Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.The history of listening must be constructed from the narratives of myth and fiction, 'silent' arts such as painting, the resonance of architecture, auditory artefacts and nature. In such contexts, sound often functions as a metaphor for mystical revelation, forbidden desires, formlessness, the unknown, and the unconscious. As if reading a map of hitherto unexplored territory, Sinister Resonance deciphers sounds and silences buried within the ghostly horrors of Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, M.R. James and Edgar Allen Poe, Dutch genre painting from Rembrandt to Vermeer, artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Juan Munoz, and the writing of many modernist authors including Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.

Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician. It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. Here is Mingus in his own words, from shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric wards of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, but for all his travels never straying too far, always returning to music.

Published: Seagull BooksAug 2024300 PagesHardbackDelves into Theodor W. Adorno’s lesser-known musical career and successful music criticism.Theodor W. Adorno is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most prominent social theorists. Though best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Adorno began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Comprehensive and illuminating, Orpheus in the Underworld centers on Adorno’s concrete and immediate engagement with musical compositions and their interpretation in the concert hall and elsewhere. Here, Adorno registers his initial encounters with the compositions of the Second Viennese School, when he had yet to integrate them into a broad aesthetics of music. Complementarily essays on Bela Bartók, Jean Sibelius, and Kurt Weill afford insight into his understanding of composers who did not fit neatly into the dialectical schema propounded in the Philosophy of New Music. Additionally, essays on recording and broadcasting show Adorno engaging with these media in a spirit that is no less productive than polemical and focused as sharply on their potentialities as on their shortcomings. Orpheus in the Underworld offers a captivating exploration of Adorno’s musical compositions, shedding new light on his understanding of influential composers and his critical perspectives on recording and broadcasting.

Publisher :University of Chicago PressLanguage :EnglishPaperback :690 pagesISBN-10 :0226476960ISBN-13 :978-0226476964Dimensions :15.24 x 4.83 x 22.86 cmFounded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall's kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, "A Power Stronger Than Itself" uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art. --- University of Chicago Press, 2009

Published by Pluto Press in Jan 1979 Paperback ISBN: 9780861040322 192 pages 135mm x 215mm A collection of powerful and evocative songs spanning five centuries of the British oral tradition, My Song is My Own takes the reader on a musical journey of courtship, desire and sexual relationships, marriage, motherhood, childhood and work.From ballads and industrial songs of the mine and factory, to the folk revival and children's rhymes from the street and playground, this collection reveals the hidden culture and history of women through song. Its notes and introductions offer rich insights into the songs and their historical context, and musical notation makes it perfect for singers and readers alike.Created during the women's movement of the 1970s, this book remains the definitive collection of women’s songs in the United Kingdom.

Publisher :University of Chicago PressLanguage :EnglishHardcover :256 pagesISBN-10 :022618076XISBN-13 :978-0226180762Dimensions :23.11 x 15.24 x 2.79 cmMiles Davis's Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis's live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group-Davis's first electric band-to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in. Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group's driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears-and outlines-a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis's funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations. --- University of Chicago Press, 2016

