232 pgs, 26 × 22 cm, Hardcover, 2021Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was a boyhood resident of Anacortes, Washington for ten years of the Great Depression. Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences is a visually compelling oral history-based biography that immerses the reader in Salish Sea traditions and discord to explore the myths of a counter-cultural shaman whose strange impacts on art, music and film resound from studies of place to beat improvisation, through brain paintings to a Grammy Award for his folk music bible, Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways). Pacific Northwest musician-historian Bret Lunsford (Beat Happening/D+) unravels a string of mysteries to reveal the avant-garde shards of a 20th century alchemist in his hometown. A beautifully printed and bound 232-page hardcover book that includes chronology, selected bibliography, endnotes, maps and over 100 historic photographs within 17 substantial and hearty chapters. Foreword by John Szwed and Preface by Phil Elverum (Microphones, Mount Eerie)

May 2022, English11.5×18 cm, 148 pages, softcover Sternberg PressAlienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman—a mother—struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, the novel’s letters are bookended by dense ramblings by the mother’s son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his “vessels,” hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, withdrawing—a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.

RESTOCK DUE 6TH MARCH Milford Graves (1941 - 2021) was a revelatory force in music, who, beginning in mid-1960s, embarked upon a lifelong pursuit of liberating the drummer from the role of "timekeeper" to instrumental improviser and giving rise to the free-jazz movement, with groundbreaking performances alongside Lou Reed, Min Tanaka and John Zorn.  But music cannot contain the energies of his creativity and intellect. Graves' kaleidoscopic genius led him to develop an unprecedented body of interests - from medicine to botany, stem-cell regeneration to martial arts.  A Mind-Body Deal gathers the multifaceted work of Milford Graves, exploring the practices and predilections of this extraordinary mind. Fully illustrated, this catalog includes documentation from the eponymous show at ICA Philadelphia, exhibiting a collection of Graves' hand-painted album covers and posters, idiosyncratic drum sets, recording ephemera, multimedia sculptures, photographs and costumes, with elements from his scientific studies.

May 2022, English11.5×18 cm, 94 pages, softcover Sternberg PressValerie Solanas’s rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp. The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported from 1970s Los Angeles to the antebellum South to save the life of the child of a slave-owner who is also her ancestor, the concept of the unpayable debt—a debt someone owes but that is not hers to pay—relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation. Focusing on the philosophical basis of these renderings of value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.

A sketch history of the 1980s American home-taping and electronic music scene through the career of sound artist, field recordist, percussionist, and visual artist Jeph Jerman. Jeph Jerman has released over 200 untraditional sound works since 1980, both under his own name and under the moniker Hands To, as well as with countless collaborators. Improvising with a variety of sound sources—natural found objects, crude homebuilt devices, tape machines, and occasionally traditional instruments—Jerman investigates the properties of sound on media and in live performance, both alone and in collaboration. Having lived and worked in four states across the American West, he now makes his home in Cottonwood, Arizona. This book-length interview traces Jerman's life and the evolution of his creative process from his earliest sound experiments, free rock and jazz units, and postal collaborations, to his more recent work with decaying matter and landscape. Profusely illustrated with unpublished photos, this highly readable conversation recounts the various phases of Jerman's artistic life and offers insights into the thought behind his work. The narrative, in tandem with the book's Introduction by Aram Yardumian, also serves as a sketch history of the 1980s American home-taping and electronic music scene, in which Jerman was a key figure, and brings together a community of anti-luminaries such as G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Eric Lunde, Mark Schomburg, Tim Barnes, Dave Knott, and Dan Burke. In addition, Listen includes a selection of Jerman's visual art. The original incarnation of this interview appeared in the now-defunct online arts and culture journal Times Quotidian. Caucasus-based writer Aram Yardumian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Athyn College, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. His research has appeared in numerous scientific and arts-related publications. Born into a military family in 1959 in Agana, Guam, Jeph Jerman moved around a lot during his early years. Drum lessons and a music theory class in high school were his only musical education until he began working at a college radio station during the mid-1980s. Around that time he was also working in various dance bands playing drums, bass and guitar, which he eventually found unfulfilling and began working toward his own music. A series of groups and solo investigations followed: noise-rock improvisations by Big Joey, sampler and tape dronage with City of Worms and hands to and punk free jazz in Blowhole. Around 1986, Jerman founded the Big Body Parts label, eventually publishing a large number of cassettes, records and videotapes, along with a short-lived magazine. After moving a few more times, Jerman found himself in Seattle where he fell in with the local improvised music community and began playing and listening constantly. In 1997 he ran a weekly improvised music session at Anomalous Records, and began investigations into very quiet sound making. In 1999 he formed the first animist orchestra, which played music written by him for natural objects (stones, feathers, shells etc). Around 2004 he began a long partnership with Tim Barnes, producing many recorded works and touring extensively in the US and Europe. In 2014 he was awarded an artists grant by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the next year was featured in a documentary film by director Jacek Blawut (How to Destroy Time Machines). His recorded work has been released by many labels, including Erstwhile, Anomalous, Falt, Grisaille, Mappa, tsss, White Centipede Noise and New Forces. Jerman lives and works in central Arizona.

