Bill Callahan should write more books. The baritone poet has already released one, 'Letters To Emma Bowlcut' -- a collection of random thoughts, barely interconnected, collected into a novella. In true Callahan fashion, the book is a delight to read, even if the reader has no fucking clue what he's talking about: the sentences just sound nice. Now, he's releasing 'I Drive a Valence', a book compiling lyrics from seventy of his songs alongside over a hundred original self-inked images. He really is a man of many talents.

edited by Stephen Barber This volume is a collaborative translation by Paul Buck, Catherine Petit, Clayton Eshelman and David Rattray in its complete form in English for the first time with an introduction by John Zorn.  Softcover, 224pp Diaphenes, April 2024Drawings on texts and letters dating from 1946, some of them written while he was still confined at the Rodez psychiatric hospital, Artaud devoted the months of November 1946 to February 1947 to completing his book through a long series of vocal improvisations titled Interjections, dictated at his pavilion on the edge of Paris. He cursed the assassins he believed were on their way there to steal his semen, to make his brain go “up in smoke as under the action of one of those machines created to suck up filth from the floor,” and finally to erase him.

Hardcover, 14 x 14, 48 pp JRP Editions, 2024 Edited by the artist, Everything in the Universe is Unfinished combines never-before-published texts and invitation pieces written in 2016–18 with drawings from the Franklin Summer series Ono started in 1994. For Ono, words, artworks and books still have the power to change the world we live in for the better. Thus she continuously shares with us her vision and philosophy toward life—one that is made of pivotal experiences, unstoppable optimism and a love for the other. Coming after several volumes that have proved to be life companions for many, Everything in the Universe Is Unfinished reflects on her most recent feelings through a delicate interweaving of poems, aphorisms, short stories and drawings.

Edited by Alejandra Cárdenas Contributions by Adrián Sallo Sallo, Alejandra Ríos Ruiz, BELLACOMSOM, Ekaterina Golovko, Karen Werner, Mariana Carvalho, Mariano Rosales, Nico Daleman, Nicole L’Huillier, Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado, Wilwer Vilca. Conversations with Caline Matar and Yazan Khalili. Artworks by Alan Courtis, Laura Mello, Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, Romi Ron Morrison, Yara Mekawei. Coilbound, 14,8 x 21 cm, 187pp Contingent Sounds, November 2024 English      Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal Vol.3 explores sound and the socio-political dimensions of listening. The publication brings together essays, practices, conversations and artworks from artists, researchers, and activists who are actively engaged in practicing and thinking about sound and listening as an anti-hegemonic gesture. The themes that they dissect and historicize span diverse geographies and contexts, from environmental and military violence to communal agency, indigenous technologies, colonial archives, radio practices, cultural cannibalism, and more-than-human ontologies. Here, borders—both physical and metaphorical—are the sites where the authors position themselves and where knowledge is contested. At the core of these texts are questions of methodology and positionality, but also a concern for action and form—performing, dialoguing and instigating as ways of research.

Paperback, 96pp And Other Stories, Sheffield, 2025 First Published by Wave Books, New York, 2016Hardly War, first published in the USA in 2016 and finally published in the UK in 2025, splices the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire. Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.

Paperback, 127pp And Other Stories, Sheffield, 2025 First published, Wave Books, New York, 2020  ‘I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.’ Woven from verse, prose, photographs, historical reports, typographic experimentation, drawings and more, DMZ Colony explores Edward Said’s notion of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ in regards to South Korea and the United States. At the start, the call of geese in the American sky translates into the letters D, M and Z, calling her back to her country of birth, Korea. She travels to a traditional village in the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, on the border of North and South Korea. There she interviews an old man who, although tortured brutally for many years, didn’t give up his belief in Communism. The artful use of the oral history genre continues as she gives voice to orphan survivors of a government massacre. In a language of haunting and suggestive construction, increasingly words give way to her father’s documentary photos from the time of General Park Chung Hee’s brutal putsch and dictatorship, a regime supported by the USA. Like its sister books in Choi’s highly acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War and Mirror Nation), DMZ Colony holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.   Winner of the National Book Award (USA)

Softcover A4, 140pp Sonduke Magazine, Kuwait 2024Kuwait-based SONDUKE Magazine, an independent digital platform for regional and global artists launched at Focal Point in 2024, their first printed publication and fifth issue, comprising a range of experimental artists and musicians from the SWANA region and beyond, provides a glimpse into the magazine’s creative process and inspirations.   SONDUKE (Arabic for crate, vault or safe) spotlights experimental and industrial art and sound. The ‘interiority’ signalled by the name SONDUKE evokes the formation of a counter space for art otherwise delineated as marginal. They support both under-represented and impactful artists, providing a platform to showcase their craft. In doing so, SONDUKE fosters creative and counter-cultural dialogue.

