New Arrivals
A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism
Surveying the range of Sun Ra’s extraordinary creativity, this book explores how the father of Afrofuturism brought “space music” to a planet in need of transformation, supporting the aspirations of black people in an inhospitable white world.
A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of '90s Austin
A twisting path through Austin’s underground music scene in the twentieth century’s last decade, narrated by the people who were there.
Arvo Part: Sounding the Sacred
*2024 stock* Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies, and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response,…
Jinxed By Being
What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…
Mapura Music
Māpura Music is a collaborative and spontaneous music making program for people living with disabilities set in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland. Its facilitator, Stefan Neville (of Pumice etc.), has been active in the New Zealand underground for over thirty years, personifying an Aotearoa DIY sensibility that effortlessly links melodic song formats with open-ended experimentation. On surface level, this collection of improvised group jams verges towards the latter, but soon structures of a playfully…
Suono Assente
2024 lucky restock. World-renowned drummer-composer Valentina Magaletti teams up with music producer and multi-instrumentalist Zongamin in their East London studio to create an album of Dub / Post-Punk influenced material, featuring Vanishing Twin's Cathy Lucas, Coby Sey and Venus Ex Machina.
Dub postcards, east London boats, reflections in the eye of a cat, swallowing your tarot card, spitting echo from calming substances, yellow paint on our shut down local brunch spot, post-punk golden rules,…
The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave
*2024 stock* How the creative use of pop music in film—think Saturday Night Fever or Apocalypse Now—has shaped and shifted music history since the 1960s. Quick: What movie do you think of when you hear “The Sounds of Silence”? Better yet, what song comes to mind when you think of The Graduate? The link between film and song endures as more than a memory, Nate Patrin suggests with this wide-ranging and energetic book. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movi…
Robert Ashley
*2024 stock* This book explores the life and works of Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s. During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in An…
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. E…
Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation
*2024 stock* In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff and others. Virginia Anderson edits the first published collectio…
Keywords In Sound
*2024 stock* In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history, outlines its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualiz…
Sound Objects
*2024 stock* Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in …
A Disco Pogo Tribute (Book)
Hardback cover. 250 pages, richly illustrated. Aphex Twin: A Disco Pogo Tribute compiles interviews, essays and features from various music journalists, all exploring Richard D. James' decades-long career. Like Daft Punk, the people behind Disco Pogo have had a long-standing relationship with Richard D. James for over 30 years via their 90s magazine Jockey Slut. The book is edited by Disco Pogo editor Jim Butler and features interviews, essays and features from the best music journalists working…
Have One On Me
2024 repress on vinyl; Deluxe 3LP box version with an 8-page, large-format lyric booklet and printed inner sleeves. For various reasons Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom's new triple-album defies the notion of fast-turnaround appraisals. Apart from sheer abundance of music here, it's also very dense and scrupulously laboured over, not only by Newsom herself but a select band of fellow musicians and arrangers - not to mention ace mixing engineers Jim O'Rourke, and Noah Georgeson (best known for his w…
Bar Maldoror
2024 stock. Bar Maldoror is the new and expanded double-CD edition of the classic Nurse With Wound album. Disc one is a remastered version of Live at Bar Maldoror, originally recorded between 1984 and 1986; disc two features a previously unreleased 2007 live show from Ghent, Belgium. 'In our very short spell as a "live band" Nurse With Wound performed eight times, five in public, between the years of 1984-86. These events were shambolic, chaotic and uneven affairs, sometimes as boring for the pe…
s/t
The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous…
The Book of Pig
The Franco-Czech duo Kesherul Neg Pineg casts a spell on ritual reductionism, offering unsettling, even gloomy, psychedelic grooves. Frenzied attacks, atmospheric soundscapes, the music remains unpredictable but full of abundant energy and unexpected turns. The two musicians bewilder the senses, creating illusions and deceptions, diverting their instruments, extended trumpet, dizzying analog synthesis, prepared percussion… These two activists of improvised and experimental music met in Prague in…
Psychedelic Jelly
Toc loves encounters and saxophonists. Alongside saxophonist Paulina Owczarek, the trio crafts a music composed of desynchronized layers, a mille-feuille of raw energy where rhythms are both suggested and suggestive. By exploring autonomous temporalities, the musicians naturally converge, with the saxophone finding its place seamlessly within Toc’s improvised kraut maelstrom, where one might even glimpse a few psychedelic jellyfish, a flapjack octopus, or a harp sponge. Regularly crossing paths …
Modfase
Crumbling tape loops, broken glass sounds, micro-cassette feedback and songs for piano, voice and guitar sit side by side on this uniquely tender release by Danish artist Franciska. Submitted to the label on a cassette sent via mail with typewritten credits, 'Modfase' is masterfully restrained, constructed with a care and gentleness that's hard to find in today's "ambient" and "experimental" music circles. Each side contains multiple pieces which quickly shift between musique concrete, tape musi…
Womb
Peripheral Minimal Records releases the album, "Womb" by Steve Parry (Neu Elektrikk / Hywl Nofio) and Colin Potter. Recorded on 1/4'' tape in 1981, it has remained unreleased in any format until now. Limited to 500 copies in a digipak CD with an 8-page booklet containing detailed information about the recordings.
''When it was mixed, I don’t think either of us knew what to do with it, as it was unlike any other music that was around at that time. So it languished….Due to various house moves, Ste…