ISBN-101890951870   Publisher: Zone Books   Publication date: 28 Oct. 2011   Pages 479 Type: Paperback Tony Conrad has significantly influenced cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has eluded canonic histories. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Such an approach simultaneously illuminates and estranges current understandings of the period, redrawing the map across medium and stylistic boundaries to reveal a constitutive hybridization at the base of the decade's artistic development. This exploration of Conrad and his milieu goes beyond the presentation of a relatively overlooked oeuvre to chart multiple, contestatory regimes of power simultaneously in play during the pivotal moment of the 1960s. From the sovereign authority invoked by Young's music, to the “paranoiac” politics of Flynt, to the immanent control modeled by Conrad's films, each avant-garde project examined reveals an investment within a particular structure of power and resistance, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the artistic and political stakes that continue to define our time. --- Branden W. Joseph isP rofessor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History andArchaeology at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room (MITPress). He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and theNeo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003.)

A memoir and manifesto by a pivotal figure at the junction of rock, the avant-garde, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, film, and dance. For over five decades, Elliott Sharp has been engaged in a quest at once quixotic and down to earth: to take the music he hears in his inner ear and bring it to life in the real world. In this vivid memoir and manifesto, Sharp takes us along on that quest, through some of the most rugged, anarchically fertile cultural terrain of our time. Sharp, a mainstay of the New York Downtown scene beginning in the 1980s, has been a pivotal figure at the junction of rock, experimental music, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, film, and dance. Rooted in blues, rock, jazz, and the twentieth-century avant-garde, Sharp's innovative music has encompassed fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors, and new strategies for graphic notation. In IrRational Music, Sharp dodges fake cowboys' real bullets by the side of a highway near Colby, Kansas; is called on the carpet by a prickly, pompadoured Morton Feldman (“Improvisation… I don't buy it”); segues from Zen tea to single malt with an elfin John Cage; conjures an extraterrestrial opera from a group of high-school students in Munich; and—back in his own high-school days—looks up from strumming Van Morrison's “Gloria” in Manny's Music on 48th Street to see Jimi Hendrix smiling benignly upon him. A mix of tales from the road with thoughts on music, art, politics, technology, and the process of thinking itself, IrRational Music is a glimpse inside the mind of one of our most exacting, exciting creative artists.

Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music. About The Author David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording, also published by Duke University Press. As a musician, he has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 180 commercially released recordings. Grubbs is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Angela Bulloch and Anthony McCall, and his work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. Grubbs has written for The Wire, BOMB, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Published: Duke University PressPages: 160 Published: March 2020The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.   --- “David Grubbs's books are at once bravado poetic performances and incisive works of performance theory. He combines a deep knowing with a willingness to smash everything. I will follow him into any medium.” — Ben Lerner “It's decades now that David Grubbs has kept my head spinning with ideas about the creation, performance, and understanding of music. To hear or read his work is to be invited into collaboration. We are all audience, all of the time, and every creator worth her salt knows this. Grubbs turns this tenet into poetry.” — Will Oldham, music maker "Grubbs uses the set-up to extrapolate many philosophical questions surrounding the materiality of technology, the motivations of the performer, the collapsing of distinctions between different media and musing on the economics of entertainment – all within the crucible of the noble ruin of the recording studio, once the promised land for an aspiring musician and now an expensive obsolescence. . . . A kind of torrent of ideas and anxieties in the form of a visual score pouring forth from his three decades of recording in grungy studios and gilded arts academies all over the world." — Alex Neilson, Record Collector "At times, Grubbs goes into incredible detail: the buttons an engineer presses, the way a space looks, the feelings that arise from playing an instrument. However.just when it becomes almost tedious, such detail proves to be the book's greatest charm. As it progresses, one more fully appreciates how these descriptions illuminate the mindfulness that music-making can beget." — Joshua Minsoo Kim, The Wire "[The Voice in the Headphones] is an experience encapsulated in the space-time of the recording process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the room that not only floats acoustically but also is free from the flow of real time in the outside world. . . . This is an insider’s inside book about an inside experience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal to anyone who’s wondered just what goes on in those sequestered rooms." — George Grella, New York City Jazz Record

