Books and Magazines


A5, Sewnbound 20pp Hopscpotch Reading Room, Cutt Press, 2025, BerlinExplores the echoes across time and space that link Carla Grandi’s book of poetry “Contraproyecto” (1985/1987) & Meredith Monk’s film and album “Book of Days” (1988).The zine is a rare chance for English speakers to be introduced to Grandi’s work, with several poems translated from Spanish for the first time specially for the event.“In a time of increasing authoritarianism, misogyny, and lethal polarization, we revisit these works to learn strategies of mourning and political defiance.And to understand the appeal of medieval settings to capture repressive regimes and the subversive potentials of magic, myth, and madness. Conceived of at roughly the same time and yet under very different circumstances, both works interweave medieval storytelling and contemporary events to protest racial and political violence and to celebrate intellectual and physical survival. Carla Grandi wrote“Contraproyecto” as a personal and affective response to the everyday restrictions and heinous violence of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, which barred her and many other leftists from teaching and publishing. Written and produced in the late 1980s, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and affected by the uncertainties and injustices of the Cold War, Meredith Monk’s film “Book of Days” shifts between a fictional medieval town and contemporary footage from New York City. With a soundtrack composed by the avant-garde artist and composer, and voiced by herself and a twelve-voice ensemble, the film deserves to be listened to as much as to be seen.”

carla grandi t. (& meredith monk) – contraproyecto

Paperback, 80pp, A4 smallest functional unit, 2025Welcome to the fourth edition of Graphème: a collection of scores by composers and artists intent on sharing and collaborating with performers in the realisation of adventurous and creative sonic experiences.The pieces presented in this edition range from simple to complex. Some are more open to freedom of interpretation and some are more specific, but all are offered in the spirit of collaboration with the performer who interprets the work.The scores within this volume draw on compositional concepts that are as varied as they are imaginative. Featuring photo-montage, graphs, illustration, timelines and grids, each piece offers the performer the chance to explore their own interpretation of the structural frameworks suggested by the composer. Representing kaleidoscopic approaches to sound and the gestural organisation of materials, these works, each different in their own way, share a sense of cooperation with the performer, which, while becoming more prevalent in contemporary music, is still quite removed from the more traditional relationship between composer and interpreter.The thematic and timbral materials offered for exploration are a true collage of ideas, motives and themes. They represent a meeting of creative initiations and responses, composed with rigour and, often, humour.Time is also represented in multi-faceted ways, whether linear, spatial or cyclical, offering the performer various ways to navigate the ideas: to overlay concepts of time as well as material, contributing to a kind of open and imaginative expression of time, material and space.Each composer’s score can be seen then, as a starting point, suggesting ways to begin: works unfolding as they are performed — often neither fully concrete, nor free of form or trajectory.Today more than ever it seems we need to reassess what it means to create, to collaborate and to find new ways of working together. These ideas of music composition and performance move towards new models through which we can truly come together as creative forces, not only with reflection and refinement, but also with spontaneity and freedom.The works in this volume, as in the previous three volumes, are here to be performed. Play them, explore them and realise them in any way you find imaginable. We are excited by the possibilities of performers creating a collaborative space between the composer and – in the rendering of these works – with audiences and listeners.

Volume 4 – Grapheme - a publication for experimental scores

N.H. Pritchard didn’t see the fruit of his labor during his lifetime, but now is recognized as a predecessor of the Rap and Language poets. -Ishmael Reed   Norman Henry Pritchard was born in New York City in 1939 and studied at New York University and Columbia University. His work has been published in two collections: The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970 (1970) and Eecchhooeess (1971). His poetry was featured in the journals Umbra and The East Village Other, performed on the jazz poetry compilation New Jazz Poets (1967), and anthologized in The New Black Poetry (1969) and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969). Pritchard taught poetry at the New School for Social Research and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary. He died in eastern Pennsylvania on February 8, 1996.   Paperback, 152pp Primary Information, October 2024The Mundus is Norman Pritchard’s magnum opus, a mysterious work that is both visual and poetic, literary and mystical. The work was composed between 1965 until at least July 1971, a six-year period during which the author refined and reworked its pages, seeking out new literary forms alongside personal transcendence. As Pritchard mentions in a letter to Ishmael Reed in 1968, “Literature in and of itself doesn’t seem to have a broad enough scope for me anymore.” Despite its ambitions and grand scope, The Mundus has gone unpublished for over fifty years. Subtitled “a novel with voices,” The Mundus combines Pritchard’s earlier poetic innovations with his growing interest in theosophy, exploring a spiritual terrain he enigmatically dubbed the transreal. Appropriately, this lost masterpiece represents some of Pritchard’s most challenging work, with the text proceeding in small leaps and sublime fractures, stuttering across the page with sonic and visual momentum as it threads through an immersive, textual mist comprised solely of the letter “o”. Pritchard found early success with his books The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS, experimental texts that, in part, bear the imprint of the avant-garde arts, music, and poetry communities of the late 1960s, in particular the Umbra group, a collective of Black poets of which he was a leading member. But The Mundus finds Pritchard at his most radical and revelatory, putting forth a profound act of negation, while it delves readers into a primordial soundscape populated by language’s essential building blocks. An early pillar of Black poetics and a world unto itself, The Mundus must be sounded out not only with the mind, but also with the mouth, body, and soul.

