Books and Magazines


Marja AhtiScott ArfordNicolas DebadeMichael GattTim IngoldRolf JuliusJules NégrierJohn RichardsMarina RosenfeldHildegard WesterkampRandy Yau   FOREWORDIn a 1955 pamphlet entitled Seven Years of Musique Concrète, Jacques Poullin wrote: [...] sound projection in a concert hall is a logical extension of the concerns of the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète and requires its technicians to properly study multiple aspects of the problems of sonorisation that are often neglected and to date have been almost exclusively the preserve of ‘public address’ technicians.1 From the very beginning, fixed media electroacoustic music in its various guises faced a significant challenge: that of how it could be shared with the public. Even before it was distributed in the form of records, musique concrète, having first been transmitted on radio, soon turned to the concert stage. From the time of its birth, a twofold question was posed: What strategy of diffusion could be used for this music which involves no live performers? But also, how could it make use of existing systems of sound amplification without losing its singular nature, making sure to preserve its own particularities? Identified very early on, these questions have lost none of their pertinence some seventy years later. Under pressure from the cultural industries and faced with a largely commercially-driven standardisation of formats, it is important today to reaffirm both the singular nature of experimental electroacoustic practices, and the possibilities these practices open up beyond standards and rules. This calls for an exploration of the vast domain of sound creation in which, here and there, ideas, concepts, and sometimes new works appear that fully embrace the question of the deployment of sound, its dissemination and its expansion. An exploration focussed on the listening experience—a fundamentally musical experience—but adopting a critical approach which may sometimes call into question traditional ways of sharing and listening to sound, the status of listener and creator, and which may even challenge the acoustic integrity of venues and the legitimacy of diffusion systems. Such are the questions to be addressed here. Sketching out the contours of what is quite obviously a huge subject, this volume, drawing upon a wide variety of points of view, experiences, and ideas, hints at an entire critical apparatus that remains to be developed and consolidated, but is crucial given the primordial importance of the theme of dissemination. For dissemination is the transitional stage par excellence, the uncertain stage that sits between creation and reception while at the same time determining both. It is a critical stage, yet one that is often neglected or, as Poullin says, left to a technical intermediary who may impose conditions entirely exogenous to questions of music and listening. For these reasons, it seems more necessary than ever to return to the experience of sounds, to once again listen attentively to their trajectories, their diffraction in space, their emergence and their disappearance. To get to grips with the mysteries of their deployment so as to reaffirm that this deployment is essential to them.96 + 104 pagesThread sewn softcoverFirst printing : 2000 copiesShelter Press, June 2025Bilingual edition French/English(all content included in both languages) ed. François Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson

Diffusion – Spectres V

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6 x booklets approx 60 pages each,  127 × 203 mm Softcover collected together in a sleeve Montez Press & London Performance Studios, 2025     Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987). Founded in 2007 by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs, Unfinished Histories is a project to gather the oral histories and preserve the archive of the vital alternative theatre movement in Britain from around 1968 to the early 90s. It shares information gathered through its extensive website www.unfinishedhistories.com as well as through exhibitions, discussions, newsletters, readings and publications, and seeks to encourage new work inspired by this history. From 2023 to 2026 Unfinished Histories is working with London Performance Studios on the project FYFFI: Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion.

Performance texts from the Women's theatre movement – Unfinished histories. Radical rediscoveries, 1969 - 1987

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With images captured on film by musician and photographer Lary 7, Tori Kudo: Ceramics documents the work displayed in the artist’s first exhibition in the United States. Designed by Alec Mapes-Frances and available exclusively at Blank Forms, this hardcover art book features thirty color photographs of the vessels with Kudo’s commentary on their forms and functions.  Ceramics, Tori Kudo says, is a “half-guaranteed chance operation.” Kudo, who once described himself as the “king of error,” regards relinquishing all expectations for his work as the foundation of his artistic output. For the past five decades, he has eschewed any pretense of control in his highly-improvisational music—assembling ragtag groups of untrained musicians to perform as his Maher Shalal Hash Baz ensemble, playing in a series of blink-and-you-miss-them psych-punk and noise bands in the ’70s and ’80s, and, he says, borrowing instruments for gigs from anyone who happens to be near the venue. In many ways, Kudo’s improvisations are controlled chaos, and this modus operandi stems, certainly, from his radical anarchist roots. But it is from this chaos that Kudo finds form, in both his sound and ceramics.    Kudo came of age in the ceramics workshop of his father, an art informel painter-turned-working-craftsman who practiced in the Tobe ware manner. Tobe ware, also known as Tobe-yaki, has been produced in Kudo’s native Ehime prefecture since the end of the eighteenth century and is known for its distinctive indigo designs set against brilliant white porcelain. Hardcover, 24 x 28.5cm, 44pp Blank Forms, 2022

