Sound Art / All styles

*50 copies limited edition* For almost a decade, starting in 1980, I worked almost exclusively with walkman recorders and cheap cassette players. From the beginning, sound recordings were intuitively for me "worlds in themselves", always markedly different from the original "reality", always full of their own thrilling features. I developed my own, very simple -but very efficient- techniques for sound transformation using only cassettes. I couldn't afford the prototypical "experimental" tools of…

*30 copies limited edition* This piece is extremely subtle and contains extensive sections with silence and quasi-silence (obviously intentional and compositional). Virtually all its audio content is completely inaudible through laptop, smartphone or equivalent small speakers. Good quality speakers or headphones –as well as a very quiet surrounding environment– are highly recommended for ideal listening.

Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrume…

In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for th…

Legendary artist Brian Eno and writer/visual artist Bette Adriaanse present a major new work exploring the meaning and purpose of art.

An illustrated monograph documenting and extending Resynthesizers, a project by artist Florian Hecker combining electroacoustic, olfactory, and textual elements, staged at the modernist Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles. Florian Hecker is an artist whose work is realized through the technical manipulation of sensory data. By utilizing machinic scales and registers, Hecker creates environments marked at once by overwhelming complexity and vexing subtlety, where audience members are led to d…

Following the success of “A Brief History of Curating” (now available in nine different languages, in its sixth reprint, and as an e-book), this publication gathers together interviews with pioneering musicians of the 1950s to the 1980s. The book thus brings together avant-garde composers such as Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen; originators of electro-acoustic music such as François Bayle, Pauline Oliveros, Iannis Xenakis, Robert Ashley, and Peter Zinovieff; Minimalist a…

Why does the letter 'M' stand alone as the title of this book by the author of Silence and For the Birds? The dictionary gives the definition of 'M' as the 13th letter of the alphabet, the symbol for 1000, and if you think they fit, they do. Or you may find clues in Cage's topics, words beginning with M that figure among the author's concerns: including music, mesostics, Marcel Duchamp and making matters worse. From Buckminster Fuller to Chairman Mao, from Merce Cunningham to mushrooms - here ar…

John Cage (1912-1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker and amateur mycologist. He is arguably the most influential composer of the mid-twentieth century. He dedicated himself to the search for new horizons in musical composition. His method of composition: an amalgam of chance operations, latitude in performace, the use of electronic sound and the inclusion of ambient noise. His aim: to increase the territory of his art and to celebrate the richness…

From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, and women crucified into madness by misogyny, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms tra…

Stereolab are one of the most fascinating groups of the past fifty years, a source of constant reinvention and illuminating contrasts, where political ideology meets the sweetest pop melodies and driving guitars rub along with space-age jazz. They are perhaps the greatest Anglo-French collaboration since Concorde: a hugely respected, highly influential group whose fan base grows larger by the year, stretching from chart-topping hip hop artists to underground indie stars. And yet their appeal rem…

Explores the profound, cultural significance of sounds, blending history, science and personal reflection.

Art Edition, 20 copies.  Xong collection - artist records, a vinyl-only publishing project initiated by Xing in 2021 with original creations by artists linked to the worlds of live performativity, reaches its final form with a box set of 19 artist records on white vinyl. Xong collection - artist records was born in 2021, in the shadow of COVID and the restrictions faced by artists and organizations in the live arts. That moment made it even clearer how those working in the field of performance h…

"In late 1975, Annea Lockwood realised her composition World Rhythms. It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was. World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into th…

30th anniversary edition. Revised and expanded printed book edition of The Crack In The Cosmic Egg. Thirty years after its original publication, Steve Freeman and Alan Freeman return to print with an anniversary edition of their encyclopaedic work on Krautrock - the most comprehensive and authoritative ever published on the subject. A long-awaited return: previous printed editions have been out of print for years and are now collector's items. This new edition - A4, perfect-bound, 484 pages - is…

On Every Color Moving (1988–2003), Steve Roden’s first 15 years unfold across six discs: from noisy, searching experiments to the hushed, “lowercase” worlds that would define his quietly radical, object‑based approach to sound and space.

On A Thousand Breathing Forms, Steve Roden’s 2003–2008 archive blooms across six discs of loop‑based miniatures, conceptual structures and quietly lyrical instrumentals, charting a mid‑period where lowercase intimacy, rigor and melody fuse into one breathing organism.

*2026 stock* “So...what are we doing?” ask [something's happening] in Turn, and it is a difficult question to answer. Somewhere near the centre of France an event was cancelled. Over the course of five days conversations were translated from French to English, mangled, remoulded and repeated aloud. Field recordings were taken and rebroadcast. From these overlapping text and sound processes this strange and unpredictable album emerged. Buzz is generated from open- ended protocols where processes …

"The primary instrument here is an empty industrial workspace, which funnels the sounds of the outside through a process of grand refraction. The offhand trills of tiny birds are gathered and stretched into the stirrings of an imaginary orchestra, while the murmurs of distant crowds are recast as choral hums that seep out of the building’s surfaces. Contact mics are attached to the walls, floors and windows – a process through which Vickridge inverts the typical depiction of industrial spaces as…

*2026 stock* In the rural terrain of Prespes, Greece, Viv Corringham emits a croak that mimics both a passing bee and the clucking of a distant chicken, straddling their sonic similarities, drawing both animals into unexpected kinship. In Muenster, Germany, she traces the undulation of air billowing through a train station, suddenly dragging the rhythm to the foreground of our attention. As with the first instalment of Soundwalkscapes, her voice is used to revive a “lost river”, this time focusi…

An all-aluminum guitar, 100-watt amplifiers pushed to blowout, two sides charting alternate trajectories through sludge, drone, and ferocious free improvisation.