Tenement Press #15, November 2024Paperback, 74pp     Lucy Sante’s books include Low Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), Kill All Your Darlings (Verse Chorus Press, 2007), The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020), and the memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Heinemann, 2024).   1.                  HypocrisyYou will find my text in the book of Matthew, Chapter Seven, Verse Five, where the apostle quotes King Jesus saying, ‘Thou hypocrite! First cast the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’                 2.                    VirtueI take my reading today from Proverbs, Chapter Ten and Verse Nine. ‘He who walketh upright do so surely, but he that perverteth his ways shall be known.’3.                    GluttonyThis morning, I take my reading from First Corinthians, Chapter Three, Verses Sixteen and Seventeen. ‘Know you not that you are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God is holy, and you are that temple.’4.                    TemperanceBrothers and sisters, I read to you today from Proverbs, Chapter Twenty, Verse One. ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’5.                    JusticeMy text is the epistle of James, the Second Chapter, the Second Verse. ‘For if there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile rags. And you shall have respect to him that weareth the fine clothing, and you say to him, “Sit you there in a good place,” and say to the poor, “You stand over there,” or “Sit down at my feet,” have you not become a judge with evil intent?’6.                    PrudenceToday I am reading to you from the book of Proverbs, Chapter Thirteen, Verse Sixteen. ‘Every prudent man dealeth from knowledge, but a fool layeth open his folly.’“In August 2016 I received an email from Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s majordomo. I had been getting occasional writing assignments from Bob through Jeff for years, and they were extremely various: speeches, press kits, prefaces, a Buick commercial. Now he explained that he and Bob had been discussing a film project, to focus on his ‘Gospel Years,’ 1979-1980. They had some great footage—not the rather stiff performances intended for an unmade TV special, but the rougher takes made for pick-ups. Bob had the thought that he’d like to interrupt the footage with sermons delivered by an actor. Would I consider writing the sermons?I gulped, but I said yes. What did I know about sermons? Barring the occasional funeral I hadn’t been to church since age thirteen, and what I could recall of the priests of my past was not exactly inspiring. I searched sermons online but found mostly dull plodding slabs of Midwestern mainstream-Protestant reasonableness. I searched my bookshelves for anything relevant and came up with Perry Miller's 1956 anthology The American Puritans, but their elegant plain seventeenth-century Dissenter prose did not suit the music. I also found Saved: The Gospel Speeches, transcriptions of the sermons Bob had actually issued from the stage in those years, edited by Clinton Heylin and published in Raymond Foye’s palm-sized Hanuman editions. They weren’t prose at all, but spontaneous exhortations and rambling homilies, full of doom and repentance, blood and thunder. I checked with Jeff, but no, Bob did not want those as a stylistic model. Finally I realized what I should have known in the first place if it weren’t for my print bias: my sources had to be recorded sermons. After all, I had dozens on my iPod (RIP): Rev. J. M. Gates, Rev. D. C. Rice, Rev. A. W. Nix. These were Black, mostly Southern preachers of the 1920s and ‘30s, whose recorded sermons, often unaccompanied, handily outsold the blues issued on the same labels. I had never seriously listened to them one after the other. I remembered some of the more sensational bits, such as Rev. Gates’s ‘Death Might Be Your Santa Claus,’ or his ‘Atlanta gets her styles from New York, and New York gets her styles from Paris, and Paris gets her styles from Hell!’But when I listened to the sermons one after another, the thing that struck me was their earnestness, their neighborliness. The secret of their success was that the preachers seemed to be addressing specific people, and that included you.”(From Sante’s foreword to these texts.)

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Swift Press (7 April 2022) Language ‏ : ‎ English PAPERBACK Dan Charnas is the author of the definitive history of the hip-hop business,The Big Payback. He’s also the author of Work Clean, a book detailing applying chefs’ techniques to almost any life situation. He was also the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series, The Breaks. He lives in Manhattan, and is an associate professor at NYU/Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. ‘Does what good music books should: send you back to the source material … Dilla Time is an important piece of music writing, affording its African-American subject the respect that the rock establishment has long accorded its white heroes’ - The EconomistEqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B; acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself.