Take my hand. Trace the lines on my palm with your fingers. What size and shape are they? Take note of their form: are they forked, tasselled, wavy, chained, broken? Now examine my fingers. Tell me my disposition; tell me what beholds me. Mapping the hand as cosmos as clinic as history as biography, hand reading is a technique suspended between medical and mystical judgement, empirical diagnosis and speculative divination. This book weaves the lives and work of the ‘reader’ and the ‘read’ together in an intricate fabric. The central ‘reader’ is Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a friend of Walter Benjamin, Helen Grund, and Ernst Schoen, who after fleeing from Germany’s new regime in 1933, took up hand reading in Paris to make ends meet. The ‘read’ are anonymous acrobats, dancers, and department-store managers, and members of the avant-gardes of Paris and London, from Antonin Artaud to Romola Nijinsky, Marcel Duchamp to Virginia Woolf. Arranged as an index, this book is both a guide to the techniques of hand reading and a critical theory of its history and practice, mixed with Wolff’s later work as a theorist of gender and sexuality. ‘Hand That Touch This Fortune Will is a study devoted to friendship, refracted through the portal of the upturned palm. Charlotte Wolff met the world by examining what was written on the hands of the times.  What did she read in the landscapes of this intimate organ of touch, and what, through reading, was she fatally unable to see?  Through a gentle fragmentation reminiscent of The Arcades Project, Dolbear acts as a thoughtful guide through fascinating and nearly forgotten passages in the European history of palmistry under late capitalism—along with all the political uncertainties and faggy gestures that formed its nimbus.  With extraordinary attention to the peculiar experiments in living that have scarcely left a trace in the archive, Hand That Touch gathers the reader around those bars, clinics, and drawn curtains, where, under the shadow of fascist diagnosis, the occult comes palm to palm with the queer past.’ – > M. Ty Each book holds a very lovely insert of a hand reading chart, designed by Ana Cecilia Breña and Sam Dolbear. Printed on tracing paper, it allows the reader to read their hand as they read the book. Sam Dolbear was a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin from 2020 to 2024. His research addresses the life and work of Walter Benjamin and those around him. He has taught and published widely, including, with Esther Leslie, Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th Century (2023). He is a co-founder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio. 224 pages120 mm x 190 mm60 mm French flaps (cover) Format: Paperback ISBN     978-1-910055-99-1 £15.00 WE HAVE A FEW SIGNED COPIES AT THE MOMENT   Add to Cart Next Book ->

An anthology that traces the long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking. Since the 1960s, the act of walking has provided a way for artists and musicians to escape the formality of the concert hall or institutional venue, engaging with shifting public spaces, natural environments, and the social and political sphere. Walking redefines notions of composer, performer, public, and music itself, while opening new modes of perception and action. Going Out addresses these developments by exploring the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts—from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today's manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives, and reflections. Through the variety of these contributions, the book makes an argument that at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking there is both a long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations and a broad field that resounds with urgent issues in critical spatial thinking and practice. --- Elena Biserna is an independent art historian and occasional curator based in Marseille, France. She writes, talks, teaches, facilitates workshops or collective projects, curates and sometimes performs. Her interests are focused on listening and on situated art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several international publications and journals. Her last book is Walking from Scores (Les presses du réel, 2022). She has taught at ESAAix-École Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University and the Academy of fine art of Bologna and is associate researcher at PRISM (AMU/CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8).

With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.Second edition (2023).An anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna. Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores. Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille, France. She is associate researcher at PRI SM (AMU / CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, "situated" art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, sociocultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several publications. As a curator, she has collaborated with different organisations and presented her projects internationally.

150 x 210mm, 224 pages, colour printing, perfect bound, 2023 The book features texts from Velérie Perrin, Daniele Balit, Elena Biserna, Sabine Himmelsbach, Rahma Khazam, Anne Zeitz. Christina Kubisch (born 1948 in Bremen, lives and works in Hoppegarten, Germany) studied painting, music and electronics in Hamburg, Graz, Zürich and Milano, where she graduated. Performances, concerts and works with video in the seventies, subsequently sound installations, sound sculptures and work with ultraviolet light. Her compositions are mostly electroacoustic, but she has written for ensembles as well. Since 2003 she works again as a performer and collaborates with various musicians and dancers.An incursion into a major field of work by Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of sound art who has been exploring the sonic potential of electromagnetic fields generated by our urban and technological environment since the 1970s.This book is part of a series of monographic publications co-published with the Espace multimédia Gantner devoted to women artists in connection with technology.