280 x 180mm 26 pages Risograph printed throughout saddle stitch, Card cover Released: 2020 TALKER is a self published interview zine about performance by musician, artist & writer Giles Bailey --- Issue #8 of Talker features a conversation with artist Paul Maheke. Born in France and now based in London, Paul’s work has been exhibited widely and, at the time of this conversation, his most recent performance Sènsa, developed with musician Nkisi and lighting designer Ariel Efraim Ashbel had just been presented at Performa festival in New York. Paul’s own dancing body is a central feature of his practice and we discuss the development of this in his recent projects. He also describes the significance of others in his creative process and his ambition to create events and share practice rather than produce images through dance. ---

Self-Published 280 x 180mm, 24 pages Risograph throughout Saddle stitch, Card cover, Released: 2017 TALKER is a self published interview zine about performance by musician, artist & writer Giles Bailey --- Issue #2 of Talker features a conversation with performer Kate Valk. As a founding member of experimental theatre company the Wooster Group she has contributed to some of the most vital and exploratory live work of the past three decades. --- This interview took place in October 2016 as her first directorial contribution to the company Early Shaker Spirituals was being performed at the Pompidou Centre.

'No one has captured the look of alternative UK music over the past half a century more tellingly than Kevin Cummins.' - Simon Armitage'Kevin Cummins is a true master in being able to capture the essence of music, the soul of the band. Whatever he does however he does it is a mystery to me but it's pure genius.' - Rankin'Kevin has the uncanny ability of capturing the inner mood of musicians. Be it the dynamics within a pensive Joy Division, or the sense surrounding the fledgeling Fall that something special was around the corner for us all. Kevin's book is nothing less than a remarkable document of a bewildering and defiant anti-fashion movement born in Prestwich, north Manchester in the grimy mid-70s.' - Marc Riley'Capturing forty years of the band's career via his archive, the legendary photographer (whose recent book, Juvenes, documented the story of Joy Division) gives his take on the phenomenon of The Fall and the late, great Mark E. Smith.' - Vive le RockFrom chaotic early gigs to their final years, NME photographer Kevin Cummins provides a definitive, unique perspective on cult favourites The Fall. In this stunning visual history spanning four decades, discover how and why they emerged as one of the most innovative, boundary-breaking bands in modern music.With a foreword by Poet Laureate and Fall fan Simon Armitage and an interview with Eleni Poulou, as well as never-before-seen images from Cummins' archive, this is the ultimate visual companion to The Fall.

In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B; recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio programs that broadcast jazz and gospel across the French empire. In each of these contexts, individual intermediaries such as educators, producers, writers, and radio deejays imbued African American music with new meaning, value, and political power. Their work resonated among diverse Francophone audiences and transformed the lives and labor of many African American musicians, who found financial and personal success as well as discrimination in France. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, Moore demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices. --- David Grubbs is Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing. As a musician, he has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. He is known for cross-disciplinary collaborations with the writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody and the visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. A grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grubbs has written for The Wire, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“Compulsively readable, Sex Sounds deftly explores what we've always taken for granted but never paused to consider in so much historical and technological richness: why exactly is music sexy? It's a tremendous achievement.” Karen Tongson, author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters and Relocations: Queer Suburban ImaginariesAn investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of “electrosexual music” by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices. Sofer argues that “electrosexual music” has two central characteristics: the feminized voice and the “climax mechanism.” Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women's presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history's exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated—segregated—from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.

“This is the worthiest heir to John Cage’s Zen questioning of music’s shape and form, without the old master’s fear of pop music or jazz. Alien Listening is the best example we’ve yet seen of what 21st century music theory can be. It explains to us why music can be about everything without reducing its subjects to the numb face of data of any kind. Chua and Rehding celebrate an idea of music as vast as the universe itself. The aliens have been with us all along…in this strange thing called music that we can never define but always want to share…as far as our reach can go.” - The Wire  An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike. In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?The stakes could hardly be greater. Around the extreme scenario of the Golden Record, Chua and Rehding develop a thought-provoking, philosophically heterodox, and often humorous Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything, a string theory of communication, an object-oriented ontology of sound, and a Penelopean model woven together from strands of music and media theory. The significance of this exomusicology, like that of the Golden Record, ultimately takes us back to Earth and its denizens. By confronting the vast temporal and spatial distances the Golden Record traverses, the authors take listeners out of their comfort zone and offer new perspectives in which music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike.