The third in the Travelogue project on Touch. finds von Hausswolff and Shukla rounding off another whirlwind 9 days in Southeast Asia in the unusual setting of the Lanna Kingdom (Kingdom of a million rice fields) of Northern Thailand. A multifaceted location where Thailand shares borders with Myanmar, Laos and China in what is known as The Golden Triangle, a commercial trade zone between the nations. This frontier region is home to hill tribes, countless Buddhist monasteries, stupas, The Mekong …

On Interview with a Cat, Marcel Broodthaers turns a deadpan Q&A with a meowing interlocutor into a razor‑sharp miniature of conceptual art: a five‑minute 1970 audio piece where questions about painting, markets and museums collapse into one insistent “miaow.”

On A Profound Loss of Meaning, Alice Kemp braids twelve years of recording and composition into a slow, unnerving drift where trance states, dream images and tiny domestic hauntings coagulate into an intimate, disquieting cartography of unreason.

On El Llamado (Der Aufruf), Mario de Vega distils a performative piece for dispersed voices and whistles into a stark, fixed composition, turning a global collection of wind instruments and a single outdoor activation into a study of call, place, and the politics of listening.

Limited to 800 copies! Each book is numbered and signed by the author. Large format book. Descenes and Discords: An Anthology is a powerful time capsule of the birth and evolution of punk music through the pages of two influential fanzines: Descenes and Discords. These publications, originally printed and distributed in Washington, D.C. during the late 1970s and early 1980s, captured the raw energy, irreverent spirit, and revolutionary ethos of the underground music scene - first local, then nat…

The Butthole Surfers lived like nomads, built their legend on never-ending tours and shows resembling hedonistic acid tests. Author James Burns returns with new interviews and shocking revelations in this explosive 10th anniversary edition of Let's Go to Hell — the first no-holds-barred chronicle of the band's rise, fall, and enduring infamy. 315 pages.

The definitive story of the slackers and shoegazers who reinvented rock. Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties. Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstr…

Akio Suzuki has always been an artist in search of unexpected sound, and curiosity has been his guiding principle. Whether that be curiosity for objects, spaces or places, his work has been guided by a porousness and pliability which has allowed him to explore an enormous sonic terrain. This freedom has also allowed him to develop a language in sound that remains utterly his own. Nowhere is this more evident than in his approach to instrument creation. During the 1970s Akio Suzuki devised a seri…

Continuing their longstanding explorations of unexpected and adventurous territories of sound, Von - the imprint run by filmmaker and sound artist Carlos Casas - is pleased to present Kino Variants 1967-1986, the first-ever collection to illuminate the vast body of work created by the Uzbek composer Rumil Vildanov during the second half of the 20th Century. Offering a rare glimpse of liberated creative spirit operating behind the Iron Curtain, this engrossing double LP - complete with printed in…

In Iannis Xenakis's Persepolis, Dr. Aram Yardumian situates the composer’s monumental electroacoustic piece amid wartime biography, architectural practice and Iranian state spectacle, tracing how one work came to shadow both the Shiraz Festival and the Revolution that followed.

In BBC Radiophonic Workshop – A Retrospective, writer William L. Weir recounts how a small, overstretched BBC unit accidentally invented the sound of the future, tracing its tape‑loop alchemy from children’s shows to the DNA of electronica and ambient.

In 20th Century Ambient, writer Dusty Henry blends prose and comics to trace how ambient music quietly became one of the century’s most pervasive forms, from Satie and dub to Eno, Alice Coltrane and streaming‑era wellness soundscapes.

In Minimalist Music, critic George Jr. Grella treats minimalism less as a style than as a set of techniques, tracing how process, repetition and reduction have migrated across genres to become one of contemporary music’s most adaptable practices.

In The Sound of the Machine, former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos offers a wry, detailed memoir of life inside and beyond Kling Klang, tracing how post‑war childhood, pop dreams and classroom work converged in some of electronic music’s most enduring songs.

In Futuromania, critic Simon Reynolds assembles essays and interviews into a time‑spanning narrative of machine music, tracing how electronic pop, from Moroder to Burial, has channelled science‑fiction fantasies and anxieties into new futures for sound.

In Ukrainian Field Notes, Gianmarco Del Re uses more than 300 interviews to trace how war reshapes listening, following Ukrainian musicians as they compose amid sirens, shelters and displacement while forging new local and diasporic sonic communities.

In Volcanic Tongue, David Keenan gathers decades of visionary criticism, charting late‑20th‑century underground sound through ecstatic essays, interviews and close‑listening dispatches that treat marginal scenes as the true engines of musical modernity.

This is the fifth issue of EX! Magazine for Experimental Art (audio, visual, text, etc.). The print version (Book/Magazine) includes the 108-page zine (printed climate-neutral on recycled paper), the digital compilation, and a download code for an exclusive album by Wraith Sector. EX! Edition 5 is feat A.J. Kaufmann, Aleksandr K, Belinda Guerriero, Cedrik Fermont, Corina Retzlaff, Disorganism, Elise Wilson, Ici Chien Chien, Jesse Narens, Jolanda Moletta, Manuel Carbone, Robert Kerber, Sascha Ros…

Black Ark is a 600‑page visual and textual immersion into Lee “Scratch” Perry’s legendary Kingston studio, assembled by Ishion Hutchinson, Kodwo Eshun, Lee Scratch Perry and Veerle Poupeye: a dense, collaged “house‑book” where dub’s sonic revolution is mirrored in murals, talismanic objects and layered histories.