New Arrivals
Midnight Pacific Airwaves
** 2021 Stock ** A rare recording from an under recorded period of Bobby Bradford's music. This date stems from a California radio broadcast. The line up is Bobby Bradford on trumpet, James Newton (flute), Richard Rehwald (bass) and John Goldsmith (drums). Includes a bonus track duet with Vinny Golia (clarinet) from a 2003 gig.
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 helps them navigate the often daunting complexity and abundance of resources and influences that confront them as they work to achieve a personal expression.
From pop to classical, the book speaks to the creative ways that new composers mix and synthesi…
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 visual and provides a glance onto a sound designer's workbench and the current state of "Sonic Labor." Part 3 uses cultural analysis to explore our contemporary "Living with Sounds." The final and fourth part then proposes a series of anthropological and…
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 resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar.
It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and ord…
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 everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and c…
Sound Arts now
In Sound arts now, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle explore contemporary artistic practices and theories, and what contributes to or hinders artistic and career development. This is conducted through a series of interviews with artists and curators, putting the often-unheard voice of the maker at the centre of the discourse. There is a conscious shift of reference away from the “white men from the global north” who have dominated the canon during the decades of the discipline’s emergence and establ…
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 resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpe…
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 LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging str…
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 principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice MerleauPonty’s phenomenological life worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thin…
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 nevertheless, its unique acoustic philosophy remaining silent. This book traces the history of sound practice from contemporary Chinese visual art back in the 1980s, to electronic music, which was introduced as a target of critique in the 1950s, to electroni…
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. His résumé is filled with collaborations with hundreds of musicians and other artists, including such leading improvisers as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Zorn, and he has given performances of works by John Cage and Christian Marclay.
In this b…
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 rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and liste…
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 offers an overview of local artists working with performance, experimental vinyl production, sound installation, sculpture, mail art, field recording, and sound mapping. It criticizes universal approaches to art and music historiography that fail to recog…
Black To The Future
Impulse! presents Black To The Future by Sons Of Kemet. Fire and Fury! We're so hyped to welcome back Sons of Kemet with a whole host of guests too. The follow up to 2018’s Mercury Prize nominated breakout release Your Queen Is A Reptile. This is their 4th record, and 2nd on impulse! Compared with ”Your Queen is a Reptile”, this album has featured vocalists and more of an emphasis on fuller compositions and arrangements. Guest artists include Kojey Radical, Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, Joshua I…
Schouwspel
** Edition of 120 ** B.A.A.D.M presents Schouwspel by Opéra Mort. Originally recorded in AB Salon, Brussels. Graphic Design: Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt. Thanks to Mich Leemans.
Porter Ricks
Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. After the Re-release of the legendary album “Biokinetics", which is superb subaquatic dub techno, we re-release Porter Ricks first album on Mille Plateaux. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkyness with an underlying almost organic rhythmight. But still its not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkyness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.
Liturgy
** In process of stocking ** Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Or…
Camino Road
First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Ann…
Kagiroi
I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San…
Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo
An absolutely stunning effort from one of the great journeymen of Italian experimentalism, Walter Maioli's 'Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo', issued by Villa Lontana Records, is electroacoustic music at its absolute, vibrant best. Pressed in two extremely limited editions on black and transparent vinyl and laden with rich tonalities, deep drones, and hypnotic arpeggiations, it's a truly mind-melting, free-standing sonic world that encounters Maioli at the top of his game.