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On Waterforest, Yoichi Kamimura turns a multichannel installation into an intimate atlas of water and ice, braiding global field recordings into a quietly immersive study of climate, memory and the act of listening to landscapes.
Bomb! 328 pages hard-cover book, large format + 2CD of previously unreleased recordings. Keith Tippett (1947-2020) occupies a singular place in the history of British improvised music - a pianist of extraordinary range whose work moved fluidly between free jazz, large-scale orchestral composition, and solo improvisation of rare depth. Born in Bristol and trained first as a chorister, Tippett arrived in London in the late 1960s and rapidly established himself as a central figure in the city's cr…
Published by 180 Studios in 2025, this limited edition booklet accompanies data-cosm [n°1], the monumental new installation commissioned and produced by 180 Studios as part of their long-running creative partnership with Ryoji Ikeda - a collaboration that has spent more than a decade pushing at the boundaries of sound, light, and human perception. Conceived as both microscope and cosmos, data-cosm [n°1] is a total sensory environment in which the mathematical fabric of nature becomes something t…
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 Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.I…
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 create entire new genres of music including hip-hop, techno, trance, electro, industrial and synth-pop. They influenced the influencers. Upon its release on 10 May 1981, the record was a revelation. It was unlike anything created for mainstream cons…
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 and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponized noise terrorized unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start a riot on a lack of guitar alone. Those who braved their live shows often fled in fear--or formed bands (sometimes both). Thi…
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 Cold War and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation.Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos's music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-…
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 best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous…
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 as varied as Egberto Gismonti, Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Arto Lindsay, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Os Mutantes, and Milton Nascimento.This book traces the 15 years (1964-1979) leading up to Naná's …
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.
What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music press, was plainly rejected by the absurdly small collection of bands to which it supposedly applied.Today shoegaze is undeniable. As a descriptor and as a source of influence, it is used in more ways and by more bands than anyone could have dreamed o…
Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history.
In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the European front of World War II and the Third Reich. In the immediate aftermath, German youth were tasked to create their own culture. Krautrock is this unlikely success story, as hundreds of bands-including Kraftwerk and Can-seemed to sprout overnight in…
When you think of techno and electronic dance music, you first think of clubs and festivals, ecstatic dancers and enraptured DJs. But in which spaces is this music actually created? Artists' studios and writing rooms of authors and composers have long been the focus of public attention and research. The studios of DJs and electronic music producers, however, have so far remained largely hidden. They can be found in darkened basements, abandoned factories, garages, and backyards, in magnificently…
Second Edition of Supersédure 2. Eric La Casa and Seijiro Murayama use percussion and field recording like scalpels on everyday life, shaving tiny ruptures into routine until small, repeated gestures cross an invisible line and start to sound like events.
*50 copies limited edition* For almost a decade, starting in 1980, I worked almost exclusively with walkman recorders and cheap cassette players. From the beginning, sound recordings were intuitively for me "worlds in themselves", always markedly different from the original "reality", always full of their own thrilling features. I developed my own, very simple -but very efficient- techniques for sound transformation using only cassettes. I couldn't afford the prototypical "experimental" tools of…
*30 copies limited edition* This piece is extremely subtle and contains extensive sections with silence and quasi-silence (obviously intentional and compositional). Virtually all its audio content is completely inaudible through laptop, smartphone or equivalent small speakers. Good quality speakers or headphones –as well as a very quiet surrounding environment– are highly recommended for ideal listening.
Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrume…
In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for th…