Publisher: Sub Jam Author: Yan Jun (editor) Medium: Book + 2 CDs Pub: 2020 Pages: 180HardcoverA project born from the mind of Yan Jun, who has edited this beautiful velvet hardback book and CD. Yan Jun gave friends and contemporaries very simple instructions - "what comes to mind when you hear the phrase 'music will ruin everyything'?" The responses came in the form of both text and audio. This very special limited run book and double CD is the collection of these results. --- “the very reason i initiated this project was vanished in time. however, it’s not very long time since it has suspending into this “physical object is dying” and “society is dying” situation. and it’s long enough to coming back with ideas of “connecting objects and bodies over language” and “connecting an outer territory”. so i have diving back to the files again, starting editing and translating, inviting few more physical entities and fortunately yihao joined as designer at this perfect moment. The way this project runs is very simple: i show my friends this sentence “music will ruin everything” then ask them to contribute audio track and text or images. i tried my best to show it while we meet physically. but some were sent by emails, exceptionally. there is no rules and no clue. i don’t explain why this title because i have no idea what it means. for me what these people doing is a huge cluster of mass such as constellation. they are connected and growing. there are much more alikes surrounding them. the way they are connected is more important than their works. if you dig more on any one of them, you will find its own genealogy of sense and mind. which i have spent years to following and enjoying. so pls, you make it anything and everything. thanx everybody who participate this project ! you have ruined some parts of me.”Yan Jun - 2016 ---

Published: Zone Books ISBN: 9781935408727Published: Sep 10, 2015 Pages: 288 Size:6 x 9 in. Illus: 7 b/w illus.Long before the invention of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler takes us back to an age, long before Edison, when writing itself was still relatively new. He meticulously reconstructs a series of Greek and Roman soundscapes ranging from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then, and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Petrarch to Puccini, Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice — as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time to students and scholars in voice studies, sound studies, and media theory. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists but to anyone interested in the verbal arts — literature, oratory, song — and the nature of aesthetic experience.

Paperback312 pp229 x 152 mmSteve Beresford's polymathic activities have formed a prism for the UK improv scene since the 1970s. He is internationally known as a free improviser on piano, toy piano and electronics, composer for film and TV, and raconteur and Dadaist visionary. His résumé is filled with collaborations with hundreds of musicians and other artists, including such leading improvisers as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Zorn, and he has given performances of works by John Cage and Christian Marclay. In this book, Beresford is heard in his own words through first-hand interviews with the author. Beresford provides compelling insight into an extensive range of topics, displaying the broad cultural context in which music is embedded. The volume combines chronological and thematic chapters, with topics covering improvisation and composition in jazz and free music; the connections between art, entertainment and popular culture; the audience for free improvisation; writing music for films; recording improvised music in the studio; and teaching improvisation. It places Beresford in the context of improvised and related musics – jazz, free jazz, free improvisation – in which there is growing interest. The linear narrative is broken up by 'interventions' or short pieces by collaborators and commentators.

80 page book with over 50 photos and a 21 track CD.Printed in Belgium by die Keure. Designed by John Hubbard. “Having heard the beautiful and haunting recordings of Zabelle Panosian, it's wonderful to learn more about her life and musical career, grounded in the history of music and the history of immigration, told here so well.” - Heather Hughes, librarian"A carefully crafted and detailed, yet succinct biography. Many of us were introduced to Armenian-American singer Zabelle Panosian’s soul-jolting rendition of “Groung” via the 2011 release of To What Strange Place, but here, in Zabelle Panosian: I Am Your Servant, for the first time, we travel with Panosian from her birthplace in Bardizag to her home in New York. We are there in the studio with her at Columbia Records for her historic recordings in lower Manhattan, and we stand with her in the radio studios of WEAF. We become readers of reviews of Panosian’s concerts both celebrated and scathing. We accompany her on performances, minuscule and grand from Waterford to Providence and San Francisco to Fresno, eventually recrossing the Atlantic with her to sing in France, Italy, and Egypt. More than a singer or performer, we learn of Zabelle, the estranged sister, the loving aunt, and the mother who passes the baton to her daughter, Adrina Otero, completing what will be the starting point for future historians or ethnomusicologists wishing to explore Zabelle Panosian and her legacy.” -Richard Breaux, Associate Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-La CrosseAmong the most significant Armenian singers in the early twentieth century, Zabelle Panosian made a small group of recordings in New York City in 1917-’18. Unaccountably, she was then largely neglected as an artist for more than half a century. This volume by three dedicated researchers is the first effort to reconstruct the life and work of a woman who had an exceptional and cultivated voice — who toured the world as a performer and made a significant contribution to the cultural lives of the Armenian diaspora, the elevation of Armenian art song, and the relief of survivors of the Armenian genocide.Panosian’s music is derived from a syncretic experience of the Western Armenian village near the sea of Marmara where she was born and a passion for the coloratura sopranos she encountered in Boston. As an immigrant carrying the traumas of dislocation and the loss of her home, she transformed her grief into action, dedicated her life to an expression of the greatest art she could imagine, both from her former life and her new life in America, and she created a path in her wake for her daughter to become a renowned dancer.Tracing her story from the Ottoman Empire to New England, from the concert halls of Italy, Egypt, and France to California, Florida, and South America through two World Wars, the story of Zabelle Panosian is that of a serious talent recognized and celebrated, dismissed and forgotten, year by year, waiting only to be known and loved again."Please listen to the Armenian singer, Zabelle Panosian. [Her ‘Groung'] is a secret song that steals away the breath of those who are fortunate enough to hear it." - Nick Cave

Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor Publisher: University of Minnesota Press ISBN: 9780816636679 Number of pages: 248 Dimensions: 229 x 149 x 25 mmn 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this completely new translation—presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor—Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Philosophy of Modern Music (1980), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975) with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory (Minnesota, 1997).Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory.