Winner of the ARSC's Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008)When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry began crafting "dub" music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae's "golden age" of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings--electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks--to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub's development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub's social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the "dub revolution" that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe

Paperback: 125 pages Published: September 1st 2000 by Reaktion Books ISBN: 1861890745    Chromophobia - a fear of corruption or contamination through colour - has lurked within Western culture since ancient times. This is apparent in the many attempts to purge colour from art, literature and architecture, either by making it the property of some "foreign" body - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile the vulgar or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the inessential or the cosmetic, which in many cases amounts to the same thing. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor analyzes the history of, and motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film, to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. Batchelor suggests how colour fits, or fails to fit, into the cultural imagination of the West, exploring such diverse themes as Melville's "great white whale," Le Corbusier's "journey to the East," Huxley's experiments with mescaline. Dorothy's travels in the Land of Oz and the implication of modern artists' experiments with industrial paints and materials.

Softcover, A4, 80pp smallestfunctionalunit, 2021"The dominant, traditional, western notation is only one aspect among many forms of expression in the field. We are interested in unconventional notational formats and graphic scores, as these represent visions of sound shapes that are open to diverse, idiosyncratic ways of interpreting and working. Works in which improvisation, composition, interpretation, performance and sound art merge require relevant modes of representation.In this first edition of Graphème artists Tomomi Adachi, Lotte Anker, Tony Buck & Lloyd Swanton, Marina Cyrino, Tina Douglas, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Phill Niblock, Jon Rose, Ute Wassermann and Nate Wooley work with photography, drawing, graphics, mixed media and object scores, finding ways to notate and share personal techniques and sonic elements. We intend to offer a much needed alternative to most current modes of publishing in a practical, accessible and approachable way.In addition to the publication of Graphème, smallest functional unit plan to present concerts, symposia and a festival within which composers will be given the opportunity to reflect and discuss their work." --- smallest functional unit was founded in 2020 by Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Ute Wassermann and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. The publication will appear as Graphème, a series with a thematic focus

The long-awaited first book from Robert Fripp (guitarist and founder member of King Crimson), The Guitar Circle collects much of RF’s writing about Guitar Craft, as well as his unique approach to guitar playing, collaborating and personal development. Presented as a limited edition first-print hardback with cover, inside pages and jacket all printed on high-end Italian Fedrigoni paper, all copies will be individually wrapped and boxed. This is the first in a series of books to include The DGM Diaries, Crimson Chronicles and membership of King Crimson (1969-2021) and personal commentary on living in New York during and after the recording of Exposure at a point in the late 1970s when New York was the fulcrum of a wider cultural rebirth. --------- “Where there is music there is hope” If one had to choose a single aphorism, of the many associated with Robert Fripp, this is probably the key line. It informs everything he does as a writer, performer, band member and teacher. That last description is also significant. Of all of Robert’s diverse work, it is Guitar Craft that he describes as 'my proper work in life’. So it comes as no surprise that, when choosing what aspect of his life to present in his first book, it is Guitar Craft that was, without hesitation, chosen as the subject. Begun in 1985, Guitar Craft and the Guitar Circle has welcomed over 3,500 musicians – including former King Crimson members Trey Gunn and Bill Rieflin. “Music creates the musician” The Guitar Circle collects much of Robert’s Writing on the subject across decades of diaries, introductions to seminars and courses, online writing and more, to present a comprehensive guide to developing a relationship with the guitar, with music, with the individual musician and working with others. It won’t teach readers how to ‘play in a day’, a week, or even a year. It might, however, help an inquisitive musician to develop a personal discipline/approach to playing the guitar that will accompany that musician for life. “Three capacities of the excellent player: to solo; to accompany; to be silent.” The book also encompasses the Four Pillars Of Ethical Conduct: Honesty, Responsibility, Equity, Goodwill Straightforwardness + Transparency translate as Honesty. Accountability + Owning-up equate to Responsibility. Fairness + Distributive justice we understand as Equity. Common decency we recognise as Goodwill. Principles which Robert Fripp insists are met in all his work including within the music industry, an industry most often noted for ignoring all Four Pillars and, just as frequently, music itself. The Guitar Circle is unlike other books by contemporary artists on guitar playing and music. “In strange and uncertain times, a reasonable person might despair.
 But Hope is unreasonable, and Love is greater even than this.” - Robert Fripp 564 pages.

smallest functional unit and Graphème is an initiative, founded in 2020 by Mazen Kerbaj, Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers.  In this first edition of Graphème artists Tomomi Adachi, Ute Wassermann, Lotte Anker, Phill Niblock, Tony Buck & Lloyd Swanton, Marina Cyrino, Tina Douglas, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Jon Rose and Nate Wooley work with photography, drawing, graphics, mixed media and object scores, finding ways to notate and share personal techniques and sonic elements. "We intend to offer a much needed alternative to most current modes of publishing in a practical, accessible and approachable way. In addition to the publication of Graphème, smallest functional unit plan to present concerts, symposia and a festival within which composers will be given the opportunity to reflect and discuss their work."