Half Sound, Half Philosophy : Aesthetics, Politics, and History of China's Sound Art
From the late 1990s until today, China’s sound practice has been developing in an increasingly globalized socio-political-aesthetic milieu, receiving attentions and investments from the art world, music industry and cultural institutes, with nevertheless, its unique acoustic philosophy remaining silent. This book traces the history of sound practice from contemporary Chinese visual art back in the 1980s, to electronic music, which was introduced as a target of critique in the 1950s, to electroni…
Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise - Conversations with Steve Beresford
Steve Beresford's polymathic activities have formed a prism for the UK improv scene since the 1970s. He is internationally known as a free improviser on piano, toy piano and electronics, composer for film and TV, and raconteur and Dadaist visionary. His résumé is filled with collaborations with hundreds of musicians and other artists, including such leading improvisers as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Zorn, and he has given performances of works by John Cage and Christian Marclay.
In this b…
Virtual Music : Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era
Virtuality has entered our lives making anything we desire possible. We are, as Gorillaz once sang, in an exciting age where 'the digital won't let [us] go...' Technology has revolutionized music, especially in the 21st century where the traditional rules and conventions of music creation, consumption, distribution, promotion, and performance have been erased and substituted with unthinkable and exciting methods in which absolutely anyone can explore, enjoy, and participate in creating and liste…
Making It Heard : A History of Brazilian Sound Art
From the mid-20th century to present, the Brazilian art, literature, and music scene have been witness to a wealth of creative approaches involving sound. This is the backdrop for Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art, a volume that offers an overview of local artists working with performance, experimental vinyl production, sound installation, sculpture, mail art, field recording, and sound mapping. It criticizes universal approaches to art and music historiography that fail to recog…
Liturgy
** In process of stocking ** Liturgy is a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses that dives into histories of perception and intuition. The artist Flora Yin-Wong deploys a variety of images and texts to explore issues related to cosmic principles, conspiracies, and parallel universes. The result is a constellatory work filled with religion, dreams, and fragmented memories and knowledge that also gestures at the artist’s own history. The book’s chapters—Rituals & Fire; Omens; Hexagrams / Or…
Theatre
Theatre is an artist book that documents seven early performances by Dan Graham taking place from 1969 to 1977 with notes, transcripts, or photographs for each work. Originally published in 1978, and produced here in facsimile form, the publication focuses on several key works that interrogate or undermine the psychological and social space created by, or between, individuals inside the performance venue. Like most of Graham’s work, they also serve as a critique of cultural norms, with many of t…
Camino Road
First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Ann…
10 Friendship Songs
** Edition of 200. Artist book + CD ** n the year 2018 visual artist Ken Verhoeven presented his Friendship Paintings, a collection best described as “deconstructed designs for friendship bracelets”, at Trampoline gallery in Antwerp. The subject: the friendship bracelet. A wristband infused with meaningful (?) symbols. Symbols crafted thread after thread. One pulls a string, and … friendship happens. Or … friendship is being manipulated by symbolism. Not unlike a fetish. Ken Verhoeven upcycled t…
Melody III Book II
**Original 1977 copies * Beautiful artist book based on Melody III (1975) for tape and slide projections Rather than a musical score, the work in this book is a graphic realisation of the structure of a musical composition. The pattern which unfolds takes on elements of landscape and architecture in stark black and white.
Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon
This video and book are based on Dan Graham’s Rooftop Urban Park Project, which opened as an extended exhibition at Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. Re-released as a VHS and packaged with the original 1992 publication, this title includes an essay by the artist and a 20-minute video.
A Family In Brussels
2024 restock. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman presents A Family in Brussels, a fictional stream-of-consciousness text encompassing multiple subjectivities and laced with autobiographical references. This is the first English-language publication of the work, which Chantal Akerman wrote and first performed as a monologue in Paris and Brussels. The accompanying CDs document the theatrical reading that took place at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in October 2001. In them, the listener can hear Ak…
Deep Listening Anthology: Scores from the Community of Deep Listeners
"Thirty-eight works by twenty-five musicians come together in this anthology. Contributors to this collection come from the United States, Canada and Switzerland, and reflect the international aspect of the Deep Listening community. The range of work in this anthology demonstrates further diversity: scores using common practice Western musical notation, graphic symbols and images, interwoven with texts, textual instructions for performance, guided meditations, commentary on the creation and use …
Deep Listening Anthology, Volume Two: Scores from the Community of Deep Listeners
The Deep Listening Anthologies are collections of work by musicians and artists from around the world who have embraced the ideas of Deep Listening in their own ways. Inspired by DL's tenets of listening, openness and play, these volumes contain a wonderful variety of interpretations and integrations of global ideas into individual practices. This volume is the second Deep Listening Anthology, containing mostly instructional scores by composers, along with scores in traditional notation, poetry,…
Yes
A fully illustrated retrospective look at the long and influential career of a challenging avant-garde artist reviews forty years of Ono's work, including films, music, and Conceptual art, and includes thought-provoking essays from respected scholars and a music CD.
Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono moved to New York in the mid-1950s and became a critical link between the American and Japanese avant-gardes. Ono's groundbreaking work greatly influenced the international development of Conceptual ar…
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 examines the beginnings of Ono's career, demonstrating her pioneering role in visual art, performance and music during the 1960s and early 1970s. It begins in New York in December 1960, where Ono initiated a performance series with La Monte Young in her Chambers Street loft. Over the course of the decade, Ono earned international recognition, staging "Cut Piece" in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1964, exhibiting at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, and launching with …
Ism Hexadome At Mass Moca
Stunning package featuring music from Suzanne Ciani, Ben Frost, Rene Lowe, Lara Sakissian aka Foozool, Peter Van Hoesen and more. Under the Electric Sea Limited edition vinyl set featuring eight live installations from the ISM Hexadome, recorded in binaural sound at MASS MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts) in December 2019. Listening to the recordings on headphones recreates the detailed sense of spatialisation and movement of the ISM Hexadome’s immersive 52-channel sound system tha…
Partners: A Biography of Jerry Hunt
Jerry Hunt (1943–93) was among the most eccentric figures in the world of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early ’90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances. Tracing Hunt’s life across his home state’s major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir…
Try Saying You're Alive!
A memoir by Kawasaki-based writer and musician Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950), Try Saying You're Alive! offers a semi-fictionalized account of the vibrant Tokyo underground that he has been at the center of since the 1970s. Recounting sixty years in the life of this "screaming philosopher." Try Saying You're Alive! traces Tomokawa's beginnings in the Akita Prefecture as a "runaway toddler," his adolescent basketball career, and his wanderings as a day laborer, gambler, painter, actor, drinker, and av…
Music For The Williamson Tunnels (A Collection Of The Sound Of Dripping Water)
Music For The Williamson Tunnels: A Collection Of The Sound Of Dripping Water As Brian Eno made music for environments rather than from them (Music For Airports) these CDs are best listened to within the strange damp world of the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool. The ceilings of these caverns are thin and the sound of dripping water can frequently be heard, but not necessarily seen. It is a sound that has intrigued artists for nigh on a century and this collection brings together historical piece…
Ryoji Ikeda EP
Crucial early work from the Japanese master of digital minimalism - like Thomas Köner or Lustmord, but with more bass. Ryoji Ikeda needs no introduction here - the Japanese composer and A/V originator has been impressing the world with his game-changing hi-frequency rhythmic loops and stark monochromatic visuals since the mid 1990s, and has never gone astray. This special Sähkö vinyl EP combines two of Ikeda's most important early pieces, 'Luxus 1-3' from his 1995-released solo debut "1000 Fragm…