Compiled by Robin Maconie   Paperback,220 pages Published September 1st 2000 by Marion Boyars Publishers ISBN: 0714529184(ISBN13:9780714529189) Edition Language: English If a genius is someone whose ideas survive all attempts at explanation', writes the well-known contemporary musicologist Robin Maconie, 'then by that definition Stockhausen is the nearest thing to Beethoven this century has produced. Reason? His music lasts.With penetrating philosophical and spiritual insights Stockhausen describes, in this collection of lectures and interviews conducted in English, a whole new universe of sounds and events.

"Presented by Sacred Realism Press, D=D is the culmination of 15 years of work and the latest and most ambitious installment of Bryan Eubanks and Joe Foster's Don (now Dan) Brown and Dan Reynolds' project. The book itself contains 391 pages of letters, notes, aphorisms, scores, images, and commentary from Brown and Reynolds, with contributions from related figures including Jenny Haniver, Tim Bradley, and of course Gwendolyn Lovequist and Jack Lunetti, offering furtive glimpses into the thoughts, work, and lives of these still under-recognized figures of contemporary American music. While it might be tempting to see D=D as epistolary speculative biography it also may call to mind the heteronyms of writers like Fernando Pessoa and especially Antoine Volodine. But make no mistake --D does equal D and everything is as it seems. The accompanying audio CD compiles Eubanks and Foster's interpretations of Brown and Reynolds' Holy and Old musics, respectively, bookended by two cassette recordings from the composers themselves, which should be of special appeal to listeners with an interest in never before exposed corners of American West Coast musical experimentation and iconoclasm." mixed by Joe Foster & Bryan Eubanks, Berlin 2018mastered by Dick Stormm, the Bronx 201910 tracks, total running time: 52:28391 page hard cover book with glass mastered CD, edition of 500 release date: April 17th, 2019

HARDCOVERAn American original, Patti Smith is a multi-disciplined artist and performer. Her work is rooted in poetry, which infused her 1975 landmark album, Horses. A declaration of existence, Horses was described as 'three chords merged with the power of the word'; it was graced with the now iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, the subject of her award-winning memoir Just Kids.Initially published in 1998, Patti Smith's Complete Lyrics was a testimony to her uncompromising poetic power. Now, on the fortieth anniversary of the release of Smith's groundbreaking album, Collected Lyrics has been revised and expanded with more than thirty-five additional songs, including her first, 'Work Song', written for Janis Joplin in 1970, and her most current, 'Writer's Song', to be recorded in 2015. The collection is liberally illustrated with original manuscripts of lyrics from Smith's extensive archive.Patti Smith's work continues to retain its relevance, whether controversial, political, romantic or spiritual. Collected Lyrics offers forty-five years of song, an enduring commemoration of Smith's unique contribution to the canon of rock and roll.

If real power begins where secrecy begins, then, as we frantically search for dick pics of Justin Bieber or our next door neighbour who we're convinced posted the faceless Craigslist ad seeking an asian bottom, we're seduced into a beautiful distraction in which we are convinced, by virtue of our victorious toppling of the lives of others, that we indeed have nothing to hide. Much of Mucus in My Pineal Gland uses devices recognisable from “confessional” literature: overtly direct affective statements, recollections of early sexual encounters as if they were the keys to understanding the adult author, general propositions about life filtered through the particulars of personal experience. These are wonderful and familiar devices: they facilitate both empathetic identification (“I can relate to that”) and empathetic alienation (“I can’t quite imagine the inside of that experience”).

In order to live through the grief of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban, Villainy foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest. In scenes loaded with glitter, broken glass, and cum, Abi-Karam insists that in order to shatter the rising influence of new fascism we must embrace the collective work of antifascists, street medics, and queer exhibitionists and that the safety that we risk is reckless and necessary. Disruptive and demanding, these punk poems embody direct action and invite the audience into the desire-filled slippage between public sex and demonstration. At heart, Villainy aims to destroy all levels of hierarchy to establish a participatory, temporary autonomous zone in which the targeted other can thrive.

