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.
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."
Magic Circle (Magazine)
Magic Circle contains photos from two rolls of Kodak Portra 200 film taken at sunrise within the inner circle of Stonehenge, six days before the winter solstice of 2018 and on the morning of the winter solstice of 2019. Some experts believe the rituals connected to the winter solstice to be of greater significance to the Neolithic people of Stonehenge than the summer, as it marked the time after which longer, brighter and more fecund days would return.
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 …
Something broke
*9 copies limited edition* An accepting, meditative, and devoted capturing of a broken tube microphone. With a clear nod to the stormy landscape surrounding the artist oceanside residence the album offers a calming tapestry of persistent yet unpredictable noises.
Cromlech (Magazine)
“O Prince of Darkness,” I cried, “O Lord of strife and chaos, O master of men, come forth from out this tomb! Here, according to the folklore of this place, is the entrance to your infernal abode…”
Cromlech is a deep dive into The Devil’s Den, our favourite ancient monument. A feast of images and new words from Weird Walk sit alongside a feverish, and previously unpublished, account of a trip to the Den by the brilliant artist Denis Grant King (extract above) and a guide to the folklore of this…
The Professional
Vanessa Rossetto returns to ErstSolo with The Professional, a double CD that takes the figure of the amateur as both formal occasion and conceptual question. The album grew out of Rossetto's 2025 European tour and, in particular, a performance at the Jauna Muzika festival in Vilnius, whose edition was themed around amateur practice. For the occasion Rossetto assembled recordings of people singing their favourite songs, prepared a backing track, and set up microphones so that audience members cou…
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…
Reliquary (Magazine)
Join the Keeper for an excavation and exploration of uncanny fiction. Reliquary is consecrated with contemporary and classic supernatural tales, ruminations upon their potency, and prompts to further enquiry...
Talisman (Magazine)
Introducing Talisman, a new zine devoted to myth, magick, and the small practices that cultivate mystery, stoke curiosity, and find beauty in the everyday. For solitary practitioners and intuitives among us, as well as the spiritually inclined.
Our debut issue shares stories from modern makers crafting candles for ritual with deep intention, offers a guide to alchemizing basic self-care into potent spell work, and engages a wide-ranging discussion on creativity, rewilding and divinatory practice…
Stillness in their isolation
low volume listening highly encouraged.
for a while now, i've been fascinated in the sensory threshold, the moment in between sensing or not, like when doing a hearing test; at one point you hear a sound and next you don't, but you're not quite sure. do you hear the beeps, something from outside or maybe something from inside yourself?
for this project, i wanted to try and recontextualize loud traffic and constant hum of air conditioning units into a quiet, nearly inaudible form as the hustle an…
Requiem For George Maciunas
A vital tape work returning to circulation thirty-six years after its private cassette debut. Mieko Shiomi's 1990 memorial for George Maciunas, self-released that year on a privately circulated cassette and unheard in proper edition since, now receives a first ever CD reissue, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. In accordance with the composer's wishes, this edition presents the work's two sides spliced together into a single continuous piece.
By 1990 Shiomi had already lived several musical lives. A f…