Sound Art / All styles

Various artists musically interpret poems from The Fall of America: Poems of these States 1965-1971 on this second volume tribute to Allen Ginsberg’ s The Fall of America, which benefits Pen America. Musical interpretations of Ginberg's poems are performed by Ai Weiwei, Philip Glass, Thurston Moore With Saul Williams, Downtown NYC poet Anne Waldman, Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto), Jack Dangers (MBM), Kai Campos & Cj Mirra, and more.  Fall of America Poems, published by City Lights Books in San Francis…

Two sides recorded in 1973. On one, Young and Zazeela sing over a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone. On the other, three sine waves alone, tuned on oscillators built for the purpose by Robert Adler. The sleeve tells you to turn the treble off.

"'DDD' is a field recording album recorded by Daisuke Suzuki and was originally released by Texas based IDEA in 2001 in an edition of 300 copies on LP. Sometimes field recordings can be appreciated in relation to the conceptual art form, or as an on-site sound study and documentation of a very specific phenomena. Daisuke had no concept of the idea of ​​building sonic panoramas and was specifically only Concerned with gathering lots of intriguing sound matter for his personal listening. 'DDD' was…

*125 copies limited edition* The abandoned railway section Castellaneta - Gioia del Colle in Puglia represents one of those places that meet the definition of 'undecided spaces', heterogeneous and dispersed realities which, precisely because of their nature of uncontrolled spaces, constitute a refuge for diversity, a product of the rational organization of the territory. A 'subnature' that lies between the natural world and the artificiality of industrial and urbanization processes. A six-hour w…

*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 …

*2023 stock* In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor …

*2023 stock* Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, …

*2023 stock* Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of…

*2023 stock* First published in French in 1998, revised in 2010, and appearing here in English for the first time, Michel Chion's Sound addresses the philosophical, interpretive, and practical questions that inform our encounters with sound. Chion considers how cultural institutions privilege some sounds above others and how spurious distinctions between noise and sound guide the ways we hear and value certain sounds. He critiques the tenacious tendency to understand sounds in relation to their …

*2023 stock* John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free impr…

*2023 stock* Tony Allen is the autobiography of legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the rhythmic engine of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat. Conversational, inviting, and packed with telling anecdotes, Allen's memoir is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with the musician and scholar Michael E. Veal. It spans Allen's early years and career playing highlife music in Lagos; his fifteen years with Fela, from 1964 until 1979; his struggles to form his own bands in Nigeria; and his emigration to France.…

*2023 stock* Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience. For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: …

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured…

*2023 stock* The Record is the full-color catalog accompanying the groundbreaking exhibition The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from September 2, 2010 through February 6, 2011. The first exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records in the history of contemporary art, The Record features rarely exhibited work and recent and newly commissioned pieces by thirty-three artists from around the world. These artists have taken vinyl records as th…

*2023 stock* Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momen…

*2023 stock* In Blutopia Graham Lock studies the music and thought of three pioneering twentieth-century musicians: Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future. A century after Ellington's birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black h…

Tip! *300 copies limited edition* For her first solo exhibition at Hundred Years Gallery, Tomoko Hojo explores the relationship between voices missing from the archive through photographs, objects, scores and sounds. Based on Yoko Ono’s historical exhibition Unfinished Paintings and Objects at Indica Gallery, London, 1966, this show Unfinished Descriptions focuses on undocumented works and highlights silenced parts of that exhibition and Yoko Ono herself. These works explore the relationship bet…

*20 copies limited release* Over two weeks in September 2022 Simon Whetham was invited to join Milena Farioli at OVNI, a creative space in Fribourg, Switzerland, to explore the sounds of various fermentations including red and white cabbage, green beans, ginger, courgette (a huge one donated to the project by the neighbouring florist), (non-lactose) kefir and mead. He recorded the whole process with various techniques and mics, also capturing some of the sounds from bustling Rue de Lausanne that…

Tip! *25 copies limited release* Xing presents the new LP Livre d'images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, tenth release of XONG collection - artist records. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited numbered edition of 300 copies. The collector's edition consists of 25 copies accompanied by a unique poster, hand drawn with black marker by the two artists, mother and daughter, folded like a map, echoing the activity of the performance. Livre d'images sans images by Mette Edvards…

The final issue of Sound American journal, as a tribute to the musical community.

*2023 stock* Original 1962 copies of this reference monograph about Yaacov Agam, with texts, sketches, and scores by the artists, and some musical exemples on a 45RPM vinyl record included. German edition.

