Books and Magazines


ISBN 9781789388619 Paperback 244 x 170 mm 320 pp This first academic collection dedicated to popular music in Leeds - developed from the work of interdisciplinary scholars, drawn from a major public museum exhibition “Sounds of Our City” and built upon contemporary research. Leeds has rich musical histories and heritage, a long tradition of vibrant music venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs and other sites of musical entertainment.The city has spawned crooners, folk singers, punks, post- punks, Goths, DJs, popstars, rappers and indie rockers, yet – with a few exceptions - Leeds has not been studied for its scenes in ways that other UK cities have. In ways that the chapters explore, Leeds’ popular music exemplifies and informs understandings of broader cultural and urban changes – both in Britain and across wider global contexts – of the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialisation and social equity; industrial decline, de-industrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of the 24-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicisation and de-politicisation, while concomitantly tracing arguments about “heritagising” popular music within discussions about music’s “place” in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds, and beyond.

edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen, Kitty Ross, Paul Thompson – Popular Music in Leeds - Histories, Heritage, People & Places

Paperback, 70pp, A4 smallest functional unit, 2023   Graphème is a project founded in 2020 by smallest functional unit (Tony Buck, Racha Garbieh, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Ute Wassermann) with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. Volume 3 features scores by Merche Blasco, Nicolás Carrasco, William Engelen, Julian Galay, Cat Hope, Charlotte Hug, @verkomponist, Lucie Vitkova, Sabine Vogel, Michael ZerangThe third edition of Graphème: a series of graphic and experimental music scores by composers from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Each composer offers a rigorous conceptual framework and provides an often sensual dialog between composer, performer, sound and space in spirit of collaborative creativity. The pieces here represent imaginative and inventive ways to notate a musical vision, making use of innovative approaches – photographic representation, geometric and cartographic schema and various degrees of indetermination and precision – as well as extending more traditional ideas of notation, to expand on expressive possibilities. Some composers embrace deep and abstract conceptual propositions while others exploit the aesthetic potential of graphic sign making to transfer ideas into a sounding choreography of possibilities, inviting performers and listeners to find connections in unexpected places. Progress in science and technology over the last decades has opened up new choices for expression and interaction, and we indeed find many composers taking up these new challenges with vibrant energy and enthusiasm. Some aspects of technology and new experimental score-making, for example, those that engage with video and interactive media, are beyond the scope of this publication. We have, however, found artists who have taken these ideas and influences as a point of departure, responding to this increasingly rational, mathematical and scientific world by using notions of data collection, the ever increasing precision of measurement and use structures derived from geometry and mathematics in innovative ways.

A publication for experimental music scores – Grapheme vol. 3

Sam Dolbear is the cofounder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio. He took up a fellowship at the ICI-Berlin as part of the 2020–2022 Project Reductions and continues working on a number projects, on palmist and sexologist Charlotte Wolff, a diagram of friendship constructed by Walter Benjamin, and a translation of Dora Kellner's feminist sci-fi novel Gas gegen Gas. Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London. She is frequently invited to speak in the UK, Europe, the US, and occasionally Australia, China, and India.An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

Sam Dolbear & Esther Leslie – Dissonant Waves

Dual language book. German translation by Lotta Thiessen   “I wanted to remember how to forget:   I found something I thought I knew well—   the colour of a childhood room; the path taken to school each day; a pool of water collecting in the iris,   —took something: lines of a poem or the pages of a book, placed them in these spaces I thought I knew well.   I had to train myself, I couldn’t carry all the pages—”THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT​​— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life.    "THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is thought turned [into] song. The singer, an ‘ambivalent woman / of non personhood’, trusts the productive energy of doubt to take her deeper into feeling and farther from naming. Lotte LS reveals the violent imperatives placed on us to speak and inhabit our pains as the limits of our personhood. In tracing the ‘tyranny of language under capitalist authoritarianism’ what emerges is the chance to become a subject always in motion, one who knows that what is not remembered is not identical to what is forgotten. " --Mira Mattar

Lotte L.S. – This Energy Wasted By Flight

"Insightful, passionate, flowing and jarring. Stage of Recovery is a creative journey that invites the reader to reflect on and reimagine society." - Marina Sitrin "This book proposes a singular bio-aesthetic, an original way of living with each other, against the ever more delirious diktats of planetary techno-capitalism. Sagri’s is an extraordinary example of a practice where, as with the Situationists, art becomes indiscernible from politics." - Mehdi Belhaj Kacem "I am convinced that Sagri's thinking in action is ultimately dedicated to the empowerment of the mass corporeality of the nameless, and to self-recovery from psychosomatic pains suffered in this world of hell." - Sabu Kohso Close to spiritual anarchism, Georgia Sagri’s writing happens in the heat of negotiation. Starting in the months leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, which became the movement for people’s self-governance known as Occupy, this book carries the energy and commitment of open struggle, direct address, self-organisation and public assembly. It is a critique of representation and its implicit oblivion, told through a decade of artistic and activist practice. The writing is a mode of recovery, it is pre-content shared to encourage open processes in art, thinking and action. Georgia Sagri (born Athens, 1979) lives and works in Athens and New York. Her practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Georgia Sagri – Stage of Recovery

