Softcover, 128pp DisVoir, 1993 Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The Pillow Book, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases.       The libretto to the opera Rosa, with music by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Imagined as a “novel-opera”, Rosa introduces the reader into a new relationship with the narrative through the visual and auditive qualities of language, creating a kind of mental opera: an opera directed by Peter Greenaway but in which the reader must make his own music. This tale is the first of a series devoted to the violent murders of ten composers during the twentieth century. The first investigation surrounds the death of J-M. de Rosa, a Brazilian who became successful in the 1950's by writing music for Western films. This experience naturally led to the realization of a genuine opera (performed in Amsterdam in 1994).

edited by Steven Isoardi Duke University Press, 2001Despite his importance and influence, jazz musician, educator, and community leader Horace Tapscott remains relatively unknown to most Americans. In Songs of the Unsung Tapscott shares his life story, recalling his childhood in Houston, moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1943, learning music, and his early professional career. He describes forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961 and later the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension to preserve African American music and serve the community. Tapscott also recounts his interactions with the Black Panthers and law enforcement, the Watts riots, his work in Hollywood movie studios, and stories about his famous musician-activist friends. Songs of the Unsung is the captivating story of one of America’s most unassuming heroes as well as the story of L.A.'s cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century.

Duke University press, 2003The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Fugitivity pervaded American slavery, propelling slaveholders into acts to prevent the self-liberation of enslaved people. The paradox of free and slave states simultaneously enabled the freedom of uncaptured runaways and criminalized the act of seeking freedom with sanctions and state laws that controlled slave travel. A central paradigm of this counteraction to freedom was runaway ads. Fugitive slave advertisements illuminated the flight of the absconder. Within the brevity of ad lines, lives of the enslaved were laid bare in descriptions of physical scars, character depictions, labor competences, and speculations about their destinations, which often revealed kinship ties. With no definitive way of knowing the plight of particular runaway slaves, the poems in Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound reimagine and reconstruct narratives through ekphrastic responses to runaway ads and other documented artifacts. Embodying the aesthetics of the poetic forms haiku and tanka, poems in this collection embark on an inquiry into the natural world experienced by the enslaved. This approach extends beyond the traditional Zen-inspired approach to haiku writing. For the enslaved, nature was captivity. Runagate is a cartographic exploration into those who found courage in bondage and who gave their lives to build our country.

Softcover, 256pp Duke University Press, 2001In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Softcover, 336pp Duke University Press, 2000In Blutopia Graham Lock studies the music and thought of three pioneering twentieth-century musicians: Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future.A century after Ellington’s birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black history and compares the different approaches of Ra, a band leader who focused on the future and cosmology, and Braxton, a contemporary composer whose work creates its own elaborate mythology. Arguing that the majority of writing on black music and musicians has—even if inadvertently—incorporated racial stereotypes, he explains how each artist reacted to criticism and sought to break free of categorical confines. Drawing on social history, musicology, biography, cultural theory, and, most of all, statements by the musicians themselves, Lock writes of their influential work.Blutopia will be a welcome contribution to the literature on twentieth-century African American music and creativity. It will interest students of jazz, American music, African American studies, American culture, and cultural studies.

Softcover, 448pp Duke University Press, 2001Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell's odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there." Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell's openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.

Volume 43, Number 3 Softcover, 288pp Duke University Press, November 2016The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the “heroic” or high-bourgeois era to late modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s Aktualität—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past.

Softcover, 384pp, 17 B&W; photos Duke University Press, 2001Japan’s jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz “can’t swing.” In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan’s own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity.Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period then became a troubling symbol of Japan’s intimacy with the West—but how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too deeply for the “total jazz ban” that some nationalists desired. While the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary jazz scene that rose up out of Japan’s spectacular economic prominence in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions over authenticity and identity persisted.With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.

Pilot Press, June 2025 92ppDerek Jarman’s unrealised film treatment, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights, takes as its subject matter the events leading up to and including the murder of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini following the making of his final film Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom in 1975.   Written in 1984, the setting of Jarman’s film is inspired by the renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), a painting that depicts both the joys and perils of temptation, and which Jarman encountered on a visit to the Museo de Prado in Madrid the year he began working on the project. For the first time, a facsimile of the treatment is presented alongside reproductions from the film’s workbook, which show Jarman’s calligraphic notes towards the film’s sequences, themes, cinematography, lighting, sound, costume, casting and props. 2025 marks fifty years since Pasolini’s murder and thirty-two since Jarman’s death due to AIDS. Against a backdrop of funding cuts to the arts and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that vanished away so many important artists and visionaries, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is a powerful elegy to the decadence of queer cinema and the tragedy of its last auteur. Derek Jarman was one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. His practice, as diverse as it was prolific, spanned painting, sculpture, film, writing, stage design, gardening and activism. He was an outspoken campaigner for LGBTQIA+ rights, and was one of the first public figures in the UK to raise awareness for those living with HIV/AIDS, announcing his own HIV diagnosis on the radio in 1986.

