★Bloomsbury
Mute Records : Artists, Business, History
Mute Records is one of the most influential, commercially successful, and long-lasting of the British independent record labels formed in the wake of the late1970’s punk explosion. Yet, in comparison with contemporaries such as Rough Trade or Stiff,…
Music Composition in the 21st Century: A Practical Guide for the New Common Practice
The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the 21st Century is a guide for composers and students that hel…
Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design
What is sound design? What is its function in the early 21st century and into the future? Sound Works examines these questions in four parts: Part 1, "Why This Sound?", presents an overview of the modern history of sound design. Part 2 is highly visu…
Annihilating Noise
Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistan…
The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound
The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in every…
Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality
In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s ninechannel video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores…
Acoustic Justice : Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation
Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon…
Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition Hearing the Continuum of Sound
From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands ‘possible world theory’ to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated pr…
Half Sound, Half Philosophy : Aesthetics, Politics, and History of China's Sound Art
From the late 1990s until today, China’s sound practice has been developing in an increasingly globalized socio-political-aesthetic milieu, receiving attentions and investments from the art world, music industry and cultural institutes, with neverthe…
Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise - Conversations with Steve Beresford
Steve Beresford's polymathic activities have formed a prism for the UK improv scene since the 1970s. He is internationally known as a free improviser on piano, toy piano and electronics, composer for film and TV, and raconteur and Dadaist visionary. …
Virtual Music : Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era
Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go...' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional …
Making It Heard : A History of Brazilian Sound Art
From the mid-20th century to present, the Brazilian art, literature, and music scene have been witness to a wealth of creative approaches involving sound. This is the backdrop for Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art, a volume that offer…
The Velvet Underground and Nico
The Velvet Underground and Nico has influenced the sound of more bands than any other album. And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed'…
Bitches Brew (Book)
It was 1969, and Miles Davis, prince of cool, was on the edge of being left behind by a dynamic generation of young musicians, an important handful of whom had been in his band. Rock music was flying off in every direction, just as America itself see…
Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (Book)
In 20 Jazz Funk Greats Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates-through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band-an exploded view of the album's multiple agendas: a series of close readings of each song, shot through …
Tago Mago
Finally, a brilliant exploration of the German rock band Can's 1971 album Tago Mago. This hugely unique and influential album deserves close analysis from a fan, rather than a musicologist. Novelist Alan Warner details the concrete music we hear on t…
Histoire de Melody Nelson (Book)
Outside his native France, the view of Serge Gainsbourg was once of a one-hit wonder lothario. This has been slowly replaced by an awareness of how talented and innovative a songwriter he was. Gainsbourg was an eclectic, protean figure; a Dadaist, po…
Freedom of Choice (Book)
Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise,…
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous - Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning. In the United States, it was…
Another Green World
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Brian Eno album to be composed almost completely in the confines of a…