Reissues
Gambian Griot Kora Duets
**New vinyl reissue remastered from the original 1970s master tapes, packaged in classic Folkways-style tip-on jackets with original liner notes.** The hypnotic, delicate sound of the kora, the harp-like instrument strung on a halved gourd, has been a trademark of West African music for centuries. Gambian Griot Kora Duets (1979), featuring the master player Alhaji Bai Konte and his equally influential son Dembo Konte and Ma Lamini Jobate, is a remarkable recording that documents an evolution in …
In the Sea
Ellen Fullman began developing The Long String Instrument in her St. Paul, Minnesota studio in 1980 and moved to Brooklyn the following year. Inspired by composer and instrument builder Harry Partch, Fullman’s large-scale work creates droning, organ-like overtones that are as unique in the world of sound as her vision of the instrument itself.Along with her 1985 debut album—appropriately titled The Long String Instrument—Fullman’s only output in the 1980s would be two self-released cassettes, In…
Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977
Since the mid-1960s, Jon Gibson has played a key role in the development of American avant-garde music. As a versatile reed player, he has performed with everyone from Steve Reich and Philip Glass to Terry Riley and La Monte Young. In the 1970s, Gibson would emerge as a minimalist composer in his own right and release two exceptional albums, Visitations and Two Solo Pieces, on Glass' Chatham Square imprint.Songs & Melodies brings together recordings from 1973 to 1977 (mostly previously unrelease…
Collected Writings on Art and Sound, 1976–2018
**Beautiful hard-cover edition, 300+ pages ** A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, s…
Sound Art
**Massive hard-cover catalogue, nearly 800 pages, big size** This milestone volume maps fifty years of artists' engagement with sound. Since the beginning of the new millennium, numerous historical and critical works have established sound art as an artistic genre in its own right, with an accepted genealogy that begins with Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as disciplinary classifications that effectively restrict artistic practice to particular tools and venues. This book, companion volume t…
Topless Cellist The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman
The first book to explore the extraordinary career of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whose work combined classical rigor, avant-garde experiment, and madcap daring. The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on The Mike Douglas Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in …
Michael Snow
Essential texts on the work of the influential artist Michael Snow: essays and interviews spanning more than four decades. Few filmmakers have had as large an impact on the recent avant-garde film scene as Canadian Michael Snow (b. 1928). His works in a range of media—film, installation, video, painting, sculpture, sound, photography, drawing, writing, and music—address the fundamental properties of his materials, the conditions of perception and experience, questions of authorship in technolog…
Experimental Sound and Radio
Art making and criticism have focused mainly on the visual media. This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Taking the approach that there is no single entity that constitutes "radio," but rather a multitude of radios, the essays explore various aspects of its apparatus, practice, forms, and utopias. The approaches include historical, political, popular cult…
Microsound
Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into ot…
The New Analog Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World
**Hard-cover edition** A meditation on what was lost—and on what is worth preserving—in the movement away from analog music and culture. Although digital media have created new possibilities for music making and sharing, they have also given rise to new concerns. What do we lose in embracing the digital? Do streaming services discourage us from listening closely? In this book, musician Damon Krukowski uses the sound engineer's distinction between signal and noise to examine what we have lost as…
Ways of Hearing
Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Damon Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways …
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
In 1999, the British artist Mark Leckey released his video-montage Fiorucci made me Hardcore, a dreamscape vignette that communes with the rapturous promises of youth. Putting archive material to use, Leckey entwined footage of underground dance and street culture in Britain with audio grifted and recorded in the artist's studio. In this illustrated study, the first comprehensive examination of the work, Mitch Speed argues that by interweaving personal and collective memory, this work gives voic…
Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music
Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happen…
The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America
2017 edition. 'This extraordinary and brilliantly curated book reveals how the tropes of cultured living were disseminated through the universal medium of music decades before the era of 'designer pop.' Revisionary and essential.' wrote Peter Saville, artist and designer; founder and art director of Factory Records. How record albums and their covers delivered mood music, lifestyle advice, global sounds, and travel tips to midcentury Americans who longed to be modern. The sleek hi-fi console in …
Electronic Works 1972-1975
In process of restock **2020 stock** This LP marks the release of Norwegian composer Knut Wiggen’s electronic music produced in the legendary EMS Studio in Stockholm between 1972-1975. As a pioneer of computer music in Scandinavia, Knut Wiggen (1927—2016) was hugely important in reshaping the Swedish music community from 1959, when he became chairman of Fylkingen Concert Society and transformed the organisation into an central hub for avant-garde music concerts and events. In 1964 Wiggen became …
Wind Harp Recordings 1976-1977
In process of restock **300 copies, 2020 stock** This LP marks the first ever release of Sverre Larssen’s infamous wind harp recordings from the late 1970s – tonal long-form drone music akin to the works of Paul Panhuysen and Ellen Fullman.In the early 1970s the Norwegian businessman Sverre Larssen decided to construct a wind harp at his cabin at Sele, Jæren on the west coast of Norway. Using his free imagination and amateur engineering skills, Larssen constructed a harp with 12-strings, which w…
Dimpna B. Clarin and the Habagat Singers
Dimpna B. Clarin, a young soprano from the Philippines, recorded her one and only album for Saturn Research, the label founded in Chicago in 1957 by Alton Abraham and Sun Ra. Dimpna B. Clarin and The Habagat Singers was originally released on vinyl and since then has become a cult object. This obscure artefact is now available again on tape courtesy of Russian label Post-Materialization Music in a remastered version. File next to Yma Sumac and Om Kalsoum.
Chance Meeting On a Dissecting Table of a Sewing...
**160 copies with silk-screened NWW patch and insert** Cassette re-issue of the timeless Nurse With Wound debut release from 1979. Described by Sounds at the time as a record that "makes The Faust Tapes sound like Carousel," nothing has changed to alter this view over the last 40 years, and to say that this work is the "Sgt. Pepper of the avant-garde" would not be an hyperbole."The album came about when Steven Stapleton was working as a signwriter in London in 1978. Completing a job at an indepe…
L'homme à la Caméra / La Glace à Trois Faces
"Un Drame Musical Instantané were founded in 1976, featuring Jean-Jacques Birgé, Bernard Vitet and Francis Gorgé. Their aim was to promote collective musical creation, co-signing their albums, which they consider as artworks in themselves, or their live shows which they tried to renew every time they played. Their sound was created with many influences: they borrowed their sources from rock (synthesizer player Birgé and guitarist Gorgé, both authors of the album, Défense de); jazz (trumpeter Vit…
Refused
The Residents are an American art collective best known for their over 60 studio albums that were recorded over a period of more than forty years. They also created some outstanding multimedia works, mainly three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs. Working as an anonymous collective, their identitites were kept secret until in 2017 when Hardy Fox revealed himself as their primary composer. Hardy died in October 2018, but the group continue to record and perform.The compilation album Refused was origin…