Ronnie Burk was a poet, collagist, surrealist, activist. A fraction of his work is collected in this unmissable boxset.

An intimate look at Robert Yarra's friendship with Corso.32 pages, with private color pics.Numbered edition, riso print.

"After several years of not doing anything since Erstwhile first asked me to do a solo album, I suddenly had the idea to record it last week and it was released within a week or so. I know some of you are thinking "Anyone can do this...", but in the DIY spirit of doing what anyone can do with what anyone can get, and without any special skills or funds, I tackled improvisation head on, using mostly newspapers and cardboard boxes, which turned out to be this triple CD set." - Taku Unami  "For the…

*50 copies limited edition* Conceived as a widespread configuration of onomatopoeic fantasies, inaugurated in New York in early 2023, «gggglllloooossssaaaa» probes the realms of voice and sound and their role as catalysts of untamed narratives. On this occasion, it materialises as a 90-minute polyphony of voices on the verge of becoming "spatial (dis)orientation device(s)” - a sonic self-portrait summoning inner densities and latencies.

*300 copies limited edition* This is the fourth release of the VOXXX series, a sound poetry magazine with 4 LP releases each year. A manifestation of poetry and voice, sound poetry and vocal art. A joined adventure by Erratum Musical (Paris) and Sonhoras (Barcelona). Precious cut and sound edition, along with beautiful artisan work made by hand in letterpress print.Cia Rinne is a Swedish conceptual poet who lives in Berlin. She writes in a dual tradition of European sound poetry. Polyglot – she …

*300 copies limited edition* This is the third release of the VOXXX series, a sound poetry magazine with 4 LP releases each year. A manifestation of poetry and voice, sound poetry and vocal art. A joined adventure by Erratum Musical (Paris) and Sonhoras (Barcelona). Precious cut and sound edition, along with beautiful artisan work made by hand in letterpress print.Eduard Escoffet is a Catalan sound poet. Born in Barcelona, for more than 20 years he has been touring all over Europe and America in…

*150 copies limited edition* Urusonēto is a sound work by the french artist Wladimir Schall based on the Ursonate, also known as Sonata in Urlauten or the "Sonate of primitive sounds", a phonetic poem composed between 1922 and 1932 by Kurt Schwitters and influenced by his meeting with Raoul Hausmann in 1921 in Prague, where he saw him reciting his poem "FMSBW". (>See RH's phonetic poems on Erratum Musical in 2019). Wladimir Schall did not start reciting the poem himself, but preferred to entrust…

Edition of 500. With fold-out poster and original sleeve design by Alain Geronnez. Arthur Petronio (1897-1983) was a French-Italian musician, poet and painter. Lived in Belgium and The Netherlands between 1910 and 1924 and since then in France. Young violin virtuoso studying with Belgian master violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Played solo violin for Belgian King Leopold II, at the age of 9. Attracted to the avant-garde and visionary ideas of Gesamtkunstwerk. Develops and presents his “Verbophonie” in 191…

Tip! These 4 CDs comprise a three-year time span of work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and percussionist Chris Cogburn. The initial concept informing the project is to examine the differences between the resonant frequencies and wild harmonics of physical objects and the exactness of sine tones and just-intonation. An additional layer of video is produced live using audio signals as raw video voltages, thereby transforming sound into video in ways far beyond the classic parameters of vo…

Super tip! *20 copies limited edition, each one contains a unique 2-minutes cassette tape loop!* Xing presents the new LP A Circle of Grey by Valerio Tricoli, eleventh release of Xong collection - artist records. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited numbered edition of 150 copies. The collector's edition consists of 20 copies accompanied by a unique cassette tape loop, titled and signed by the artist: 20 short compositions, each developed from a different sonic fragment of the record. A C…

Recital presents a newly unearthed recording of an interview between Sun Ra and composer Charlie Morrow recorded at his New York studio in 1989. This voice-only recording develops more like a kaleidoscopic sermon than any standard interview.

The cover story is a multi-part Prince feature with reprints of rare writings by the great writers Ann Powers, Michael A. Gonzales, and Greil Marcus. Plus, also too: Mary Lattimore -- the great LA-based harpist interviewed by RJ Smith. Audrey Golden's Thought I Heard You Speak book on the role of women in Factory Records is celebrated with an interview by Jessica Beard. Negativland -- amazing huge very very in-depth feature on the whole 'Helter Stupid' debacle -- strap on in for this one, by Cor…