Sound Art / All styles

The second limited print run of the 'Most Wonderful Melodies' - score and text book to accompany The Instruction Manual by Instruction Manual.Designed by Katie Muir, this book is stunningly illustrated and contains engravings of all your favourite songs from the Glasgow robot folk revivalist's debut album 'The Instruction Manual'.This second edition now comes with an online bonus 'remix' of Faith Eliott's 'thys creatur.'

This bilingual book, part of the project Candomblé: Sacred Rhythms in Brazil, brings together a curated selection of archival documentation alongside newly commissioned texts and artistic contributions. Through historical research, essays, and visual materials, it honours this tradition by tracing its foundations while reflecting on its contemporary transformations and future trajectories. By placing past records in dialogue with present-day perspectives, the publication becomes both an archive …

Do you get nostalgic shivers down your spine when someone mentions the word Punk? Are you a real geek when it comes to record collecting? Have you ever wondered what was out there ­ deep in the underground of the Swedish punk scene? Then this book is for you! Find out everything you want to know about leading acts such as Ebba Grön, KSMB, Attentat, Anti Cimex, Mob 47, Asta Kask and Strebers. But also about every other band that ever released a record during the first ten years of punk music! In …

Want to know who won a scuffle between Stoke-On-Trent punks Asylum and 80s pop stars Dexy’s Midnight Runners? What to do when your band has to play after The Seats Of Piss, and the microphone has been down the front and back of Hendrix Deadboy’s nether regions most of the set? Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye’s brushes with skinheads on the first Black Flag UK tour? Just a few of the numerous and unique reflections revealed in Shot From Both Sides, the first book from Paul May, and Sealed Records. …

The complete, definitive and never-before-published catalogue of Hipgnosis, Vinyl • Album • Cover • Art finally does justice to the work of the most important design collective in music history, which, according to Roddy Bogawa, director of the documentary Taken by Storm (2011), ‘designed half your record collection’.Founded in 1967 by Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Peter Christopherson, Hipgnosis gained legendary status in graphic design, transforming the look of album art forever and…

The classic account of ambient music, with a new foreword by Michel Faber. David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an exhilarating, path-breaking…

Still going after thirty years, The Fall are one of the most distinctive British bands, their music - odd,spare, cranky and repetitious - an acknowledged influence on The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, Nirvana and Franz Ferdinand. And Mark E. Smith IS The Fall - 47 members have come and gone over the years yet he remains its charismatic leader, a professional outsider and all-round enemy of compromise, a true enigma. There have been a number of biographies of the legendary Smith, but this is the fir…

Revealing Merce Cunningham’s creative processes as inspiration for today’s dancers and choreographersIn this book, former members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company detail the technique classes, rehearsal procedures, and compositional approaches that defined Cunningham’s New York studio for more than sixty years. Through firsthand accounts supported by interviews and secondary sources, the authors reveal Cunningham’s creative process—how simple movement phrases introduced in class evolved int…

To Hell With Poverty! documents Jon King’s story from a South London slum and impoverished working-class background to international success as core musician, lyricist, writer, and producer in legendary post-punk/funk band Gang of Four. The reader is taken on an episodic and kaleidoscopic journey full of adventures from childhood to the end of Gang of Four’s ‘golden period’ in 1984. Thrown off Top of the Pops, truncheoned by police at an anti-Nazi rally, being at the heart of Leeds music scene a…

A no-holds-barred narrative history of the iconic label that brought the world Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, and more, by the co-author of Do What You Want and My Damage.Greg Ginn started SST Records in the sleepy beach town of Hermosa Beach, CA, to supply ham radio enthusiasts with tuners and transmitters. But when Ginn wanted to launch his band, Black Flag, no one was willing to take them on. Determined to bring his music to the masses, Ginn turned SST into a record label. O…

