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This issue explores the crossroads, contacts and contrasts between two fields of musical knowledge: ethnomusicology and popular music studies.When ethnomusicology tackles music that is produced in recording studios in both the North and the South, when queer performances venture into Asturian folklore, when bureaucracies produce world music, when raggadub and punk from Marseille are observed from the radios, restaurants and streets they have stemmed from, when Mandingo music is analyzed as a mai…
*2024 stock* Pianist, composer and sound artist Hans Otte is still undervalued in Europe, and the Anglo-American cultural scene just starts to notice him. Ingo Ahmel's bilingual study of his biography and artistic work highlights Otte’s view of life and his aesthetical orientation, providing the fundamentals for an adequate reception. At the centre of the book are the solo piano cycles Das Buch der Klänge (The Book of Sounds, 1979-82) and Stundenbuch (Hours Book, 1991-98) as well as the related …
The music of Arthur Russell defies classification. From his pioneering compositions as part of New York's vibrant avant-garde scene (alongside artists including Philip Glass, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg) to his genre-expanding disco productions, from his new wave and art pop to his posthumously released folk songs, Russell crafted timeless and foundationally influential work until his premature death in 1992 from AIDS-related illnesses.
Now, in a landmark publicat…
Huge Tip! 392 pp! Basta Now: Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by musician Valentina Magaletti and writer Fanny Chiarello, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 2,371 wo…
Spanishedition. Perfect bound. 190 pages. Cornelius Cardew's Stockhausen serves imperailism, originally published in 1974 is translated to spanish for the fist time. Seminal text for those who are interested in the intersection between experimental music and politics during the 70's.
Vague was the Post Punk Fanzine that tuned so many people into the joy of punk and the futuristic and hybrid styled music that followed it, that became known as ‘Post-Punk’ or for a period of time ‘Positive Punk’. Vague promoted the notion that a band meant something more than the music and that meaning could be shared amongst like-minded folk, the ‘lovable spikey tops’ or the like-minded ‘tribe’ that people were looking for. Vague though was critical enough to see through the growing number of …
2024 stock. The artistic career of Christopher Knowles (born 1959) began at the age of 13, when his writings and recordings came to the notice of avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson. Still a teenager, Knowles went on to write the libretto for Wilson and Philip Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach, and his collaborations with Wilson would continue for decades. His practice spans many mediums—text, sound, painting, sculpture and performance—and exhibits a fascination with the materiality of l…
Huge Tip! Large format, 400 pages Out of the Grid presents a critical selection of 100 Italian zines from 1978 to 2006 that display a broad spectrum of social, political, aesthetic, and technological changes in the use of language and communication strategies across the territory of self publishing.
Widely mapping Italian society, particularly youth culture—over an extended period that can be symbolically defined as the "post-movement" and "pre-internet3.0"—, this outpouring of creativity gave v…
Huge Tip! 400 pages, 387 Images. The story of the legendary Swedish psych rock band Träd, Gräs och Stenar is also a defining story of alternative culture. Across multiple incarnations, the musicians of this iconic group (whose name translates to “Trees, Grass and Stones”) have drawn on their roots in jazz and the avant-garde, the iconoclastic art and theater of the 1960s, and the back-to-the-land “green wave” movement to blaze a pioneering trail across fifty years of endlessly improvisational, r…
If any one musical act of the rock and roll era can be said to have transcended the simple categorization of “band,” the Grateful Dead is it: by the time they stopped performing in 1995, the Dead had become an international institution with a vast backing organization, a massive and devoted fanbase, and archival recordings both official and bootlegged. The cultural significance of these bootlegs—live concert cassettes which solidified the Dead’s legendary status even as they occupied a legal gra…
How can thoughtfully and intentionally listening to our world inspire our creative practices? What insights can we gain when we delve into the immersive world of sound, which permeates our every moment? In Transcendent Waves, sound healing practitioner, meditation teacher, and artist Lavender Suarez outlines how listening can unlock moments of creative spark, self-awareness, and mindfulness in a work that is equal parts how-to guide and contemplative artist’s workbook. Suarez's illustrated medit…
The penultimate Blank Forms anthology presents new, in-depth interviews with musicians Theo Parrish, Amelia Cuni, Akio Suzuki, and more. At the centerpiece of Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures is a career-spanning, twenty-hour conversation conducted over four days between producer, remixer, and Detroit house music legend Theo Parrish and veteran music journalist Mike Rubin. They go deep on Parrish's childhood in Chicago's South Side, sculptural training, and collaborations with Moodymann, Rick Wi…
*2023 stock* In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and no…
*2023 stock* Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker offers close, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's signif…
*2023 stock* Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker provides in-depth, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Volume 1, Contexts and Paradigms, chronologically surveys Tenney's creative development and output. Wann…
Big Tip! Japanese jazz bars and coffee shops are insular worlds where time ceases to exist, removed from the speed and chaos of the modern urban landscape. Tokyo Jazz Joints is a visual chronicle of this unique culture that captures the transient beauty of these spaces. Established in 2015 to document Tokyo’s myriad »jazu kissa«, the project has gradually expanded to cover the whole of Japan. These dedicated jazz listening spaces are slowly vanishing in the face of changing trends, ageing custom…
*2023 stock* The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena…
In The Williamsburg Avant-Garde Cisco Bradley chronicles the rise and fall of the underground music and art scene in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. Drawing on interviews, archival collections, musical recordings, videos, photos, and other ephemera, Bradley explores the scene’s social, cultural, and economic dynamics. Building on the neighborhood’s punk DIY approach and aesthetic, Williamsburg's free jazz, postpunk, and noise musicians and gr…
*2023 stock* Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa v…
*2023 stock* In Soundscapes of Liberation, Celeste Day Moore traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest. Moore surveys a wide range of musical genres, soundscapes, and media: the US military's wartime records and radio programs; the French record industry's catalogs of blues, jazz, and R&B recordings; the translations of jazz memoirs; a provincial choir specializing in spirituals; and US State Department-produced radio …