Coverscaping Discovering Album Aesthetics (Book)
*2023 stock* Coverscaping focuses on the semiotics, poetics, and rhetoric of album covers. Working from the assumption that record sleeves may represent a visual genre in its own right, the essays engage in various ways with what one might call the pictorial component of recorded music. The contributors run the whole gamut from close readings of individual covers to more theoretical or philosophical explorations of the aesthetic nature and artistic value of album covers. Coverscaping aims to car…
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (Book)
*2023 stock* Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinkin…
You’ll Know When You Get There - Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Book)
*2023 stock* As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and el…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
Loft Jazz Improvising New York in the 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experiment…
Earth Sound Earth Signal Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s…
Struggling to Define a Nation American Music and the Twentieth Century (Book)
*2023 stock* Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rat…
Music Downtown Writings from the Village Voice
*2023 stock* This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS …
Reverse The Night
Attentive readers will know that late last year in my other guise as a musician I shared a split album with Andreas Brandal on Lithuanian label AghartA Tapes which, due to my involvement, was ineligible for inclusion in these here pages – I can’t really review myself after all. So, it’s nice to finally be able to lay before you the very fine music that this gentleman makes.Reverse the Night, as the title and the solid black of the sleeve implies, is a melancholic and introspective listen that pl…
Enginn Gleypir Sólina
In February 1993, at artist Hannes Lárusson’s Gallerí 11 in Reykjavik, Magnús Pálsson exhibited two installations, one in each of the gallery’s two rooms. In the first was Enginn Gleypir Sólina (No One Swallows The Sun). In the adjacent room was its companion work Herra Túrpur Jónsson (Mister Túrpur Jónsson). Each room featured four wall-mounted loudspeakers, one in each corner emanating vocalized grunts, sighs, and syllables in between extensive passages of Icelandic and nonsensical language. O…
Nothing Here Now but the Recordings
*2023 Restored Edition* In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (then of Throbbing Gristle renown) travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz to starting the daunting task to compile the experimental sounds works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been heard.
During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recor…
Catorce Reflexiones Sobre el Fin
** Edition of 300. Comes with green inner sleeve ** Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin (Fourteen Reflections On The End) originated from an installation exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2019. Fourteen magnetic bodies of tape that dialogued with the fourteen pieces of electroacoustic music now contained in this album composed from the sound anthology of Angélica Castelló. Thus, Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin is a complex piece consisting of multiple parts that, a…
Frans Zwartjes (2LP)
This special discounted bundle includes the latest Purge releases, the Mykolaiv Singers's LP, previously unreleased in any form - spare a few tapes distributed in the Mykolaiv region - these are old, old songs (of winter, weddings, war, sex, bread) predominantly sung by groups of women, and all from the villages of Mykolaiv, Ukrain. And the Frans Zwartjes's largely synthesiser-based improvisations for films either unmade or unfinished, played and recorded by Zwartjes between the late 1960s, thro…
Sometimes It Degenerates Into Music (Book)
Unquestionably one of the most exciting books to emerge this year - filled with revelation, insight and surprise, finally offering Conrad Schnitzler the attention and recognition he’s always deserved. An unparalleled survey of his work in music, sculpture, video, performance and installation.
Into the Mylar Chamber (Book)
Between 1968 and 1971, in a loft on New York's Jefferson Street, the poet, photographer and filmmaker Ira Cohen created some of the most mythic images of the late 1960s. Inspired by his friends Jack Smith and Bill Devore, Cohen’s initial experiments with black light developed into an experimental ritual space he termed the Mylar Chamber―a simple room of hinged boards hung with reflective Mylar film. Through his extended network, and with the support of artist and set designer Robert LaVigne, Coh…
Mati & The Music: 52 Record Covers 1955–2005 (Book)
Mati Klarwein (1932–2002) was a major presence in the New York art scene, admired by everyone from Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí to Jimi Hendrix and Jackie Onassis. His Pop-Surrealist universe of pantheistic religious harmony, sexual fertility and gender and racial unity gave visual expression to an era. Mati & the Music presents Klarwein’s 52 paintings that appeared on album covers, a body of work that began in the mid–1950s and continued for half a century. Many of the album covers were commis…
Pintura Música Arquitectura
*Massive 3LP edition with Hardcover book, nearly 400 pages* Drawings, LPs and an architectural survey by Mexico City–based artist, architect and musician Lucio Muniain. This volume presents three bodies of work by Mexico City–based architect, painter and double bassist Lucio Muniain (born 1969): blue-and-black graphic drawings from 2001 to the present; three LPs from his band Another; and a selection of 30 architectural projects.
Shibboleth
CD+Book, art edition Original sound installation by Eiki Mori (born 1976 in Ishikawa, Japan). A horn speaker, used to send small sounds far away, will emit whispers of various voices that read Mori’s poems in multiple languages. In the galley space, these voices shall sound nostalgic but at the same time be felt as if they are heard for the first-time, coming from somewhere around the globe. The 15 shibboleths written down for this installation do not really stand for symbolic things or events…
Fiction of the Physical
Crystalline examples of Zweig’s aesthetic and brilliance...A labyrinth of sound worth getting lost in
Cramps Records – Il suono che misura la libertà del tuo tempo (Book)
The illustrated history of legendary Cramps Records (Area, Demetrio Stratos, Arti e Mestieri, Claudio Rocchi, Alberto Camerini, Canzoniere del Lazio…) in a 22cm square-sized 244-page book.