Listening to the Music the Machines Make is the revolutionary story of electronic pop from 1978 to 1983, a true golden age of British music. This definitive account explores how krautrock, disco, glam rock and punk inspired a new generation to rip up the rulebook and venture toward a new frontier of electronic music – one that laid the foundations for Hip-Hop, house, techno and beyond. Including an extensive collection of archive images throughout, Richard Evans’s kaleidoscopic narrative draws o…

The second outing for our short run book publishing imprint, The End books, takes the form of a reprint of Spanish Cante Jondo and Its Origin in Sindhi Music, originally published in Spanish in 1955 under the name Cante Jondo: Su Origen y Evolución and later in this English translation. Aziz Balouch presents his theory on the roots of flamenco's 'deep song' in modern-day Pakistan, a cultural journey that mimics the routes of his own life, having been brought up among the Islamic mysticism and de…

Derek Bailey's Improvisation , originally published in 1980, and here updated and extended with new interviews and photographs, is the first book to deal with the nature of improvisation in all its forms,Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and "free" music. By drawing on conversations with some of today's seminal improvisers,including John Zorn, Jerry Garcia, Steve Howe, Steve Lacy, Lionel Salter, Earle Brown, Paco Peña, Max Roach, Evan Parker, and Ronnie Scot…

Excerpts from gloomy days is an intimate journey through the winters of the province of Ravenna, captured from the window of my car between 2015 and 2017, wandering between the city, the countryside, the industrial areas and reaching the coast.  The photos, taken through fogged up windows and raindrops, tell of blurred landscapes, deserted roads, and melancholic atmospheres, suspended between the real and the dreamlike. A tale of moments stolen from time, where rain becomes a brush and the fogge…

Adriano Zanni is well known here at Boring Machines. Our collaboration started in 2008 with the album "Piallassa (red desert chronicles)", an album inspired by a simple but meaningful coincidence. In 1964 Michelangelo Antonioni shot his first color film "Il Deserto Rosso" (Leone d'Oro at Venice Film Festival) inside and around the huge assembly of petro-chemical factories in the outskirts of Ravenna, known at that time as ANIC.  Adriano Zanni was born in 1964 in Ravenna.  In the last 25 years he…

Among the few truly experimental composers in our cultural history, Harry Partch’s life (1901-1974) and music embody most completely the quintessential American rootlessness, isolation, pre-civilized cult of experience, and dichotomy of practical invention and transcendental visions. Having lived mostly in the remote deserts of Arizona and New Mexico with no access to formal training, Partch naturally created theatrical ritualistic works incorporating Indian chants, Japanese kabuki and Noh, Poly…

Bluetooth sound walks featuring extreme interference.Side A recorded at Cedar Point with bluetooth earbuds.Side B recorded in Oberlin with bluetooth speaker.

Hardback cover, richly illustrated. A full-length book on Boards of Canada, the Scottish duo of Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, published by Disco Pogo with the approval of the band and of Warp. It is the fifth volume in the magazine's Tribute series, after Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, LCD Soundsystem and Andrew Weatherall, and the artist readers had been requesting most since the series began. Ships 10 November 2026. Sandison and Eoin started recording in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh in the…

Tony Conrad alone with amplified violin and self-built Long String Instrument, playing behind a sheet inside the unfinished Mudam in Luxembourg, October 2002. Nearly an hour of unbroken drone, first published here with an extended interview by Philippe Franck. CD digipack, 8 page booklet.

*50 copies limited edition* »presage« is an act of sonic foraging: shortwave radio transmissions and field recordings were collected around Helsinki, then assembled and transformed into two long-form pieces. Collecting radio brings with it a particular uncertainty, as signals may have travelled enormous distances before arriving stripped of their context and misted with static, interference, and the imprint of atmospheric conditions. A field recording is a more certain and geographically secure …

Rather than offering a single narrative, A Study on Tension unfolds as an atmosphere. The tape focuses on the thresholds between attraction and resistance, intimacy and distance, stability and collapse. Its fragmented structure invites the viewer to remain attentive to small gestures, pauses, interruptions, and the accumulation of pressure over time.

