are open to players with no previous musical experience and incorporate elements such as spoken word, light and movement. ‘star star star’ puts the emphasis on the player and the group, whether that be on stage or at home, and shares a DIY spirit of openness and possibility.

     Released in print by Cafe OTO (OTOHAN01) and as a download by CURL (CURL015). 
 Produced by Cafe OTO and Qu Junktions.     24ppA5Staple boundPrinted on pastel blue 80gsm paper Mica Levi is a musician and composer born in Guildford and living in South East London. They use programming software, written notation and improvisation to produce music and are currently a member of the groups CURL, Good Sad Happy Bad and Tirzah.

Holy Bodies is a peephole, gloryhole and sinkhole forming a somatic stone soup of small proposals that together exalt the freedoms of body, mind and spirit through care, sex, jokes, destruction and transformation. 'Clay AD knows at an ancient and prescient level that, to quote from their book, 'shit is all life', but also that life is the shit, and the sunset, and the endgame. One for our immuno-suppressed comrades, shit theorists, pink salt throwers, and their lovers and friends, that is, I hope, everyone.' — Isabel Waidner 'Clay AD’s poetry is for arseholes… & kneecaps, for belly buttons and sweaty crotches, for perforated ear drums and rubbish immune systems. This book is a vessel with feelings for vessels with feelings, transcribed into a trans crip language that I have been waiting for.' — D Mortimer Clay AD is a somatic bodyworker, artist and writer living in Glasgow.