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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Voice in the Headphones
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .
Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents…
A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings
Between 1895 and 1920, the United States saw a sharp increase in commercial sound recording, the first mass medium of home entertainment. As companies sought to discover what kinds of records would appeal to consumers, they turned to performance forms already familiar to contemporary audiences—sales pitches, oratory, sermons, and stories. In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this i…
Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil
Nearly 600 pages! Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover. In this heavily illustrated compendium, the legendary British experimental band Coil tell their story in the present tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established itself as a shape-shifting doyen of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since its untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficu…
The Radio Phonics Laboratory - Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis & The Birth of Electronic Music
The Radio Phonics Laboratory explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th century. This fascinating story unravels the intricate threads of telecommunications, from the invention of the telephone to the advent of global communication networks. At the heart of the narrative is the evolution of speech synthesis, a groundbreaking innovation that not only revolutionised telecommunications but also birthed a new era in electronic music. Tracing th…
Maggot Brain #17 (Jun/Jul/Aug 2024)
Maggot Brain is a full-color, quarterly magazine edited by noted Detroit scribe Mike McGonigal: 100+ pages packed with phenomenal content -- art, music, literature, unpublished archival material, and more -- with a simple promise to only exist on the printed page. On The Cover: Unpublished Joe Dilworth photo of My Bloody Valentine, from sessions for their Isn't Anything record. My Bloody Valentine: Revelatory, unpublished interview excerpts from hours of tapes with Kevin Shields by editor Mike M…
Wild Combination - A Zine Inspired By The Music Of Arthur Russell
A 24-page A4 2 colour riso zine inspired by the words and music of Arthur Russell. Combining Arthur's lyrics with full page illustrations and comics, this was 1st printed nearly 10 years ago and is back in print again!
They Said! - On Julius Eastman's Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D'Arc
THEY SAID! simmers, boils and simmers again on the 1981 solo vocal composition Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Language, listening and voice are at the core of the essay. As is the relationship between Julius Eastman and Joan d’Arc which, as readers, we’re invited not to divide into two individual histories but encouraged to consider a singular position which both figures may have inhabited across distances. The essay opens with an exclamation mark which weaves through the text, aliv…
Boca Muralha
Tip! Originally written to accompany Catarina Miranda’s ambitious Boca Muralha dance piece, a duet inspired by ancient Greek deities of vengeance the Furies, this tightly-coiled experiment comes off like Steve Reich in a k-hole. Saldanha makes use of a delay to manipulate and control the two voices, freezing fragments and curving them into slippery vortexes. Raw syllables are repeated, intersected and phased from staccato passages into operatic, rhythmic choruses, time-stretching snowballed clus…
Sancta Ratio Chaotica. L’ora felice in La maggiore
A box set in a limited edition of 50, printed in intaglio from an aquatint copperplate. Made by hand, the box set contains a numbered reproduction of the anonymous photograph, Alessandra Piolotto's narrative in Italian and English, a presentation text and an audiocassette with the sound composition created by artist Gea Brown especially for the project, with a download code to listen to it digitally. Sancta Ratio Chaotica! is a multidisciplinary research work on the concept of translation and f…
Nuove Destinazioni Per L'Improvvisazione Radicale (Book)
*Italian Language Edition* Dall’Introspezione all’Interazione. Un compendio per tutti i musicisti, gli appassionati e gli ascoltatori che desiderino avvicinarsi al mondo dell’improvvisazione radicale. Un breve saggio per chiunque voglia comprendere come l’improvvisazione radicale possa affrontare e contribuire a risolvere problematiche di natura politica, economica, sociale.
Auditory Poverty and its Discontents – An Essay (Book)
Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms.
In this essay—or is it perhaps a long love poem?—she dives into the sounding-listening dynamics and reveals them as class relations in which audibility is not an event following an occurrence of sound but a point in an intersectional class structure. With audibility, or rather the lack thereof, comes auditory poverty. And where there i…
azotea / me with room
"In the building where Gudinni lives there's a large rooftop with several obsolete parabolic antennas, their dishes taller than me pointing in several directions. one late afternoon when the sun was getting lower in the sky we installed 3 pairs of microphones in different spots on the rooftop. we started making sounds moving around the space, as if getting closer / moving away from an imaginary audience scattered around us, from each other, from the traffic of cars, dogs and airplanes." - Anne-F…
Woodscratcher
Woodscratcher (Scratching Wood) is a composition and sound generating machine from Austrian composer, media-artist, sound-sculptor and performer, Winfried Ritsch. Already known as collaborator in different projects with Bernhard Lang (pieces from his series Differenz/Wiederholung, Trike), Peter Ablinger (Klavierautomat), Ritsch created “my own dedication to noise pieces of experimental music from 70s onwards”. This machine cuts a 2-5cm thick disk of a wooden trunk in a circular line along the gr…