Hardback, 464 pp  Verso Books, May 2025 A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chron­icles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and, ultimately, the streets.The principals here are penniless filmmak­ers, jazz musicians, and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many more. Some were associ­ated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix, and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting his­tory, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo paperback, 218pp Editions 1989, May 2025  Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound is the first publication devoted to Tom Wilson (1931–1978). Wilson started Transition Records in 1955, a pioneering label that painted a picture of vibrant jazz scenes from Boston to Memphis. Based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Transition came to prominence with releases featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd, among others, before running out of money in 1958. Wilson then moved to New York and began an extensive career as an “A&R; man” (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, crafting innovative productions at Columbia for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel before signing the Velvet Underground, Nico, and the Mothers of Invention at MGM Records. His work as a record producer is as expansive as it is little known. Through newly commissioned essays from music historians Wolfram Knauer and Richie Unterberger, journalist Ignacio Juliá, and essayist Pacôme Thiellement, this book explores Wilson’s role in documenting avant-garde jazz, producing some of the key folk-rock recordings of the 1960s, and his daring collaborations with influential US rock bands. It also includes a rare full-length interview with Wilson and a selection of unpublished photographs. Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound tells the untold story of a visionary record producer.

paperback, 110pp Litmus Press, 2nd edition, 2014   Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal Callaloo in 1999. Author of 20 books (including Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents, Inside The Earthquake Palace: 4 Plays, Aboce The Human Nerve Domain, and Exobiology As Goddess), Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.Now available as a second edition with a new preface from the author, Will Alexander’s Towards The Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998) is a work of “vertical philosophy” revealing the strata of cultures and language, like geological layers seen all at once. These essays comprise Alexander’s “search for origins outside the warrens of the visible,” revealing a singular imagination that moves with the force of a manifesto and the impossible dexterity of the unknown. Alexander’s virtuoso arpeggios of linguistic realms explore language and perceiving, and resonate far beyond the constrictions of the rational world.

Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations is a limited edition book of only 300 copies published by the writers own BUKU Press, an independent artisanal publisher in Cornwall. Each book is numbered by hand.  Graeme Ewens spent over 5 years recording interviews with Don Cherry on cassette tapes for this book project - a great opportunity to hear Don’s story in his owns words.    Published, December 2024  A5 printed in mono and colour with 176 pages  The eternal rhythm is the vital conduit that links music through breath to life itself. Don Cherry certainly lived music. And his music is alive.When he says that music is breath he talks of something much bigger than the blow needed to make the trumpets sound. From his prime instrument, the trumpet, to his beloved ‘ngoni via flutes, piano and melodica Don Cherry’s voice is unique; like the man from which it springs, it is instantly recognisable whatever instrument or angle it is coming from. THE DON CHERRY TAPES laid the foundation in 1979 of the Cherry Archives which preserve the memory of Don and his extended tribal family. The archive began with a series of taped autobiographical interviews and a box of ephemera and mementoes. Now, 30 years after his death, those transcribed conversations are finally being published, illuminated by Don’s own artworks and augmented by the author Graeme Ewens’ tour journals and contemporaneous notes made over three decades of collaboration. The material included here is previously unpublished and is a kind of top- and-tail treatment of one of the Jazz Great’s personal experience, combining autobiographical background alongside his mentor Ornette Coleman with objective reportage from some of his later tours and personal anecdotes that offer a unique perspective from the writer who had become Don’s confidant, travel companion, witness and friend. They hung out together in the 1970s and between 1979 and 1984 were collaborating, collecting and collating material for a multimedia extravaganza that Don called ‘The Project’, which was picked up again in 1994. This would tell his story from the inside and from alongside, aiming to glimpse the essence of a cosmic traveller and multicultural ‘organic’ musician, from the spiritual high spots to the low points of the jazz life. The pages on his later years include personal reflections on his contemporary musical travellers and reveals details of his collaboration with John Coltrane. Special Edition limited to 300 copies

ALICE COLTRANE (1937–2007) was a composer, master of various musical instruments, improviser, spiritual leader, and wife of John Coltrane. Throughout her adult life, she worked within and combined a broad range of musical genres, including gospel, R&B;, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. She recorded more than twenty full-length albums for Impulse and Warner Bros. Her music speaks to her experiences as a child playing for church congregations in Detroit; the transcendent and mind-bending avant-garde improvisations she performed with her husband John Coltrane; and her religious pilgrimages to India.  Hardback, 80pp Akashic Books, 2025When Monument Eternal was originally published in 1977, Alice Coltrane was living in Southern California and had recently become a swami, building and nurturing an alternative spiritual community. In these pages, she says that the book is “based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” Monument Eternal offers deep insight into Coltrane’s tremendous musical output, and shines a light on her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church organist and bebopper, to sage thought leader Swami Turiyasangitananda. It also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of American religious customs in the mid and late twentieth century.    Akashic’s long-awaited reissue of Monument Eternal includes a new foreword by Ashley Kahn.

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to “uncuration”: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding, 48pp Varamo Press, November 2022, series Gestures  In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’ Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Fitzcarraldo, April 2025  Paperback, 215ppComposer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There’s scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn’t anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre’s Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman’s masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie’s death.