Zweikommasieben #21
Over the years, it has become clear that the “thing” that continues to captivate us is in flux, as are its possible definitions. Various contributions to the current issue of this magazine attest to this permanent development, too. And whatever our “thing” might be called or actually might be, the following has become clearer in the recent past: the boundaries separating different artistic practices have been dissolving more and more. Also this second assertion seems to be present again in the i…
Music with Roots in the Aether
"Music with Roots in the Aether" is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me (Robert Ashley) when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago.There is, of course, our indebtedness to Eur…
Outside of Time - Ideas about Music
English-German Edition, 655 pages (!) collection of writings about ideas concerning music by American composer Robert Ashley. For nearly forty-five years, composer robert Ashley has pursued his vision of opera in the face of near complete indifference from the American mainstream culture industry. Ashley’s experience parallels that of other American indepen-dent avant-garde figures such as Terry Riley, Alvin lucier, and Pauline Oliveros. like these composers, Ashley uses notation only to the ext…
Finding Music
A general introduction to Tom Johnson’s music, as well as many articles written from 1961 until 2018, with texts both In English and German. "I can not say that I always manage to find my music. Sometimes it still seems necessary to compose it, particularly when I want to produce another opera. I can say, however, that there is something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (the music) seems to arise naturally from some discovery outside of myself, and where everything comes to…
Sur le diapason
The art of the tuning fork: the manifesto of the sound artist, performer and composer Nicolas Bernier. Sound artist, performer and composer Nicolas Bernier (born 1977 in Ottawa, Canada, lives and works in Montreal, Québec) creates audiovisual performances and installations aiming to carve a dialogue between sound and tangible matter. Shaped by his work within the fields of cinema, literature, dance and theatre companies, his own language blend together elements of music, photography, design, sci…
Music as Seismographic Sound
A proposal for a radio project on the diffusion of world music in the digital age, focusing on the concept of “seismographic sound”. The publication Music as Seismographic Sound / Tracking Down the Idea of Cultural Translation is a written radio pitch by Ania Mauruschat, closely following musicians in bi- or multi-lingual cultural contexts.Ania Mauruschat is a radio journalist who has produced several features on sound art, with the German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk, and the Swiss nation…
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…
The New Woman’s Survival Catalog
Originally published in 1973, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of Second Wave feminist efforts, which, as the editors noted in their introduction, represented an “active attempt to reshape culture through changing values and consciousness.”Assembled by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in only five months, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog to map a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s…
Poesy Matters and Other Matters (2xBooks)
This two-volume set, Poësy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poësy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a repro…
Atlas (books, records, relics, prints, sounds)
This book looks at the work of Austrian avant-garde artist Hermann Nitsch, particularly his ritualistic and existential “public aktionen” under the Orgies Mysterien Theater. Presented through the documentation of these events as they were recorded (scored, directed, written down, photographed, published, and reported), this archiving method explores Nitsch’s performative practice, both in terms of how the performance is organised and by what means the organisation is effected by the original and…
Erratum #4 / Sound Review / Art + Noise + Poetry
Sound poetry and poetry of sound. Edited and assembled by Joachim Montessuis. Joël Hubaut, Erik Samakh, Atau Tanaka, AGF, José Iges, Lee Ranaldo, R.H.Y. Yau, Rainier Lericolais, Francisco López, Gary Hill, Charles Pennequin, Ira Cohen, Phill Niblock, Joachim Montessuis, Le Dépeupleur, Julien Ottavi, Robin Minard, Guillermo Goméz Peña, Guillermo Galindo, Brandon LaBelle, Pierre André Arcand, Christina Kubisch, Fréderic Dumond, Christophe Charles, Henning Christiansen, EHB, laboiteblanche, Tommi G…