Softcover, 94pp Autonomedia, Brooklyn, Spring 2025     Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings is a collection of essays and prose poems from acclaimed pianist and visionary Matthew Shipp. Downbeat magazine has described Shipp as “the connection between the past, present and future for jazzheads of all ages” and as “a musician who deserves a place of choice in the jazz piano pantheon.” Shipp has written essays for a number of fanzines, blogs and magazines over the years and this collection touches on many subjects, including jazz, sports, the psychology and spirituality of improvisation, and 1980s New York dance culture. Introducing this book, visual artist and poet Yuko Otomo places Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings in the pantheon of books by artists writing about their art, lauding it as “a meticulously descriptive record of his creative process’s physical/metaphysical/alchemical mystery itself seen from the inside,” with “a peculiar and unique quality which does not exist in any art writing.” “Matthew Shipp has created a beautiful testament filled with reflections, insightful analysis of his music and of the creative music scene. As every time his fingers touch the piano, he taps into the pure spiritual world from the eyes of the musician who is down in the trenches and standing on the pulpit. This book is full of personal stories and anecdotes that resonate with truth and a poetic honesty that goes beyond Jazz. It goes right to the heart.” –William Parker “Reading Matthew Shipp is like hearing him play: one is left spellbound. The essays, poems, meditations, reflections gathered here are the work of a true polymath, a clairvoyant who understands that “mystery” neither baffles nor conceals. It illuminates. And what Shipp illuminates are the core elements of this thing we call jazz: vibrations, universal energy, breath, pulse, silence, chromosomes, logos, language, and angels. This book will forever change how we hear, see, and feel music.” –Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Paperback, English-German Edition, 655 pp Wolke Verlag, MusikTexte, Berlin, 2009 Collection of writings about ideas concerning music by American composer Robert Ashley. For nearly forty-five years, composer Robert Ashley has pursued his vision of opera in the face of near complete indifference from the American mainstream culture industry. Ashley’s experience parallels that of other American indepen-dent avant-garde figures such as Terry Riley, Alvin Lucier, and Pauline Oliveros. Like these composers, Ashley uses notation only to the extent that it conveys his ideas to a longtime “band” of collaborators (which includes singers Jacqueline Humbert, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, and Joan La Barbara, along with engineer/mixer Tom Hamilton). Like Oliveros, Ashley is also keenly interested in performance as ritual; for the past three decades he has composed operas that rely upon the inflections and rhythms of American english and are set against the backdrop of a largely static “electronic orchestra.” Although much of Ashley’s work is conceived for television, only the seven-part Perfect Lives (1977–83) has been completely realized in its intended medium, and it has never been shown on American networks. Now, as Ashley enters his eighties, a european musicologist—Ralf Dietrich—has taken on the task of gathering Ashley’s essays, sketches of pieces, and program notes into one volume.

Nine enigmatic, chilling and moving short tales in this first ever collection from David Rudkin, writer of Penda’s Fen, The Ash Tree, Artemis 81 and numerous other television and stage productions.     “Rudkin’s intense spiritual, intellectual, psychological and emotional investigations excavate in the interstices between certainties… For readers and followers of Rudkin’s singular trajectory over many decades, this diptych of story constellations, as ancient, present and prescient as anything in his oeuvre, are unexpected but truly welcome gifts, manifestations of a lifelong enquiry that is among the most charged and profound these islands have witnessed.”From the foreword by Gareth EvansIllustrated by Zoe Taylor Forewrod by Gareth Evans Available in a strictly limited, high quality hardback edition of 500. All copies come with a bookplate signed by the author.   Hardcover, 264 pp Strange Attractor Press, December 2025