*2026 stock* "As a fifth-generation Nebraskan, growing up on the native lands of the Chatiks si chatiks people (Pawnee), this project is a part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful place with a rich history that is as much a part of me and my family as it is part of the settler-colonial project of displacement and genocide Self-portrait as a meditation on something else is the third entry in my ongoing se…

*2026 stock* A follow up to 'A Year In Any Other Place' (Falt) from 2022, 'The Root, The Interim' is a tape composition in four parts, drawing on the influences of musique concrete, cinema & dub. Constructed over 14 months in 2022-3, it is a tour of parks, hotels, kitchens, churches, utility rooms. Obstacles are encountered. Objects tested, discarded or transported from one space to another. Recordings endlessly played back and forth through different media. Song fragments forgotten and remember…

For a group founded on refusal, The New Blockaders have collaborated a great deal. It is less a contradiction than it looks. Where most collaborations in music amount to two recognisable personalities meeting and reinforcing each other, TNB's have always worked in the opposite direction: material is passed over, altered, buried, returned, and what emerges belongs to nobody in particular. Paul Hegarty has described the process as one in which individuality gets swamped, the sound cut loose from a…

Few gestures in the history of recorded sound have been as absolute as the one Richard and Philip Rupenus made in a garden shed in rural Newcastle in 1982, when – as The New Blockaders – they committed Changez Les Blockeurs to tape and, with it, drew the founding line of noise as an art of pure negation. From the outset TNB armed the music with a manifesto: blockade as resistance, an anti-music and anti-art set against every convention of composition, performance, and even personality, the sound…

*75 copies limited edition* The material suggests the idea. The idea emphasizes certain aspects of the material, and these could be physical and concrete, fully subjective, or something in between. For many years I've been drawn to the sound of urban and suburban spaces, and in particular I've been able to explore, in an empirical and non systematic way, the sonic environment of my street and neighborhood, with focus on the quiet moments in which one can almost hear the place breathing. Over tim…

*75 copies limited edition* I have chosen my workplace environment in Dublin as my area of sonic investigation over the last year or so. Where it is or the history of it is not important as my focus is purely on the sonic character of the spaces and materials I find there, and the potential they hold for articulating noise in imaginative and engaging ways. My tendency is to go in deep and make a thorough range of recordings that give me more than adequate scope to draw on to create atmospheric c…

Few gestures in the history of recorded sound have been as absolute as the one Richard and Philip Rupenus made in a garden shed in rural Newcastle in 1982, when – as The New Blockaders – they committed Changez Les Blockeurs to tape and, with it, drew the founding line of noise as an art of pure negation. From the outset TNB armed the music with a manifesto: blockade as resistance, an anti-music and anti-art set against every convention of composition, performance, and even personality, the sound…

“between soil and signal” is a three-part audiovisual performance featuring live electronics and Cretan bulgari. It reimagines the atmosphere of long-duration poetry singing and oral traditions from Balkan, mainland Greek, and Cretan communities. Expanding poetry beyond language through an interplay of immersive sound and dynamic moving images, the performance crafts a world that is at once synthetic and organic, fragile and intimate, inspired by cosmogonic myths, magic spells, and folk songs. T…

I’m very happy to present this cassette by my dear friend Martha Hviid. A sprawling and colorful collage of field recordings from Amager, A place many (especially those who live there) would call their favorite part of Copenhagen. When you listen to the tape, you definitely get the sense that adventure is always waiting for you just around the corner. Martha Mostly makes Visual art, but I hope she will make more music, or sound works, as I think she likes to call her recordings.