As part of Sight & Sound's Auteur SeriesSight and Sound continues to celebrate the work of the greatest auteur directors in history by returning to our archives to revisit the cinema of the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, director of Jeanne Dielman, named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound voters in 2022. Alongside in-depth features, reviews and behind-the-scenes images of Akerman at work are new critical assessments of her films, interviews with her collaborators including Claire Atherton, Sonia Wieder-Atherton and Eric De Kuyper and writing by filmmakers Céline Sciamma and Lukas Dhont. Also in this special publication is exclusive material from The Fondation Chantal Akerman archive, including a previously unpublished interview with Akerman, where she discusses Jeanne Dielman and a scenario Akerman wrote for her first feature, Hotel Monterey. This celebration of Akerman's work is presented to coincide with the BFI retrospective Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception

Zeynep Bulut is a voice and sound theorist. She is a Lecturer in Music at SARC, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at Queen's University Belfast. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. She is project lead for the research platform, Music, Arts, Health, and Environment, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council's Impact Acceleration Account at QUB. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video, and theater, and released two singles. Her composer profile has been featured by British Music Collection. She is a certified practitioner of Deep Listening.   Hardback, 250pp Goldsmiths Press, Feb 2025On the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin. How do we build or make a voice together? Can we imagine the voices we make in the form of a skin, a multi-sensory interface that behaves both as a boundary and as a point of connection? What does such a voice capacitate in times of crises and uncertainties?  In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, Zeynep Bulut explores these questions. She examines the multi-sensory and collective forms of voice making in experimental music, sound and media art in conversation with the use of voice in creative interventions for environmental crisis, experiences of voice hearing, and digital technologies of artificial and tactile speech.  Through this conversation, she points to two key terms: plasticity of voice, and non-dialogue. Plasticity of voice indicates both malleable and resistant aspects of voice. Non-dialogue refers to cross-sensory, non-dyadic, and distributed modes of interaction across both humans and nonhumans. The plasticity of voice and the non-dialogue, Bulut argues, encourage us to think about voice in the form of a skin, a surface that both connects and differentiates, without being limited to human body or labels of verbal language.  Voice-as-skin, in effect, prompts us to reflect on both individual and collective, concrete and emergent, and uncertain and shared aspects of voice and speech, as well as to pace and revisit our conceptions of communication, intersubjectivity, connectivity, understanding and empathy.

Paperback, 240pp, 21 B&W; photos Wesleyan University Press, 2024A study of transoceanic musical appropriation and Swahili ethnic subjectivity on the Kenyan coast Sounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung poetry that emerged as East Africa's first mass-mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emerged in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa during the twentieth century feature particularly dramatic, even flamboyant, appropriations of Indian and Arab sonic gestures and styles. Combining oral history, interpretive ethnography, and musical analysis, Sounds of Other Shores explores how Swahili-speaking Muslims in twentieth-century Mombasa derived pleasure and meaning from acts of transoceanic musical appropriation, arguing that these acts served as ways of reflecting on and mediating the complexities and contradictions associated with being "Swahili" in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. The result is a musical anthropology of Kenyan Swahili subjectivity that reframes longstanding questions about Swahili identity while contributing to broader discussions about identity and citizenship in Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

Paperback, 384pp, 42 B&W; photos Wesleyan University Press, 2024Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as "free jazz" brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure. Davis's spearheading of "jazz-rock fusion" opened a door through which jazz's ongoing dialogue with the popular tradition could be regenerated, engaging both high and low ideas of creativity, community, and commerce. Includes 42 illustrations.

Paperback, 304pp Velocity Press, Nov 2024In July 2019, eleven years after Jay-Z became the first hip-hop artist to headline Glastonbury, Stormzy became the first English rapper to follow suit. Wearing a customised stab-proof vest designed by Banksy, the South London rapper delivered an explosive performance and finished by thanking the “legends for paving the way,” name-checking Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, and Giggs. Despite how unlikely it seemed for decades, UK rap was now firmly a part of pop music and the greater hip-hop canon. Rich, nuanced, and often misunderstood, the history of UK rap is a story of music that refused to stand still. Factoring in socioeconomics, gender, identity, music industry disruption, and innovation, What Do You Call It? charts the artform’s first four decades, beginning when rap landed on our island in the early 1980s. Shaped by sound system culture, inspired by punk, and accelerated by rave, it has evolved from Britcore, UK hip-hop, and trip-hop of the late twentieth century to garage, grime, and drill. Through cultural theory, historical research, and original interviews with key figures and collaborators in the UK rap scene, from pioneers like Malcolm McLaren, Soul II Soul, Tricky, Roots Manuva, and Roll Deep to modern artists like Dave, CASISDEAD, Little Simz, Loyle Carner, and Skengdo x AM, adds a rich human dimension to the UK rap story — one that helped change British music and culture forever.

