If a genius is someone whose ideas survive all attempts at explanation', writes the well-known contemporary musicologist Robin Maconie, 'then by that definition Stockhausen is the nearest thing to Beethoven this century has produced. Reason? His musi…
‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant …
Sniffin' Glue may have been the closest thing to perfection ever achieved by a magazine. Untroubled by the demands of owners, publishers, designers and production editors, it was a one-man enterprise that perfectly mirrored the spirit and manners of …
A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon.
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Franc…
*Text in French and English* A few months before the death of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965), Gunther Schuller (1925–2015) sat down with the composer for an in-depth conversation: his career and friendships, collaborations, new instruments, and the rare …
New expanded edition of the book. In the long interview that forms the body of this publication, Éliane Radigue talks about her work, her reflections and underlying research, as well as her historical context. The publication also contains a commente…
The collection of previously unpublished interviews and extended versions of Alan Licht's famous conversations with figures in the American art and music scene.
*2023 stock* Original 1962 copies of this reference monograph about Yaacov Agam, with texts, sketches, and scores by the artists, and some musical exemples on a 45RPM vinyl record included. German edition.
The definitive publication accompanying the most comprehensive exhibition ever dedicated to one of the most visionary composers and polymaths of the 20th century
This ground-breaking biography is as much about Sun Ra’s music as it is about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the galaxy, black people and spiritual matters. With the various incarnations of his inimitable Arkestra, his repertoire ra…
This volume unpacks the cultural legacy of musician, spiritual leader, wife and mother Alice Coltrane. Accompanying the eponymous exhibition at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum, the book takes its title from Coltrane's 1977 autobiography and devotional tex…
In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets photographer Nan Goldin — an encounter that will lead them to New York’s bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and undergroun…
Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was a…
A bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first…
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.
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.
In Volcanic Tongue, David Keenan gathers decades of visionary criticism, charting late‑20th‑century underground sound through ecstatic essays, interviews and close‑listening dispatches that treat marginal scenes as the true engines of musical moderni…
The next book on Korm Plastics contains no photographs of the artists, no list of released records, no pictures of record sleeves, and no footnotes. It is not a hardcover, not on glossy paper and is not expensive. It’s… ‘America’s Greatest Noise’ tel…
2026 stock Temporarily Eternal is an emotional-visual summing up of a creative friendship between Swedish author Carl Abrahamsson and British artist Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020) that lasted for more than three decades, and which was filled with musi…
Sound shapes our world in invisible but profound ways, and here Caspar Henderson brings his characteristic curiosity, knowledge and sense of wonder to the subject to take us on an exhilarating journey through the heard universe.
A Book of Noises gath…
It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, ‘I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.’ This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in the…
Sounding the Indian Ocean is the first volume to integrate the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian Ocean studies. Drawing on historical and ethnographic approaches, the book explores what music reveals about mobility, diaspora, colonialism, religiou…
The first monograph on John Giorno (1936-2019), poet, performer and activist who brought the written word off the page and into life. Accompanying the MAMbo Bologna retrospective, it maps six decades of radical practice at the crossroads of poetry, a…
On Diastima, Luigi Turra moves inside Sylvain Chauveau’s sparse graphic scores with a hyper‑reduced electroacoustic vocabulary, turning each page into a fragile interval of tension, suggestion and nearly vanishing sound.
The second book in the trilogy of volumes dedicated to Grim Humour fanzine, which ran between 1983 and 1993 and lasted eighteen editions. Following on from the first one, published in 2020, this book continues the same approach and blends together re…
Back in stock! 640 pages! Industrial music has long been recognized for its sonic innovations, but the radical visual culture that accompanied this underground movement has remained largely unexplored. Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial …
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,…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 C…
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 b…
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 …
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.