N. H. Pritchard – The Mundus - a novel with voices

Hardback, 512pp Allen Lane, 2024Motherhood is a political state. Helen Charman makes a radical case for what liberated mothering could be, and tells the story of what motherhood has been, from the 1970s to the 2010s.When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo.In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them, too.Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organise under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

helen charman – motherstate - a political history of motherhood

by Niki Elliott, Karen Hill, Jo Johnson, Chris Rowley, and Jon Slade. Edited by Ethan Swan & designed by Matthew Walkerdine. Published by JABS &  The Grass is Green in the Fields for You 190 x 250mm, 352 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024Huggy Bear was a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-1994. Outcast and outraged, they made a howling, squalling mess of punk, all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Huggy Bear was a group that let things be complicated, that considered themselves complicit, but never took that as a reason to surrender. There’s no band more important. Killed (of Kids) is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear. It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers and ephemera from their three year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, encouragement. Throughout Huggy Bear’s lifespan, they rejected major label advances and shunned contact with the music press. Following the band’s final concert, the members largely withdrew from public life. The subsequent 30 years has seen their legend bloom. And just as the warnings and incitements of their music continue to grow in relevance, the curiosity and distortion has also grown. Killed (of Kids) documents the chances taken, the psychic drains, the unique connections and the aftermaths of Huggy Bear. The book is a real reflection of the sharp edges and dissatisfaction and love that has always lived in the songs and the words. It is not a “rock biography.” There’s no swagger or grand narrative. It’s all small delight and protective energy. Drastic liberation. A reiteration of Huggy Bear’s propositions: It is always possible for people to trust their collaborators. It is always possible to make a song (book/painting/poem/dance/etc) about something that you’ve never heard anyone make a song about before. It is always possible to refuse to answer their questions.

huggy bear – KILLED (OF KIDS)

Repeater Books, Nov, 2024 240pp   Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is a Southend-on-Sea-based writer. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, where she now teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her performance work, comprising sound collage and spoken word with printmaking props, occasions numerous performances both nationally and internationally. She writes for publications including the Darkside, the Leigh Times, and the London Drinker. https://www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.ukAn alternative occult and esoteric history of England told through one of its most popular cultural forms: the comedy sitcom. Code: Damp is a sometimes-comedic field report that charts an esoteric code hidden within the twin poles of 1970s sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Outlining how past cultural patterns condensate and repeat through technology, time is shown to be a damp condensation seeping through the centuries and out onto the telly. Interspersed with the author’s own photographs, prints, Holsten Pils cans, local newspaper entries and carrier bags, as well as a whole host of other characters, the work seems an antiquarian’s conceit that takes time travel as a metaphoric methodology. This is not media studies; more an allegory of all reality as (tele)visual recorded history, excavating the strata of haunted technology from which the fragile band of code comprising our sense of time is briefly emitted. Drawing connections between incidents of ancient and popular culture, from Mark E. Smith’s lyric— “They say damp records the past”—to Rising Damp’s (meta)physical structure of decay, the book finds damp’s temporal power manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and parish folklore to pulp, Time Team, darts, the local newspaper and, of course, the sitcom. Merging the vast with the parochial, the occult with the comedic, Code: Damp tunes into the weird demands of damp as a time-traveling material at the intersections of comedy, myth and technology, taking all three as serious resources to better (dis)orient the ground we stand on.

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson – Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms

Second Edition, 2024, 2000 copies New expanded edition, originally published 2019 210 pp, paperback, umland editions  bilingual english/french"Éliane Radigue is considered one of the most innovative and influential contemporary composers from her early electronic music through to her acoustic work of the last 15 years. Influenced by musique concrète and shaped by regular sojourns in the United States where she discovered analogue synthesizers, her work unfolds an intensity which is at once subtle and monumental. Through her deep reflections on sound and listening, not only her music but also her working methods have come to shape a widely resonating set of new parameters for working with sound as musical material. “In the long interview that forms the body of this publication Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research as well as her historical context. The publication also contains an annotated list of works and Radigue’s programmatic text on “The Mysterious Power Of The Infinitesimal”.” Edited by Julia Eckhardt with texts by Éliane Radigue and Julia Eckhardt. With 62 black and white illustrations. Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sonic arts. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels for which she conceptualised various thematic research projects. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated with numerous artists and extensively with Éliane Radigue. She has performed internationally and released a number of recordings. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, Conversation On Gender and Music, Grounds For Possible Music, and The Middle Matter, Sound As Interstice. ---

Éliane Radigue & Julia Eckhardt – Intermediary Spaces