304 pages, paperback. Serpent's Tail Classics edition, with a foreword by Hanif Kureishi. Originally published in 2006. The sixties began in the summer of 1956, ended in October 1973, and peaked just before dawn on 1 July 1967, during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London. That is Joe Boyd's thesis, delivered in the opening pages with a precision that is obviously a joke and obviously not. He was in the room. He built the room. This is the sixties memoir that survives re-reading, and the r…

234 pages, paperback, 14 x 17cm. Over 200 flyers, compiled by Masala Noir, Paris. Nobody was supposed to keep these. A flyer is made to be handed out on a Tuesday, read once, and dropped in the street on the way to the show. It has a job, the job lasts about four days, and then it is rubbish. That is the whole reason this book exists and the whole reason it is worth having: what you are looking at is the accidental survival of a form designed to be thrown away. And what a form. No budget, no cli…

490 pages, hardback, with 60 black and white photographs. Foreword by Francis Ford Coppola. Published by Oxford University Press. Voltage control. Two words, and everything downstream of them: the oscillator that tracks a keyboard, the envelope that shapes a note's attack and decay, the ladder filter that gives a sawtooth its wet, vocal edge. These are the grammar of the instrument, and they are almost all his. Anyone who has turned a cutoff knob has touched Bob Moog's thinking. He died in 2005 …

292 pages, 244 x 170mm, with figures and music examples. Published by Cambridge University Press in the Music since 1900 series, paperback. Zagreb, June 1961. On the programme: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Mauricio Kagel, Witold Lutosławski, the Darmstadt serialists, the tape pieces coming out of Paris, Milan and Cologne, and the experiments of John Cage. In a communist country that had spent the previous fifteen years under socialist realism, with closed borders and almost no contac…

312 pages, paperback, with 8-page photo insert. 150 x 215mm.  The first extended biography of Albert Ayler ever published in English, and it took twenty years to build. Part life story, part case file, and long overdue. Richard Koloda is a musicologist and a practising lawyer, and both trades show on every page. He was a long-time friend of Donald Ayler, Albert's trumpet-playing younger brother; a consultant on Revenant Records' ten-CD retrospective Holy Ghost: Rare And Unissued Recordings (1962…

Within all things audible, sine waves are arguably the simplest, yet most fundamental elements. They are consists of a single frequency and cannot be stripped back any further. On the other hand, as stated in the Fourier theorem, virtually all complex sounds can be broken down into a series of simple sine waves. In 2020, I was invited by Nicolas Bernier to create a work centred on sine waves as part of his collaborative research-creation project at the University of Montreal. Thinking about such…

Edition of 30 (!) Eight pieces by the graduating artists of the Nordic Sound Art programme, issued in 2015 by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in an edition of 300, compiled by Jonas Olesen, who coordinated the programme throughout its life, and supported by the KUNO Publication Fund. Nordic Sound Art ran from 2007 to 2015 as a joint study programme within the KUNO network, shared between the art academies of Copenhagen, Helsinki, Bergen, Tromsø and Umeå. Students spent a year moving betwee…

Sarah Davachi's first book, From the Ruins of the Literal: Critical Organology, Timbre, and the Poetics of Affect, published by her own Late Music imprint. The title is borrowed from Paul Ricoeur, whose account of metaphor locates meaning at the point where literal sense gives way. Davachi turns that idea on the study of instruments and timbre, disciplines she sees as long governed by empirical, neuro-cognitive and modernist assumptions. Her objection is not that measurement is wrong but that it…

*70 copies limited edition* Paratexts, by definition, are everything that stands beside (‘para’ in Greek) the main content of a work, or the so-called “body text” of a book. The reading performance Sounding Out (Reading Paratexts) explores this “beside” as a site and sounds out paratexts as testimonies of the labour and collective efforts behind the making of a book. What kind of bodies emerge when we read dedications, acknowledgements, colophons or editorial notes? They can unsettle the notion …

Los Angeles, 1985. Every Sunday after midnight, on KTTV Channel 11, an independent commercial television station, something appeared that had no business being on commercial television: Alice Coltrane, appearing as Turiya, broadcasting devotional wisdom, meditation and music straight into the Californian night. The programme was called Eternity's Pillar. It ran until 1988, then vanished, thought lost for decades, until seventeen episodes surfaced from broadcast master tapes held by the Coltrane …