Archive Books, 2021 published in February 2021 English edition 13 x 20 cm (softcover) 264 pages   ISBN : 978-3-948212-11-7 EAN : 9783948212117A collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman.   The book investigates his legacy beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic and the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music. By trying to complicate, deny or expatiate on the notions of the harmonic, tonal hierarchy, the triadic, or even the tonal centre, Eastman's compositions explore strategies and technologies of attaining the atonal. One might be tempted to see Eastman in the legacy of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and others, but here too, it is worth shifting the geography of minimal tendencies and minimalism in music. It is worth listening and reading Eastman's music within the scope of what Oluwaseyi Kehinde describes as the application of chromatic forms such as polytonality, atonality, dissonance as the fulcrum in analysing some elements of African music such as melody, harmony, instruments and instrumentation.   This publication constructs a non-linear genealogy of Eastman's practice and his cultural, political and social relevance, while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.   ---   Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism. He was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music.   There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic—undoubtedly also one of the most powerful. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned—including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.   ---   Edited by: Federica Bueti, Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Contributions by Antonia Alampi, Rocco Di Pietro, Kodwo Eshun, Federica Bueti, Sean Griffin, Sumanth Gopinath, Jean-Christophe Marti, Josh Kun, Elaine Mitchener, Malak Helmy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Marie Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, Berno Odo Polzer, Pungwe, Christine Rusiniak.   ---

19.5 x 3 x 25.2 cm hardcover  faber and faber, 2024The music of Arthur Russell defies classification. Across a twenty-year career he created a body of work which ranged from his pioneering compositions as part of the New York avant-garde alongside artists including Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg, to his genre-expanding disco and art pop productions, to his posthumously released folk songs.Travels Over Feeling is the result of extensive research by author Richard King, curating the ephemera and documentation found in both Arthur's and other private archives, and consists of hand-written scores, lyrics, photos, letters and drawings. Throughout, King has conducted wide-ranging original interviews with Arthur's collaborators, contemporaries, family and friends. The resulting book reveals a true picture of one of the most distinctive artists of the last fifty years.

Punk Suprematism includes the first English translation of theoretical writings on punk, art, socialism, bureaucracy, and nationalism by Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, and Zoja Skušek. Written in the first half of the eighties, these texts are a unique mixture of punk attitude with theoretical concepts borrowed from Althusser, Lacan, and avant-garde art. Written in a turbulent period of Yugoslav socialism, these texts were trying to understand the political importance of punk as a mass movement of impoverished youth. The conclusions of these interventions had a lasting effect on the theoretical formation of Yugoslav post-Marxism, as well to the organizational forms of the socialist alternative. The book also includes a foreword on the historical context of the eighties and the extensive narrative bibliography of punk related publications in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia written by Sezgin Boynik. In addition to this, it also includes translations of the two editorials to Punk Problemi written by renowned Slovenian theoreticians.

Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language brings together the first English translation of the Russian Formalist and Futurist writings on Lenin’s revolutionary language. The book includes the Russian Formalists’ (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, Lev Yakubinsky, and Boris Kazansky) most ‘political’ texts, first published in 1924 in the journal of the Left Front of the Arts (edited by Mayakovsky). Together with this collection, the publication also includes Futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh’s Devices of Lenin’s Speech, from 1925. Indispensable for any serious research dealing with the relationship between revolutionary politics and artistic forms, these writings had remained a marginal note, both in studies on avant-garde art, and in much literature on Formalist theory.The publication is edited by Sezgin Boynik, who wrote an extensive introduction to the translations by contextualising the experiments of the Russian avant-garde through theories of conjuncture, or more precisely, the theory of contemporaneity within the revolutionary moment. Darko Suvin in his afterword discusses the actuality (and limits) of Lenin and Formalists in the shadow of never-ending warfare.With this book, Rab-Rab Press is proud to present the first English translation of the most interesting project of political Formalism and avant-garde theory in the twentieth century.210x140mm, 366 pages, Black and white offset printed throughout, Perfect bound, Ed. of 1000 Published by Rab-Rab Press, 2018

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith, musician and a member of The Scratch Orchestra, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians. Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians’ interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith’s music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK.The book will introduce new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew.Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.Designed by Ott Kagovere, the book is edited and co-published by Pykë-Presje, a collective from Prizren, Kosovo.The book is commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina.

The first print issue of Pinko contains a brief statement of our editorial orientation, dispatches from the Puerto Rican uprising and the Kentucky coal miners' blockade, essays about the communization of care and Kuwasi Balagoon, archival documents from groups like Third World Gay Revolution, and more.

This 288-page Artbook in English and Russian collects research, essays and photographs detailing the context around this fascinating music and those drinking songs.