THE SCREENPLAY FOR A HORROR FILM THAT NEVER WAS “Read The Otherwise and shed a tear for one of cinema’s great, long-lost screenplays.”   Ben Wheatley In 2015, Mark E. Smith of legendary post-punk group The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff co-wrote the script for a horror feature film entitled The Otherwise.  The Fall are recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The surrounding Lancashire landscape is at the mercy of a Satanic biker gang, and haunted by Scottish clansmen who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.  Every film production company they showed it to said it was “too weird” to ever be made. Yes, The Otherwise is weird. It’s also witty, shocking, and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside handwritten notes and previously unpublished photographs by Jim Moir and Smith’s widow and Fall keyboardist Elena Poulou.  Also within are essays by Duff and Poulou, and transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, in which they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favourite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat).  With Manchester’s visionary frontman Mark E. Smith as their one constant, The Fall were the most individual and influential group of their era. From post punk angularity to mutant rockabilly and machine-driven garage rock, via slanted Northern pop, The Fall were one of Britain’s last great singles bands.   As well as their own unmistakable songs, The Fall’s single discography also takes in a panoramic range of cover versions, including the psychedelia of The Move, the northern soul of R. Dean Taylor, the country rock of George Jones, the quintessential Englishness of The Kinks and William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.    Covering a diverse and thrilling run of over 50 releases between 1978 and 2016, Graham Duff has interviewed key members of The Fall, including Marc Riley, Elena Poulou, Simon Wolstencroft, Keiron Melling, Una Baines, Tim Presley and Paul Hanley.

Mark E. Smith and Graham Duff – The Otherwise

36 pagesprinted and manufactured in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm I often think back and thank my lucky stars that I just happened to arrive in Manchester in 1988. I’d enrolled on a Photography Course at Manchester Polytechnic and while still only 22, I was ready for a new chapter in my life after leaving behind my past in Birmingham. I had no idea that I was about to walk into the global phenomenon that the media called “MADCHESTER”. The Years of 1989–91 in Manchester saw an incredible explosion of creativity across many art forms and it certainly wasn’t just the music scene that benefitted. If you’re thinking Madchester only meant Happy Mondays & the Stone Roses then think again. There was also the poets, comedians, designers, entrepreneurs, journalists, DJs, photographers, — artists of all descriptions, as well as all round chancers that helped give the city an incredible buzz and ensuring the rest of the world was looking on with envy. As a Photographer I was perfectly set up to cover what was developing. I’d set up my Photo studio and darkroom where I was living, which at the time was a squat in one of the four big crescents which dominated the district of Hulme. Squatting in Hulme was really convenient, not only did it mean all my money could go on photography but also meant I was walking distance to the centre of Manchester, where all the fun was. I couldn’t help but get caught up in all the general mayhem, momentum and energy that these years provided. I became determined as much as possible to document what was going on around me.

Richard Davis — The Madchester Years 1989–91

Sounding Fragilities enacts a polyphony of writing on contemporary composition, music and performing arts in relation to music theatre. Co-edited by a theatre and performance scholar and by a composer and artistic researcher, this anthology considers its field of investigation through the lens of positionalities. Irene Lehmann and Pia Palme invite readers into intimate encounters with an artist’s practice, feminist and queer perspectives, and personal explorations into aspects of musicology, theatre studies, technology and ecology. By presenting female* composers who write with/through/about their own practice, Sounding Fragilities is a remarkable contribution to an interdisciplinary debate around the agency of artistic research. With this synthesis, the editors evaluate how moving beyond the binary of art and science reveals the rich yet fragile territories of artistic knowledge-production and literacy in music theatre. Sounding Fragilities. An Anthology brings together essays, discussions and interventions on contemporary music, dance and music theatre to offer a polyphony of new approaches to listening, watching, composing and performing. Artistic and academic researchers present reflections and insights into the fragilities of artistic materials, collaborations and the communities that build around live performances. Challenging the idea of isolated composers, choreographers, audience members and academic researchers, they stress instead the interconnectedness of these positions as indispensable elements of thriving performance and research. This feature of all live performance is envisaged by several of the book’s contributors as linked to political, democratic thought and ecological or feminist thinking. Sounding out the relationality, brittleness, fragility, transitoriness, and beauty of live performance, this anthology stresses the urgency of coming together and interacting as a foundation for human and political relations; an urgency intensified by the current overlapping crises in politics, health and ecology.

Sounding Fragilities