In Search of a Concrete Music (Book)
*2023 stock* Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music (À la recherche d’une musique concrète) has long been considered a classic text in electroacoustic music and sound recording. Now Schaeffer’s pioneering work—at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d’être of “concrete music”—is available for the first time in English translation. Schaeffer’s theories have had a profound influence on composers working with technology. However, they extend …
Music after the Fall - Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (Book)
*2023 stock* Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to in…
What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Book)
Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. Eric Porter overturns this tendency in his creative intellectual history of African American musicians. He foregrounds the often-ignored ideas of these artists, analyzing them in the context of meanings circulat…
Nostalgia for the Future Luigi Nono's Selected Writings and Interviews (Book)
Nostalgia for the Future is the first collection in English of the writings and interviews of Luigi Nono (1924–1990). One of the most prominent figures in the development of new music after World War II, he is renowned for both his compositions and his utopian views. His many essays and lectures reveal an artist at the center of the analytical, theoretical, critical, and political debates of the time.This selection of Nono’s most significant essays, articles, and interviews covers his entire car…
Why Jazz Happened (Book)
*2023 stock* Why Jazz Happened is the first comprehensive social history of jazz. It provides an intimate and compelling look at the many forces that shaped this most American of art forms and the many influences that gave rise to jazz’s post-war styles. Rich with the voices of musicians, producers, promoters, and others on the scene during the decades following World War II, this book views jazz’s evolution through the prism of technological advances, social transformations, changes in the law,…
We Have Always Been Minimalist The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Book)
*2023 stock* Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important and influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music’s style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless struggle within the music establishment and be…
Living Genres in Late Modernity American Music of the Long 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: t…
The Hum of the World A Philosophy of Listening (Book)
*2023 stock* The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poeti…
Capturing Sound How Technology Has Changed Music, Revised Edition (Book)
*2023 stock* There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in fil…
Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America (Book)
*2023 stock* The experience of the divine in India has three components, sight, performance, and sound. One in a trilogy of books that include Diana Eck's Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India, and Susan L. Schwartz's Rasa: Performing the Divine in India, Mantra presents an introduction to the use of sound -- mantra -- in the practice of Indian religion.
The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music,1965 to Now (Book)
On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world.The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement o…
Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Book)
*2023 stock* In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human cultur…
Sounding New Media Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Book)
*2023 stock* Sounding New Media examines the long-neglected role of sound and audio in the development of new media theory and practice, including new technologies and performance art events, with particular emphasis on sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists as John…
Morning Glory A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Book)
*2023 stock* Mary Lou Williams—pianist, arranger, composer, and probably the most influential woman in the history of jazz—receives the attention she has long deserved in this definitive biography.
Western Music and Its Others Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Book)
*2023 stock* This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant exampl…
Serial Music A Classified Bibliography of Writings on Twelve-Tone (Book)
*2023 stock* This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
Source Music of the Avant-garde, 1966–1973 (Book)
*2023 stock* The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice an…
Coverscaping Discovering Album Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to car…
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (Book)
*2023 stock* Miles 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 thinkin…
You’ll Know When You Get There - Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Book)
*2023 stock* As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and el…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
Loft Jazz Improvising New York in the 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experiment…
Earth Sound Earth Signal Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…
Struggling to Define a Nation American Music and the Twentieth Century (Book)
*2023 stock* Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rat…
Music Downtown Writings from the Village Voice
*2023 stock* This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS …
Reverse The Night
Attentive readers will know that late last year in my other guise as a musician I shared a split album with Andreas Brandal on Lithuanian label AghartA Tapes which, due to my involvement, was ineligible for inclusion in these here pages – I can’t really review myself after all. So, it’s nice to finally be able to lay before you the very fine music that this gentleman makes.Reverse the Night, as the title and the solid black of the sleeve implies, is a melancholic and introspective listen that pl…
Enginn Gleypir Sólina
In February 1993, at artist Hannes Lárusson’s Gallerí 11 in Reykjavik, Magnús Pálsson exhibited two installations, one in each of the gallery’s two rooms. In the first was Enginn Gleypir Sólina (No One Swallows The Sun). In the adjacent room was its companion work Herra Túrpur Jónsson (Mister Túrpur Jónsson). Each room featured four wall-mounted loudspeakers, one in each corner emanating vocalized grunts, sighs, and syllables in between extensive passages of Icelandic and nonsensical language. O…
Nothing Here Now but the Recordings
*2023 Restored Edition* In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (then of Throbbing Gristle renown) travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz to starting the daunting task to compile the experimental sounds works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been heard.
