Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground
Few groups have exerted an influence so out of proportion to their commercial fortunes as The Velvet Underground. Formed in New York in 1965, the band sold modestly across four studio albums and had effectively dissolved by the end of the decade, yet the sound it built - the drone, the controlled noise, the plain-spoken songs about subjects pop had left untouched - became one of the foundations on which the next half-century of rock was laid.
Trust Patterns
The Dave's Waves House Band is the ultimate outgrowth of an installation project David First created in 2003 entitled Dave's Waves - A Sonic Restaurant. In 2018, after numerous iterations in various European cities, he began presenting it at the Sunview Luncheonette in Brooklyn and for the first time included live performances in what had previously been an individual, headphone-only experience for people entering his establishment. After a few years of putting together one-off situations for di…
Slot Machine Music, Vol. 1 & 2: Field Recordings from Middle American Casinos
"Video gambling addicts, academic researchers, and industry professionals alike describe the trancelike state into which problem gamblers suspend themselves with remarkable consistency: they unanimously call it the machine “zone,” a kind of inner experience during which the rhythmic flow of human-machine collusion borders on mysticism. Time is abolished in the act of contemporary video gambling—simulated slot reels roll, virtual poker decks deal, and all worldly concerns are lost—leaving only th…
Sonic Boom, Spectrum & E.A.R. Vinyl - (Book + Flexi)
In Sonic Boom, Spectrum & E.A.R. Vinyl, Danny Passarella turns Pete Kember’s solo history into a 300‑page artifact: every record from “Angel” to A ? Of When, unreleased audio, new interviews and ephemera mapped into a definitive, tactile chronicle.
Neural #78 – Voices, Humans, Machines (Magazine)
Interviews with Machine Listening, Tomomi Adachi, Erin Gee, Pedro Oliveira; article: The Watery Graves of Electronic Speech, or Phonemes in Davey Jones' Locker; reports: Festival de la Imagen 2025, Choose Your Filter!...
Neural is a printed magazine dealing with new media art, with a peculiar attention to the networked and conceptual use of technology in art (the so-called net.art), hacktivism, or activism using electronic media to express itself, and electronic music, investigating how the te…
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…