tori kudo – ceramics

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"Alan Licht's historical approach successfully unpacks the development of sound art and explains its development through a multitude of examples. He ... brings new clarity into the discussion of sound art and its variations, remembering its roots and perhaps more importantly bringing social perspectives to bear in the narrative for scrutinising conceptual, instrumental and performative aspects of this many-faceted art form.” –  Organised Sound “I am pleased to discover at last an English-language, far-reaching survey of sound art rightly focusing on both theoretical and historical aspects while dealing with challenging categorization and placement issues such as situating sound art with regard to the fields of experimental music, fine art, and even sound studies. Sound art is becoming an increasingly important art form; this volume, a highly revised and expanded version of Licht's earlier Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories, is long overdue.” –  Leigh Landy, Director of Music – Technology and Innovation, Institute for Sonic Creativity, De Montfort University, UKThe first edition of Sound Art Revisited (published as Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories) served as a groundbreaking work toward defining this emerging field, and this fully updated volume significantly expands the story to include current research since the book's initial release. Viewed through a lens of music and art histories rather than philosophical theory, it covers dozens of artists and works not found in any other book on the subject.Locating sound art's roots across the centuries from spatialized church music to the technological developments of radio, sound recording, and the telephone, the book traces the evolution of sound installations and sound sculpture, the rise of sound art exhibitions and galleries, and finally looks at the critical cross-pollination that marks some of the most important and challenging art with and about sound being produced today. ---  Paperback edition. ISBN:9781501333132 Imprint:Bloomsbury Academic Illustrations:25 b&w; figures Dimensions:6" x 9"

Alan Licht – Sound Art Revisited

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Published by Blank Forms, 200 pgs, 21 × 14 cm, Softcover, 2021Kazuki Tomokawa has lived many lives: poet, self-taught guitarist, actor, day laborer, basketball coach, painter, bicycle race tipster, and incomparable drinker among them. Above all, he is a legend of Japan’s avant-folk music scene and his searing lyrics and raw, unvarnished vocals have influenced generations of musicians since his mid-1970s debut, when his unique sound brought him to prominence in the turbulent worlds of Tokyo’s underground film and music. Here, in his contemplative and utterly original style, the “screaming philosopher” charts the last six decades of his life, reflecting on everything from keirin to nuclear disaster to his own itinerancy, all the while providing an unfiltered view into the explosive cultural zeitgeist of postwar Tokyo. Originally printed in 2015, this translation is the first of Tomokawa’s writings to ever be published in English, and is accompanied by Blank Forms Editions’ reissue of Tomokawa’s first three solo records from 1975–77: Finally, His First Album, Straight from the Throat, and A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth. Try Saying You’re Alive! is a memoir like no other, delivered with the incisive tongue and stubborn charm of one of Japan’s most singular living musicians. Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label. Damon Krukowski is a musician and writer based in Cambridge, MA. His most recent book is Ways of Hearing (MIT Press, 2019) and his latest album is Damon & Naomi’s A Sky Record (20|20|20, 2021). Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor, and musician. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard University in medieval Japanese literature, and recently contributed translations to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki.

Kazuki Tomokawa – Try Saying You’re Alive! : Kazuki Tomokawa in His Own Words

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A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel” In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.Capital, it turns out, only fears health.Verso Books, 220pp Paperback edition published 2025

beatrice adler-bolton & artie vierkant – health communism

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