Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents…
A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings
Between 1895 and 1920, the United States saw a sharp increase in commercial sound recording, the first mass medium of home entertainment. As companies sought to discover what kinds of records would appeal to consumers, they turned to performance forms already familiar to contemporary audiences—sales pitches, oratory, sermons, and stories. In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this i…
England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground (Book, revised and expanded edition)
Strange Attractor Press are proud to announce the release of a new revised and expanded edition of David Keenan’s seminal secret history of the UK’s esoteric underground, England’s Hidden Reverse.
Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil
Nearly 600 pages! Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover. In this heavily illustrated compendium, the legendary British experimental band Coil tell their story in the present tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established itself as a shape-shifting doyen of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since its untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficu…
Frivolous & Furious
A new tape from Counter Culture Chronicles! This time featuring Paul Ricketts, publisher of the English 80s' fanzine Unhinged.
Making Conversation
Crys Cole returns to Black Truffle with Making Conversation, her third solo release for the label. After the intimate song-like constructions of Other Meetings, Making Conversation documents a different facet of cole’s work, presenting three rigorously conceptualised commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions.
Frogs, a Selection of Field Recordings
Tip! *Much needed Repress!!!* About 10 years ago I tried to contact Dutch artist and scientist Felix Hess, when he was still alive, but never got a reply. Years later, in 2022, I was talking to Frans de Waard, who told me he was administering the sound archive of the late Hess together with Mark Poysden. Together we started working on an album to celebrate his life and many accomplishments. It includes selections from all the highly collectible Frogs releases from the 80's and 90's, while the ar…
The Radio Phonics Laboratory - Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis & The Birth of Electronic Music
The Radio Phonics Laboratory explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th century. This fascinating story unravels the intricate threads of telecommunications, from the invention of the telephone to the advent of global communication networks. At the heart of the narrative is the evolution of speech synthesis, a groundbreaking innovation that not only revolutionised telecommunications but also birthed a new era in electronic music. Tracing th…
Maggot Brain #17 (Jun/Jul/Aug 2024)
Maggot Brain is a full-color, quarterly magazine edited by noted Detroit scribe Mike McGonigal: 100+ pages packed with phenomenal content -- art, music, literature, unpublished archival material, and more -- with a simple promise to only exist on the printed page. On The Cover: Unpublished Joe Dilworth photo of My Bloody Valentine, from sessions for their Isn't Anything record. My Bloody Valentine: Revelatory, unpublished interview excerpts from hours of tapes with Kevin Shields by editor Mike M…
Wild Combination - A Zine Inspired By The Music Of Arthur Russell
A 24-page A4 2 colour riso zine inspired by the words and music of Arthur Russell. Combining Arthur's lyrics with full page illustrations and comics, this was 1st printed nearly 10 years ago and is back in print again!
They Said! - On Julius Eastman's Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D'Arc
THEY SAID! simmers, boils and simmers again on the 1981 solo vocal composition Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Language, listening and voice are at the core of the essay. As is the relationship between Julius Eastman and Joan d’Arc which, as readers, we’re invited not to divide into two individual histories but encouraged to consider a singular position which both figures may have inhabited across distances. The essay opens with an exclamation mark which weaves through the text, aliv…
Boca Muralha
Tip! Originally written to accompany Catarina Miranda’s ambitious Boca Muralha dance piece, a duet inspired by ancient Greek deities of vengeance the Furies, this tightly-coiled experiment comes off like Steve Reich in a k-hole. Saldanha makes use of a delay to manipulate and control the two voices, freezing fragments and curving them into slippery vortexes. Raw syllables are repeated, intersected and phased from staccato passages into operatic, rhythmic choruses, time-stretching snowballed clus…
Last Of The Beats
Noise, art, experimental music band Gray, founded by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979, has released their 2nd album titled, “Last of the Beats,” a reference to the lyrical poetry featured on the album, inspired by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs (Grayʼs first album was “Shades Of…,” a true collectorʼs item today). Original Gray members Nick Taylor and Michael Holman conceived of this sonic and verbal work of conceptual and intellectual beauty, knowing they would be collaboratin…
Sancta Ratio Chaotica. L’ora felice in La maggiore
A box set in a limited edition of 50, printed in intaglio from an aquatint copperplate. Made by hand, the box set contains a numbered reproduction of the anonymous photograph, Alessandra Piolotto's narrative in Italian and English, a presentation text and an audiocassette with the sound composition created by artist Gea Brown especially for the project, with a download code to listen to it digitally. Sancta Ratio Chaotica! is a multidisciplinary research work on the concept of translation and f…
Haze - Almanacco Di CUltura Di Sonora N.2 (Magazine)
*Italian Language Edition* Un libro/almanacco con cadenza quadrimestrale che raccoglie saggi, interviste, approfondimenti sulla ricerca sonora contemporanea per un concetto allargato di musica. Nel secondo volume: Fred Frith, Paolo Conte, William Parker, Erik Satie, Roberto Masotti, Stefano Scodanibbio, Toshio Hosokawa e altro ancora...
Nuove Destinazioni Per L'Improvvisazione Radicale (Book)
*Italian Language Edition* Dall’Introspezione all’Interazione. Un compendio per tutti i musicisti, gli appassionati e gli ascoltatori che desiderino avvicinarsi al mondo dell’improvvisazione radicale. Un breve saggio per chiunque voglia comprendere come l’improvvisazione radicale possa affrontare e contribuire a risolvere problematiche di natura politica, economica, sociale.
Debauched: Witchery and Devilry Vol. 2 (2nd Spell) Book
**Massive 288 pages deluxe, hard cover** A whirling, twirling, panorama of satanic sleaze! The Return…. The 2nd Coming…the long-awaited next dose is finally unleashed and ready to melt minds and devour souls. During the height of the turned-on 1960s and 70s Occult explosion even the under the counter adult men’s magazines got in on the act and began a surreal exploration of the haunting netherworld of Witchcraft and Satanism. This monumental art book reveals a world of diabolical smut that was s…
Der Vogel Turlipan
*80 copies limited edition* For more than two decades Oliver Peters has been working as Evapori, with releases on Entr'acte, Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, 1000füssler, as well on his own now defunct Antiinformation imprint he used to run with his close collaborator Nicolas Wiese since the early 2000's. Following his 2020 LP "Dia-Logos", "Der Vogel Turlipan" is Peters' second work for Fragment Factory, which is based on a poem of the same name by East German writer Peter Hacks. It tells the story…
Heartbeats
*300 copies limited edition* Arbitrary presents the second in a series of 10" vinyl remix collaboration releases by Danish musician Mads Emil Nielsen and Chromacolor. Side A features Heartbeats, a composition Nielsen originally made for a radio soundtrack. The track is derived from loops and granulations of sine waves and pulses from Nielsen’s modular synth, which he later combined with recordings of synthesized bass and layers of organ-like tones. On side B is a remix by German sound artist and…
Auditory Poverty and its Discontents – An Essay (Book)
Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms.
In this essay—or is it perhaps a long love poem?—she dives into the sounding-listening dynamics and reveals them as class relations in which audibility is not an event following an occurrence of sound but a point in an intersectional class structure. With audibility, or rather the lack thereof, comes auditory poverty. And where there i…