An independent magazine about art in the age of pollution Contributors: Alina Schmuch, Anton Spice, Charlemagne Palestine, Cocky Eek, Dominika Mikołajczyk, Elias Anastas, Elena Colombi, Hannah Pezzack, Jacek Smolicki, Juan Cortés, Loma Doom, Lucas Nessim Snaije, M Murphy, Maud Seuntjens, Mirna Belina, noiserr, Salomé Voegelin, Sammy Lee, Sarah E. Agerbaek, Shortwave Collective, Sève I.V. Janssen   Paperback, 16x23cm, 300pp Sonic Acts, Jauary 2025Building on Sonic Acts’ 30-year legacy, the seventh edition of Ecoes – a special, double issue – delves into the art of sound and presence. From Salomé Voegelin’s remixing of the ‘curatorial order’ to maximalist composer Charlemagne Palestine and Loma Doom’s cerebral DJ sets, this magazine reimagines listening as a form of attention – at once a method, an ethics, and a poetics. A continuation of the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 project Touched by Sound, Sève I.V. Janssen excavates the media archive of Dutch performer and instrument maker Michel Waisvisz. Meanwhile, Elias Anastas of Radio alHara discusses the Palestine-based station’s efforts to sustain (inter)national solidarity amidst escalating Israeli violence. In their collaboratively written article, Shortwave Collective proposes another (radio) listening exercise, asking: ‘Do we listen to the same things, differently?’

Henry Flynt's wild follow up to his previous volume, Three Essays on Spirituality171 x 234mm, 272 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, Ed. of 500, 2022 Ruinous Spirituality can be seen as the sequel to my recent Three Essays on Spirituality and Art. The abstract for Three Essays on Spirituality and Art said that ruinous spirituality needs to be studied as carefully as admirable spirituality: it discloses personness as much as admirable spirituality does. Ruinous Spirituality is a lengthy and aggressive contribution to this study. It goes without saying that myths about supernatural sources of evil, and myths about impiety, are rejected. Indeed, they are ignored: except when they comprise part of the object of study. There have been self-avowed Satanist enterprises for centuries. (And Satanic has a vivid metaphorical use in English. As shorthand for eerily malicious.) As for religion, it has to be appraised as a ruinously spiritual institution (more carefully, as an amalgam).  The study wants to go beyond “decrying the bad.” It wants to go beyond listing public manifestations which exhibit ruinous spirituality. (E.g. cultural works.) What needs to be answered is how ruinous spirituality is assembled in individual interiority at all. It needs a “reality-picture” beyond today’s conventional wisdom: that would be personalysis.  What constituents must personness have to give rise to ruinous spirituality? Five cases are found of spiritually ruinous interiority. (The cases outline a principal axis). The SUFFERER, the PERFORMER, the WRECKER, the SEDUCER, the PARTICIPANT. The SUFFERER is a victim of themself. Three cases are agents acting on targets: their success is the ruin of the target. The PARTICIPANT is a SEDUCER who also participates in the revels. In a postscript, the book finds another axis, with admirable and ruinous as its poles. It takes up amalgams, mixtures in the middle of this axis. Indeed, amalgams comprise much of what faces us.  Not because admirable and ruinous are vague. Quite the contrary. The appropriate metaphor would be a clothed person. Clothes and humans go together even though they are distinct. - Heny Flynt

A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, illustrated, 122 pages. Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future. ASKIA M. TOURÉ is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

Paperback, A5, 76pp Materials, 2nd Edition, January 2025In this collection of poems and of five recent essays, his first to be published in the UK, Tongo Eisen-Martin reflects on poetry’s role in the tornado-like devastation of current political conjunctures: white supremacist street lynchings, the naked abuse of state power, the classed and racialised effects of a global pandemic. Eisen-Martin’s work crackles, investigates, worries, riffs, insists, explodes, presenting an empire in slow eclipse through the lenses of double consciousness, poems, poisons, prisons, “dry-Leninism”. This work is animated by the spark of individual phrases, turns of phrase, refrains: common sense and senses from the commons. Aphorisms, maxims, dispatches from “the hell / of where we are” (Joseph Jarman), Eisen Martin’s words are imbued with music which strains the edge of music and strains the edge of the poem; a chorus of voices filtered, refracted and remixed through the completely singular voice of its poet. Their architecture ranges across the page like that of the city—San Francisco—and its correlates whose interstices they rigorously trace, attentive to the spaces of daily life—tower blocks, vacant lots, streets, porches, bars, rooms, roads, cars—and the realities of power that cluster in and around them.  With the nation collapsing around the corner, these texts inhabit “psychology of the mask”; “half distracted (half suicidal)”, they rest and rove by the “hard residing” of the porch, by the “kitchen table that likes to talk”, by “working class windows”, by walls with eyes and ears; then venture out in search of “socialist breakthroughs”, of revolution’s “amazing grace”. In this “cotton gothic society”, a “strange fruit theatre” where capitalism walks on water and people play dead “so they could be part of the miracle”, it can be hard to tell if you’re “alive” or “differently alive”. But Eisen-Martin knows that sometimes, it’s ghosts who write poems, and that there’s a criminality buried in art: “like introducing Gabriel Prosser to Thelonious Monk”. “World history has a proletariat when the lights come back on”.