Fear of Music - Why People Get Rothko but Don't Get Stockhausen
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 Francis Bacon make headline news. However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under sim…
Conversation
*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 freedom he allowed the sounds they produced... Published for the first time in English and French, this is a rare testament for all lovers of "sounds."
Expression Musicale totale (Book + 7")
This release (Book + 7") by Vincent Epplay is a free interpretation of audio and visual archives drawn from sound experiments conducted during music workshops in Freinet schools in the 1960s and 1970s. It serves as a way of reviving these diverse practices, allowing us to revisit the original educational experiments carried out over the course of a decade in various Freinet classrooms. Beyond simply unearthing these hidden treasures, the aim here is to capture a pioneering spirit in which wild …
Legends In Their Own Lunchtime : An Exploration Of The Canterbury Scene (Book, Hardcover)
Hardcover, 648 pages, Hardcover! This book looks back on the golden years of the music scene that emerged out of Canterbury, Kent, in the late 1960s, spearheaded by Soft Machine and Caravan and their various offshoots, including Gong, Kevin Ayers and the Whole World, Robert Wyatt's Matching Mole, Hatfield and the North and National Health, and related bands like Egg and Gilgamesh.
Musically at the meeting point between pop, progressive rock, electric jazz and modern classical, it brought togethe…
Analog Days : The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Book)
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 an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for…
Policing The Beats - Black Music, Racism And Criminal Injustice
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 nor the only Black music to be targeted this way. Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal …
Ongaku Otaku - Complete Edition (Book, Hardcover)
Hardcover, 527 pages, 21×27 cm! In the mid-1990s, four thick, annual issues of Ongaku Otaku magazine were published. Operating from San Francisco, California, the goal was to spread the word about the compelling independent music being produced in Japan. With dozens of interviews and articles, and many hundreds of reviews, the magazine was an influential voice, sharing words about Aube, Cornelius, Yamamoto Seiichi (Boredoms, Rovo, Omoide Hatoba), Shizuka, Jojo Hiroshige (Hijokaidan, Alchemy Reco…
Eighth Tower Magazine Vol. I (Magazine)
Eighth Tower Magazine is a periodical publication dedicated to music and modern mythologies. It explores alternative and experimental sound practices, tracing connections between contemporary music, invisible cinema, and dark fiction. Eighth Tower investigates how modern mythologies are shaped, transmitted, and transformed. It is conceived as a space for reflection, documentation, and critical exploration, where sound, image, and narrative converge into a shared cultural landscape.
Volume I - co…
No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene (Book)
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 underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.
Adele Bertei didn’t just witness the No Wave explosion—she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno’s assistant, she…
A Book of Noises (Book)
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 gathers together sounds from the cosmos, the natural world, the human world, and the invented world, and contains quiet pockets of silence. From the vast sound of sand in the desert to the tuneful warble of a songbird, to the meditative resonance of a te…
Sacred Intent – Conversations with Carl Abrahamsson 1986-2019 (Book)
2026 stock Sacred Intent gathers conversations between artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950-2020) and longtime friend and collaborator, the Swedish author Carl Abrahamsson. From the first 1986 fanzine interview about current projects, over philosophical insights, magical workings, international travels, art theory and gender revolutions, to 2019’s thoughts on life and death in the the shadow of battling leukaemia, Sacred Intent is a unique journey in which the art of conversation blooms.
With (…
Temporarily Eternal (Book)
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 musical projects, films, books, writings, conversations, travel, and a great deal of magic. This book both is and is not a companion to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Sacred Intent – Conversations with Carl Abrahamsson 1986-2019. It is, in the sense that the …
William S. Burroughs - A Life (Book)
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 their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media – Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scr…
Hating Jazz - A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse (Book)
A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.
A Revolution in Music The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Book)
Established in the 1950s by musician and engineer Pierre Schaeffer, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales would become the nerve center for avant-garde artists experimenting with sound and acoustics, as well as the birthplace of a genre of music-making enabled by new recording technologies and sound pioneers: musique concrète. Évelyne Gayou—herself a researcher, composer, and producer at the GRM—tells the history of the storied institution through the people, works, technologies, and research devel…
Sounding the Indian Ocean Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape (Book)
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, religious networks, media, and performance. Collectively, the chapters examine different ways the Indian Ocean might be “heard” outside of a reliance on colonial archives and elite textual traditions, integrating methods from music and sound studies into the…
In Search of a Concrete Music (Book)
Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music (À la recherche d’une musique concrète) has long been considered a classic text in electroacoustic music and sound recording. Now Schaeffer’s pioneering work—at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d’être of “concrete music”—is available for the first time in English translation. Schaeffer’s theories have had a profound influence on composers working with technology. However, they extend beyond the co…
Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Book)
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 ranged from boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to fusion to New Age, and his influence extended throughout the jazz and rock worlds. While Sun Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born …
Musica 109. Lezioni sulla Musica Sperimentale
Italian edition. "Music 109" prende il nome dall'aula della Wesleyan University dove Alvin Lucier ha insegnato per oltre quarant'anni. Il libro nasce da quelle lezioni, e ne conserva il tono: quello di un compositore che ti siede accanto e ti spiega, pezzo per pezzo, come funzionano le musiche più radicali del secondo Novecento americano. Nessun gergo accademico. Nessuna distanza critica. Solo la voce di qualcuno che c'era - che ha conosciuto John Cage, suonato con Robert Ashley, condiviso il pa…
Diastima
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.