During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recor…
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Catorce Reflexiones Sobre el Fin
** Edition of 300. Comes with green inner sleeve ** Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin (Fourteen Reflections On The End) originated from an installation exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2019. Fourteen magnetic bodies of tape that dialogued with the fourteen pieces of electroacoustic music now contained in this album composed from the sound anthology of Angélica Castelló. Thus, Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin is a complex piece consisting of multiple parts that, a…
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
This special discounted bundle includes the latest Purge releases, the Mykolaiv Singers's LP, previously unreleased in any form - spare a few tapes distributed in the Mykolaiv region - these are old, old songs (of winter, weddings, war, sex, bread) predominantly sung by groups of women, and all from the villages of Mykolaiv, Ukrain. And the Frans Zwartjes's largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, played and recorded by Zwartjes between the late 1960s, thro…
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Sometimes It Degenerates Into Music (Book)
Unquestionably one of the most exciting books to emerge this year - filled with revelation, insight and surprise, finally offering Conrad Schnitzler the attention and recognition he’s always deserved. An unparalleled survey of his work in music, sculpture, video, performance and installation.
Into the Mylar Chamber (Book)
Between 1968 and 1971, in a loft on New York's Jefferson Street, the poet, photographer and filmmaker Ira Cohen created some of the most mythic images of the late 1960s. Inspired by his friends Jack Smith and Bill Devore, Cohen’s initial experiments with black light developed into an experimental ritual space he termed the Mylar Chamber―a simple room of hinged boards hung with reflective Mylar film. Through his extended network, and with the support of artist and set designer Robert LaVigne, Coh…
Mati & The Music: 52 Record Covers 1955–2005 (Book)
Mati Klarwein (1932–2002) was a major presence in the New York art scene, admired by everyone from Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí to Jimi Hendrix and Jackie Onassis. His Pop-Surrealist universe of pantheistic religious harmony, sexual fertility and gender and racial unity gave visual expression to an era. Mati & the Music presents Klarwein’s 52 paintings that appeared on album covers, a body of work that began in the mid–1950s and continued for half a century. Many of the album covers were commis…
Pintura Música Arquitectura
*Massive 3LP edition with Hardcover book, nearly 400 pages* Drawings, LPs and an architectural survey by Mexico City–based artist, architect and musician Lucio Muniain. This volume presents three bodies of work by Mexico City–based architect, painter and double bassist Lucio Muniain (born 1969): blue-and-black graphic drawings from 2001 to the present; three LPs from his band Another; and a selection of 30 architectural projects.
Shibboleth
CD+Book, art edition Original sound installation by Eiki Mori (born 1976 in Ishikawa, Japan). A horn speaker, used to send small sounds far away, will emit whispers of various voices that read Mori’s poems in multiple languages. In the galley space, these voices shall sound nostalgic but at the same time be felt as if they are heard for the first-time, coming from somewhere around the globe. The 15 shibboleths written down for this installation do not really stand for symbolic things or events…
Fiction of the Physical
Crystalline examples of Zweig’s aesthetic and brilliance...A labyrinth of sound worth getting lost in
Cramps Records – Il suono che misura la libertà del tuo tempo (Book)
The illustrated history of legendary Cramps Records (Area, Demetrio Stratos, Arti e Mestieri, Claudio Rocchi, Alberto Camerini, Canzoniere del Lazio…) in a 22cm square-sized 244-page book.
The Ritual Year Book - Dave Pearson's English Calendar Customs 1973-1983
A hauntological beauty reminiscent of Seventies folk horror movies and Broadcast’s soundtrack work
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Folklore Tapes: Ten Year Anniversary Book (2011-2021) (Book)
186 page full colour photo book, covering ten years of 35mm photography in the field, stage and studio. Includes essay by Jez winship and archival artwork. The Tenth Anniversary Book is filled with hitherto unseen images and text. Over the past decade, Folklore Tapes have amassed a vast archive of 35mm and slide film photography, detailing their activities on stage during live performances, and on-site during fieldtrips. This behind-the-scenes material will finally see the light of day through t…
Arthur Pétronio
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…