White Bicycles (Book)
304 pages, paperback. Serpent's Tail Classics edition, with a foreword by Hanif Kureishi. Originally published in 2006. The sixties began in the summer of 1956, ended in October 1973, and peaked just before dawn on 1 July 1967, during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London. That is Joe Boyd's thesis, delivered in the opening pages with a precision that is obviously a joke and obviously not. He was in the room. He built the room.
This is the sixties memoir that survives re-reading, and the r…
Punk Flyers (1975-2020
234 pages, paperback, 14 x 17cm. Over 200 flyers, compiled by Masala Noir, Paris. Nobody was supposed to keep these. A flyer is made to be handed out on a Tuesday, read once, and dropped in the street on the way to the show. It has a job, the job lasts about four days, and then it is rubbish. That is the whole reason this book exists and the whole reason it is worth having: what you are looking at is the accidental survival of a form designed to be thrown away.
And what a form. No budget, no cli…
Switched On Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution (Book)
490 pages, hardback, with 60 black and white photographs. Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Published by Oxford University Press. Voltage control. Two words, and everything downstream of them: the oscillator that tracks a keyboard, the envelope that shapes a note's attack and decay, the ladder filter that gives a sawtooth its wet, vocal edge. These are the grammar of the instrument, and they are almost all his. Anyone who has turned a cutoff knob has touched Bob Moog's thinking. He died in 2005 …
Yugoslav Avant-Garde Music, 1945–1991 (Book)
292 pages, 244 x 170mm, with figures and music examples. Published by Cambridge University Press in the Music since 1900 series, paperback. Zagreb, June 1961. On the programme: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Mauricio Kagel, Witold Lutosławski, the Darmstadt serialists, the tape pieces coming out of Paris, Milan and Cologne, and the experiments of John Cage. In a communist country that had spent the previous fifteen years under socialist realism, with closed borders and almost no contac…
Holy Ghost: The Life & Death of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler (Book)
312 pages, paperback, with 8-page photo insert. 150 x 215mm. The first extended biography of Albert Ayler ever published in English, and it took twenty years to build. Part life story, part case file, and long overdue. Richard Koloda is a musicologist and a practising lawyer, and both trades show on every page. He was a long-time friend of Donald Ayler, Albert's trumpet-playing younger brother; a consultant on Revenant Records' ten-CD retrospective Holy Ghost: Rare And Unissued Recordings (1962…
From the Ruins of the Literal: Critical Organology, Timbre, and the Poetics of Affect (Book)
Sarah Davachi's first book, From the Ruins of the Literal: Critical Organology, Timbre, and the Poetics of Affect, published by her own Late Music imprint. The title is borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, whose account of metaphor locates meaning at the point where literal sense gives way. Davachi turns that idea on the study of instruments and timbre, disciplines she sees as long governed by empirical, neuro-cognitive and modernist assumptions. Her objection is not that measurement is wrong but that it…
Eternal Rhythm: Conversations and Travelations with Don Cherry and Graeme Ewens (Book)
Eternal Rhythm: Conversations and Travelations with Don Cherry and Graeme Ewens is the book on Don Cherry we have been waiting for - not a biography written from the outside, but a portrait built from the inside, from hours of cassette-taped conversations recorded since 1979 by writer Graeme Ewens, a confidant, travel companion, and close friend of Cherry. Published by Ars Nova Workshop, this is an intimate, free-flowing document of one of the most unique and innovative voices to emerge from the…
10001 Records Collector Dreams (10xBook Set)
There are price guides, and then there is Hans Pokora. Since the late nineties, his Record Collector Dreams series has been the secret handbook passed between the most obsessive diggers on the planet, the reference you reach for when a sleeve you have never seen surfaces and you need to know exactly what you are holding. This is the complete set: ten hardcover volumes, from 1001 through 10001 Record Collector Dreams, each one a different and exclusive window onto the rarest and most expensive co…
Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground
Few groups have exerted an influence so out of proportion to their commercial fortunes as The Velvet Underground. Formed in New York in 1965, the band sold modestly across four studio albums and had effectively dissolved by the end of the decade, yet the sound it built - the drone, the controlled noise, the plain-spoken songs about subjects pop had left untouched - became one of the foundations on which the next half-century of rock was laid.
Slot Machine Music, Vol. 1 & 2: Field Recordings from Middle American Casinos
"Video gambling addicts, academic researchers, and industry professionals alike describe the trancelike state into which problem gamblers suspend themselves with remarkable consistency: they unanimously call it the machine “zone,” a kind of inner experience during which the rhythmic flow of human-machine collusion borders on mysticism. Time is abolished in the act of contemporary video gambling—simulated slot reels roll, virtual poker decks deal, and all worldly concerns are lost—leaving only th…
Sonic Boom, Spectrum & E.A.R. Vinyl - (Book + Flexi)
In Sonic Boom, Spectrum & E.A.R. Vinyl, Danny Passarella turns Pete Kember’s solo history into a 300‑page artifact: every record from “Angel” to A ? Of When, unreleased audio, new interviews and ephemera mapped into a definitive, tactile chronicle.
Neural #78 – Voices, Humans, Machines (Magazine)
Interviews with Machine Listening, Tomomi Adachi, Erin Gee, Pedro Oliveira; article: The Watery Graves of Electronic Speech, or Phonemes in Davey Jones' Locker; reports: Festival de la Imagen 2025, Choose Your Filter!...
Neural is a printed magazine dealing with new media art, with a peculiar attention to the networked and conceptual use of technology in art (the so-called net.art), hacktivism, or activism using electronic media to express itself, and electronic music, investigating how the te…
Be Glad - An Incredible String Band Compendium
First published in 2003 and long out of print, Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending: An Incredible String Band Compendium is the definitive book about the ISB. Containing a wealth of interviews, essays, and ephemera from the band’s brief but tangled history, this new revised and expanded edition includes two new pieces by ISB member Rose Simpson on Witchseason Productions’ idiosyncratic offices and on recording with the ISB in the Sound Techniques studio, as well as interviews with Neil Tennant of…
Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden - A Girl’s Life in the Incredible String Band
A memoir by a member of the Incredible String Band that charts a journey from hippie utopia to post-Woodstock implosion.
Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice McKechnie), morphing from English student to West Coast hippie and, finally, bassist in leathers. The band's image adorned psychedelic posters and its music was the theme song for an alternative lifestyle.Rose and partner Mike Heron believed in, and lived, a naiv…
Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews
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 music lasts.With penetrating philosophical and spiritual insights Stockhausen describes, in this collection of lectures and interviews conducted in English, a whole new universe of sounds and events.
Atypical Girl - Punk rock, Liverpool, and trying to be normal
It’s 1977, and punk rock has just hit Liverpool. The legendary Eric's club is home to the city's rebels, posers and misfits. It’s a place of attitude, adventure and new possibilities, and it changes lives. Some become pop stars; Penny Kiley becomes a music journalist. The story traces Penny's relationship with the music scene from the turbulent political 1980s into the changing culture of the 21st century. Throughout these years, she never stops being a misfit, and the question remains: how do y…
Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear
‘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 exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding …
Sniffin' Glue... And Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits
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 its subject matter - punk rock - by being intentionally amateurish, passionate and crude.Mark Perry’s first issue (1 of 12) set the tone for an exercise in kitchen-table publishing that did not even have a kitchen table. Boldly scrawled in his bedroo…
Sound Experiments - The Music of the AACM
A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music.
The Sound of Thinking - A Listener’s Companion to Conceptual Music
A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon.