★Bloomsbury
Paris 1919 (Book)
John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.I…
Computer World (Book)
Computer World was Kraftwerk's most concise and focused conceptual statement, their most influential record and crowning achievement. Computer World transformed the way pop music was composed, played, packaged and released and, in the process, helped create entire new genres of music including hip-hop, techno, trance, electro, industrial and synth-pop. They influenced the influencers. Upon its release on 10 May 1981, the record was a revelation. It was unlike anything created for mainstream cons…
Suicide (Book)
New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponized noise terrorized unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start a riot on a lack of guitar alone. Those who braved their live shows often fled in fear--or formed bands (sometimes both). Thi…
Switched-On Bach (Book)
So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation.Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos's music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-…
Sorrow Tears And Blood (Book)
Sorrow Tears and Blood offers a glimpse into the complicated social, cultural, and political phenomenon that is Nigeria.
Clyma Est Mort (Book)
The Dead C's Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous…
Saudades (Book)
The story of Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos stitches together histories of 1960s-1980s jazz, psychedelia, world music, experimentalism and post-punk. Based in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, New York City and Paris, Naná played with musicians as varied as Egberto Gismonti, Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Arto Lindsay, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Os Mutantes, and Milton Nascimento.This book traces the 15 years (1964-1979) leading up to Naná's …
Tropicália (Book)
This comprehensive portrait of Tropicália, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, demonstrates how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world.
Shoegaze (Book)
What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music press, was plainly rejected by the absurdly small collection of bands to which it supposedly applied.Today shoegaze is undeniable. As a descriptor and as a source of influence, it is used in more ways and by more bands than anyone could have dreamed o…
Krautrock (Book)
Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history.
In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the European front of World War II and the Third Reich. In the immediate aftermath, German youth were tasked to create their own culture. Krautrock is this unlikely success story, as hundreds of bands-including Kraftwerk and Can-seemed to sprout overnight in…
Iannis Xenakis's Persepolis (Book)
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.
BBC Radiophonic Workshop's BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective (Book)
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.
1970s Jazz Fusion (Book)
In 1970s Jazz Fusion, critic Matthew Reed Baker reassesses a once‑derided hybrid, showing how the electric experiments of Davis, Hancock, Corea, Mahavishnu and others reshaped jazz, rock, soul and hip‑hop from the 1970s to today.
20th Century Ambient (Book)
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.
Minimalist Music (Book)
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.
Being Time: Case Studies in Musical Temporality(Book)
Being Time invites a deep consideration of the personal experience of temporality in music, focusing on the perceptual role of the listener. Through individual case studies, this book centers on musical works that deal with time in radical ways. These include pieces by Morton Feldman, James Saunders, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Ryoji Ikeda, Toshiya Tsunoda, Laurie Spiegel and André O. Möller. Multiple perspectives are explored through a series of encounters, initially between an individual and a work, an…
Nico: Songs They Never Play On The Radio (Book)
Fully updated with a new introduction, this is the story of Nico, former model, film actress, singer with the Velvet Underground and darling of Andy Warhol's factory, when the world had all but forgotten her.
In 1982 Nico was living in Manchester, interested mainly in feeding her heroin habit. Local promoter Alan Wise ('Dr Demetrius') hired musicians, rented a van and set off with the band on a tour of Italy. James Young played keyboards for Nico throughout this period.
Over six years, until her…
The Art of Sound
A celebration of the visual artistry behind the evolution of sound recording with specially commissioned photography of iconic, rarely-seen artefacts from the collections of the EMI Archive Trust
Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation
Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sa…
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound.
Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and a…