Within today's intensely polarized environment, in which social and political debate often tends toward conflict or impasse, might listening enact an intervention? While focus is mostly placed on making statements, capturing history, and the importance of speaking out, listening is radically key to facilitating dialogue, understanding, and social transformation. To listen is to extend the boundaries of the familiar, the recognized, and the known. In addition, listening affords more egalitarian and ecologically-attuned relations, staggering exclusionary systems and human exceptionalism by way of empathic, attentional, and more-than-human orientations: to hear beyond the often fixed schema of self and other, us and them. Listening is an embodied power, it may open and hold, it may support and heal, and it may afford escape as well as compassionate action.The Listening Biennial Reader draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and ecological proposition, a creative practice, and research method. This includes contributions by curators and artists from the first edition of The Listening Biennial, presented in 2021, along with a number of key scholars who offer critical reflections on cultures of listening. Listening emerges as a creative and critical force, or wave of attention, that contributes to maintaining the diversity of our social, creaturely adventure.Edited by Rebecca Collins and Brandon LaBelle. Contributions by Miguel Buenrostro, Wanda Canton, Rebecca Collins, Henry Ivry, Nanna Hauge Kristensen, Brandon LaBelle, Margarida Mendes, Sara Mikolai, Mhamad Safa, Luísa Santos, James Webb.   Hardcover, 17 x 24 cm Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2025

'He spoke about music in its pre-cultural state, when song had been a howl across several pitches, [when] musical performances must have had a quality something like free recitation; improvisation. But if one closely examined music, and in particular its most recently achieved stage of development, one noticed the secret desire to return to those conditions.'- Thomas Mann Doctor 'Faustus' 'We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them.'- Cornelius Cardew 'Everywhere, the orthodox systems of our times anticipate the careful and clear presentation of ready-worked-out on-tap outcomes, throughout our lives. Said systems seldom afford focused vantage on the vagaries, protean problems, the awkward wealth, of investigation itself. Generally, the on-goings of development are hidden, edited or simply unseen; what has been developed over time is rendered public, honed for appreciation after the fact, variously knowable, reproducible and endorsable qua final product or record.'- Seymour Wright Percussionist Eddie Prévost co-founded in the 1960s the seminal improvising music ensemble AMM. In this book he presents a very personal philosophy of music informed by his long working practice and inspired by the London weekly improvisation workshop he first convened in 1999. Perhaps controversially, this view is mediated through the developing critical discourse of adaptionism; a perspective grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature. Music herein is examined for its cognitive and generative qualities to see how our evolved biological and emergent cultural legacy reflects our needs and dreams. This survey visits ethnomusicology, folk music, jazz, contemporary music and 'world music' as well as focusing upon various forms of improvisation - observing their effect upon human relations and aspirations. However, there are also analytical and ultimately positive suggestions towards future 'metamusical' practices. These mirror and potentially meet the aspirations of a growing community who wish to engage with the world - with all its history and chance conditionals - by applying a free-will in making music that is creative and collegiate.Softcover, 235pp Copula, Harlow, UK, 2011

Softcover, 383pp Copula, Harlow, 2006 Matchless Recordings A collection of Cornelius Cardew's published writings. With commentaries and responses from Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Brian Dennis, Anton Lukoszevieze, Michael Nyman, Eddie Prévost, David Ryan, Howard Skempton, Dave Smith, John Tilbury and Christian Wolff. The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-81) was among the most adventurous, controversial and innovative musicians of his generation. After an initial association with Stockhausen and the European avantgarde, he became engaged with the aesthetic ideas of John Cage and the New York School. A leading figure in the experimental music of the 1960s, Cardew is widely acknowledged as a pioneer of indeterminacy, graphic notation, free improvisation and performer involvement. As well as extending the boundaries of music in unprecedented directions, he enquired deeply into its social relevance and meaning. His passionate and untiring quest for wider social significance led him eventually to become a political activist. In the 1970s he repudiated his earlier experimental work and adopted a more traditional musical language. He joined a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party and devoted himself to political action, at the same time searching for ways to express his commitment in musical terms. At the height of his political involvement he died tragically at the age of 45, killed by a hit-and-run driver near his home in East London. This Reader brings together a diverse collection of Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2008, it provides essential material for the study of Cardew's life and ideas; it also makes a significant contribution to discussion of the wider issues involved in the relationship between music, ideology and political commitment.