Publisher: Sub Jam Author: Hsia Yu and Yan Jun Medium: Book + CD Hardcover: pp49 Language: English + ChineseHsia Yu is a legendary poet in Taiwan. For decades, she has been one of the most influential figures of the youth subculture. Under several pen names such as Li Gedi, she is also one of the top lyrics writers in the Mandarin pop music scene. She publishes her poetry herself and mostly steers away from public events. But she is paid dueful respect now via this release by Beijing-based sound artist Yan Jun on his own label Sub Jam In the same style and format as the book 23 Formes en Elastique(with Lionel Marchetti), this is again a beautiful publication, a hardcover book with a CD, 49 pages. This series of conceptual publications is called Miji which, in translation, means “dense, concentrated. . From the outset, it focused on physical embodiment -- Voice: Hsia Yu Voice and environment sound recorded by: Hsia Yu and Yan Jun in Taipei and Paris, 2011-2012 Other sound materials played and recorded by: Yan Jun. mastered by: Taku Unami in Tokyo, 2015 -- By the way the Tinnitus in the title is all over the place, so don’t expect some sweet laid-back soundtrack okay? okay!

Released May 27th 2019Limited numbered editionA5 paperback (291 pages + a4 foldout image)ISBN: 978-1-9996176-3-9Published by the Sonic Art Research Unit‘Azimuth, the Ecology of an Ear’, is a new book by Patrick Farmer in collaboration with twenty three other artists. It revolves around fifteen attempts to locate and rend the human/non-human ear into holes, isolating and being with its forms and natures outside of their conventional relations–inhabiting a distinct violence of separation–in order to see what, if any, degree of wholeness may arise in the distinct noise of the particulars. It asks, what is the ear; where is the ear; who is the ear; what are we to our ears; are we listeners or listening; does the ear hear? It considers the ear as interlocutor, as equivalence, as syncope, as eros (hear us). Azimuth’ features work by Thomas Martin Nutt, Susana Gómez Larrañga , Lotti V Closs, Richard Skelton, Carrie Olivia Adams, Patrick Farmer, Helen Frosi, April Van Winden, Florence Sunnen, Lance Austin Olsen, Tomoé Hill, Chloë Proctor, Nisha Ramayya, J.R. Carpenter, Julia Bloch, Michael Pisaro, Clara de Asís, Fay Zmija Nicolson, Tess Denman-Cleaver, Joseph Clayton Mills, Amelia Ishmael, Emily Leon, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe and Mirella Salame.

Paperback,72 pages Published December 3rd 2020 Publisher: Peepal Tree Press ISBN: 1845234774This stunning new collection from Nii Ayikwei Parkes features poems which embrace play, love and the ephemeral such as water bodies, blood/heritage, history and gossip; and a healthy dose of music and popular culture. Concerned with the phase of life sometimes referred to as the midlife crisis, The Geez navigates the blurred lines between age and youth; the real and the imagined; what is seen and what is – what catches the gaze and what lies beneath. Conceived in four sections, the collection moves from play, to love, to gossip and - finally - to explorations of the intersections of self and contemporary culture, including a segment inspired by blues legends, riffing on the myth of the crossroads, as well as an eleven-part love letter to the African diaspora – specifically African-Americans, whose sacrifices have contributed to the still-suppressed freedoms of Black folk globally. A number of the poems in The Geez are written in a form called the Gimbal, which was developed by Nii – initially to work through his enduring grief at the loss of his father. It evokes the workings of a gyroscope – spinning but stable –a state that echoes the liminality that anchors this collection. --- Peepal Tree Press, 2020

Publisher: Uniformbooks ISBN: 9781910010037 Number of pages: 88 Dimensions:234 x142 mmPub: 2015Located on the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, Sonorama is an audio work by composer Claudia Molitor that offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train. The work is downloadable as an app for listening with headphones.Imagining the journey itself as the ‘score’ Molitor has composed a cycle of works and collected interviews, readings and archival material which respond to both the present, and the history of the route. With each track relating to a different point or area on the line, the work has been informed through a collaboration with historian David Hendy and the British Library. The tracks imagine topics as diverse as visio-centricity, Roman history and hop-picking, with a variety of contributors such as flautist Jan Hendrickse, saxophonist Evan Parker and writer Charlotte Higgins.Sonorama: Listening to the view from the train, is a companion to the audio experience. It reproduces the complete graphic score of Molitor’s interpretation of the journey, locating the thinking behind the composition and the selection of other material.Claudia Molitor is a composer and artist whose work stems from a curiosity in unnoticed and fragile sounds, structures and thoughts, exploring the hierarchies at play in listening and seeing. Recent projects include Promming (with listening stick), a headphones piece for the 2012 BBC Proms Music Walk, Sounding the View, the culmination of a workshop exploring the sounds heard in the view from Tate Britain in 2013, the desk-opera Remember Me…, produced by Cryptic, which was performed over forty times around Europe throughout 2013/14 and Vast White Stillness, part performance, part installation, commissioned for Spitalfields Festival 2014 and performed at the 2015 Brighton Festival.