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…
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 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…
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…
Cornelius Cardew. A reader
A very nice book brings together a diverse collection of Cornelius Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2006 (ISBN 0 9525492 3 9) it provides essential material for the study…