No Sound is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention: Meta-musical Narratives: Essays Softcover, 188pp Copula, Harlow, UK, 1995 an imprint of Matchless Recordings and Publishing    The improvising group AMM was born some 30 years ago [1965], at a time of extraordinary creative ferment and transformational social possibility. Though its history has not been completely smooth, it continues today to pursue a unique sonic course, unswayed either by academic orthodoxy or the conformist pressures of the market. In this book, Eddie Prevost, drummer and a founder member, explores the reasons it came to be, the influences and refusals that have shaped its history, and the potential and the failings not only of the meta-music AMM is committed to, but all music everywhere: classical, jazz, folk, pop and the experimental avant-garde. In a unique series of acute and often moving dissections and meditations, directly modelled on AMM’s attitudes and practices in performances, Prevost examines the meanings of sound itself, giving them aesthetic, social and political dimension. These, together with an outline of the events of the group’s three decades of existence, of alliances and conflicts within the collective, give voice to a radically contrarian but always thoughtful underground strand in present-day music-making, which adherents all over the world, among players and listeners. It will fascinate and perhaps trouble anyone with an interest in modern music’s deeper currents.   The idea of the performer of a written work as technical executor,or as a kind of curator (as Brendel puts it), precludes the possibility of free dialogue. If musical works could be perceived less as marketable or sacred objects, and more as possible views of the world on which to reflect, greater freedom might develop. Eddie Prévost'ss book, with great skill and imagination, provokes the readers into contemplating such questions. -  Piano Journal This is an inspiring, modest and (to use a word that Prévost is not ashamed to use) beautiful book. Nothing in it is more beautiful than his own cry of resistance: ˜I am something other than what you tell me I am' - The Wire One of the most successful attempts to illuminate the aesthetic, social and political aspects of the modus vivendi of improvised music.Dissonanz (Swiss)

Softcover, 242pp Copula, Matchless, 2020    Percussionist, Improviser and AMM founding member Eddie Prévost's fourth book presents a fascinating series of reflections and challenging insights on music in its various forms, and the development of improvised music at the intersection of contemporary compositional and conceptual forms; alongside a personal history of Prevost's life and his relationship with music. "Part personal history, part provocation, here is a compelling book about musical improvisation. But it's also about so much more."-- Ajay Heble, Director, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, University of Guelph  ".... a very different kind of musician's memoir, a provocative and stimulating account in which the founder-member of AMM questions every aspect of his life and purpose in making music."-Richard Williams  "An uncommon voice that weaves together an extraordinary life of musical exploration and trenchant, relentlessly discomfitting observations on improvised musicking, Eddie Prévost's unsettling An Uncommon Music for the Common Man excoriates critical pretense and academic cant while getting at uncomfortable truths about how and why music matters." Daniel Fischin

In all, within these pages, there is a reimagining and repurposing of traditional score-making, utilising new and old technology to pursue and produce inventive unconventional outcomes. One thing all these pieces share is a fascination and curiosity with inventive strategies with which to make music, coordinate actions and interpret ideas.We would like to emphasise, as we have done in our earlier editions, that the pieces here are presented to you in the hope that they will be explored and performed—deciphered and investigated—offering performers, interpreters and listeners alike the opportunity to engage with, and gain insight into new and sometimes challenging ideas about music making and performance.  smallest functional unit was founded in 2020 by Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Ute Wassermann and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. The publication will appear as Graphème, a series with a thematic focus. Softover, A4, 100pp smallest functional unit, December 2025

"This anniversary edition of Sound and Sentiment includes a profound new introduction by Feld. . . . Sound and Sentiment was the seminal book on which the contemporary sound anthropology was founded in the 1970s."  — Meri Kytö, Popular Music "Sound and Sentiment is one of the greatest ethnographies ever written. Few books create new fields of inquiry; this work inaugurated the anthropology of the senses and played a crucial role in creating the anthropology of affect." — Charles L. Briggs, author of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare "One of the first books to successfully integrate ethnographic, musical, and linguistic analysis, Sound and Sentiment remains a model for such integration. In addition, it undergirds acoustemology, or the anthropology of sound, a scholarly tack that is accelerating, with no ritardando in sight." — Bonnie C. Wade, author of Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture "Written on the cusp of a shift in anthropology away from the influences of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner, Sound and Sentiment does double duty in the classroom: it represents crucial changes in the discipline of the early 1980s, while continuing to animate debates about sound, listening, and aesthetics across cultural and linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, media studies, history, and folklore." — Louise Meintjes, author of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio This thirtieth anniversary edition of Sound and Sentiment makes Steven Feld's landmark, field-defining book available to a new generation of scholars and students. A sensory ethnography set in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, among the Kaluli people of Bosavi, Sound and Sentiment introduced the anthropology of sound, or the cultural study of sound. After it was first published in 1982, a second edition, incorporating additional field research and a new postscript, was released in 1990. The third edition includes all of the material from the first two editions, along with a substantial new introduction in which Feld discusses Bosavi's recent history and reflects on the challenges it poses for contemporary theory and representation.

In Music Films, Neil Fox considers a broad range of music documentaries, delving into their cinematic style, political undertones, racial dynamics, and gender representations, in order to assess their role in the cultivation of myth.Documentaries, concert films and other cinematic representations of popular music Paperback, 23.4 x 15.6cm, 280p Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2024

When Jean, a young translator of French and Russian, receives a mysterious commission, she leaps at the chance to escape her current life—and husband—and relocate to Montréal. Marriage has destroyed her sense of self, but work offers a way to rebuild it, as Jean slowly rediscovers her identity via a series of literary encounters (as well as lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll). With nods to the Situationists and Oulipo, JEANNE is an experimental yet at the same time intensely readable novel about gender, alterity, and linguistic insecurity. Will translation always be seen as an act of betrayal? Or does one's willingness to speak through and with the other yield its own rewards?Paperback, 237pp Moist Books, May 2025ISBN: 978-1-913430-19-1

Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is ‘to speak the truth to power’ even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialization.  Preface by Isabella Hammad Paperback, 146 ppp  Fitzcarraldo Editions, January 2026

Here, in a single extraordinary volume, are thirty poems from some of the world's finest visual poets, including John Hollander, Emmett Williams, Maureen W. Armour, and Douglas Florian. New to the paperback edition, tucked inside the front cover, are tips, guidelines, and inspiration for writing your own concrete poems.Written by Paul B. Janeczko Illustrated by Chris Raschka Edited by Paul B. Janeczko Paperback, 10 x 10in, 48pp Candlewick Press, 2005  Second Hand, Good Condition

Paperback, 48pp Spiral House, 2025 Portals SeriesHuman history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category.  From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood. Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Raymond Horricks on Eric Dolphy, including 20 illustrations, 3 transcriptions of solos and a comprehensive discography by Tony Middleton.  "There's so much to learn, and so much to try and get out. I keep hearing something else beyond what I've done. There's always something else to strive for. The more I grow in my music, the more possibilities of new things I hear. It's like I'll never stop finding sounds I hadn't thought existed." Eric Dolphy.     Part of the Jazz Avant-Garde series Second Hand, Good condition Softcover, 95pp Costello, 1989

Issue #15 of TALKER is a conversation with Anne Bean. Anne has been working with performance since childhood. Hers is a practice of vital, embodied authenticity at the very vanguard of performance art in Britain. An inveterate collaborator, she has worked with Paul McCarthy, Rod Melvin, Franklin Aalders, Poshya Kaki, Carlyle Reedy, Stephen Cripps, and the Kipper Kids among countless others. With Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson, she was a member of Bow Gamelan Ensemble. Her work has featured in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s A Short History of Performance (resisting their request for an ‘iconic’ piece) and was included in Tate Britain’s vast survey, Women in Revolt!, Art and Acti vism in the UK 1970-1990. She was a 2007 fellow at Franklyn Furnace and worked with Zambian artist Serah Chule at the 2024 Venice Biennale. This interview examines a body of creative work that spans many decades and continues furiously.Saddle Stitched, Riso Printed, 20pp Giles Bailey, Talker #15, 2025

The exhibition „rack it!“ opened at No Tax in Paris on October 15th and was on show throughout October 27th 2024. Through scans and images, this book compiles the works presented in the exhibition. Through drawings, sculptures, and a video piece, the British Artist and Musician Klein delves into the complex legal and social dynamics of the YSL RICO trial (the longest criminal trial in Georgia‘s history), exploring its intersection with free speech, free will, and systemic bias within the justice system. She examines the lives of key figures involved, the surprising plot twists in the case, and the larger implications for artistic expression and personal freedom. As a case study in bias, the exhibition questions the narratives of criminality, highlighting how culture, race, and public perception shape legal outcomes in America and lead further governance across other countries.Softcover, 308mm × 234mm, 116 pp No Tax, Paris, 2025