Deconceptual Voicings
A collection of musical compositions derived from film interviews with conceptual artists, including Martha Rosler, Art & Language, Andrea Fraser, Ed Ruscha, Shilpa Gupta, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Yvonne Rainer.Deconceptual Voicings is a 12" record, which uses the extensive archive of interviews with artists of the historical post-minimal and conceptual art as a starting point. It was generated for the documentary film Conceptual Paradise (Stefan Römer, 2006).“Deconceptual Voicings consis…
Listening Patterns. From Music to Perception and Cognition (Book
Listening Patterns is dedicated to facing the great diversity of discourses on listening in today's literature and to proposing a possible key of interpretation. The book develops the analysis of listening, in its most general sense, in three parts with the aim of presenting a versatile model which can be used in a wide variety of applications. After setting the discussion on the experience of listening as an eminently epistemological problem, the first part focuses on the examination of theorie…
Sur le diapason
The art of the tuning fork: the manifesto of the sound artist, performer and composer Nicolas Bernier. Sound artist, performer and composer Nicolas Bernier (born 1977 in Ottawa, Canada, lives and works in Montreal, Québec) creates audiovisual performances and installations aiming to carve a dialogue between sound and tangible matter. Shaped by his work within the fields of cinema, literature, dance and theatre companies, his own language blend together elements of music, photography, design, sci…
Music as Seismographic Sound
A proposal for a radio project on the diffusion of world music in the digital age, focusing on the concept of “seismographic sound”. The publication Music as Seismographic Sound / Tracking Down the Idea of Cultural Translation is a written radio pitch by Ania Mauruschat, closely following musicians in bi- or multi-lingual cultural contexts.Ania Mauruschat is a radio journalist who has produced several features on sound art, with the German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk, and the Swiss nation…
In the Sea
Ellen Fullman began developing The Long String Instrument in her St. Paul, Minnesota studio in 1980 and moved to Brooklyn the following year. Inspired by composer and instrument builder Harry Partch, Fullman’s large-scale work creates droning, organ-like overtones that are as unique in the world of sound as her vision of the instrument itself.Along with her 1985 debut album—appropriately titled The Long String Instrument—Fullman’s only output in the 1980s would be two self-released cassettes, In…
Collected Writings on Art and Sound, 1976–2018
**Beautiful hard-cover edition, 300+ pages ** A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, s…
Sound Art
**Massive hard-cover catalogue, nearly 800 pages, big size** This milestone volume maps fifty years of artists' engagement with sound. Since the beginning of the new millennium, numerous historical and critical works have established sound art as an artistic genre in its own right, with an accepted genealogy that begins with Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as disciplinary classifications that effectively restrict artistic practice to particular tools and venues. This book, companion volume t…
Topless Cellist The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman
The first book to explore the extraordinary career of musician and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whose work combined classical rigor, avant-garde experiment, and madcap daring. The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on The Mike Douglas Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in …
Michael Snow
Essential texts on the work of the influential artist Michael Snow: essays and interviews spanning more than four decades. Few filmmakers have had as large an impact on the recent avant-garde film scene as Canadian Michael Snow (b. 1928). His works in a range of media—film, installation, video, painting, sculpture, sound, photography, drawing, writing, and music—address the fundamental properties of his materials, the conditions of perception and experience, questions of authorship in technolog…
Experimental Sound and Radio
Art making and criticism have focused mainly on the visual media. This book, which originally appeared as a special issue of TDR/The Drama Review, explores the myriad aesthetic, cultural, and experimental possibilities of radiophony and sound art. Taking the approach that there is no single entity that constitutes "radio," but rather a multitude of radios, the essays explore various aspects of its apparatus, practice, forms, and utopias. The approaches include historical, political, popular cult…
Microsound
Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into ot…
The New Analog Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World
**Hard-cover edition** A meditation on what was lost—and on what is worth preserving—in the movement away from analog music and culture. Although digital media have created new possibilities for music making and sharing, they have also given rise to new concerns. What do we lose in embracing the digital? Do streaming services discourage us from listening closely? In this book, musician Damon Krukowski uses the sound engineer's distinction between signal and noise to examine what we have lost as…
Ways of Hearing
Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Damon Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways …
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
In 1999, the British artist Mark Leckey released his video-montage Fiorucci made me Hardcore, a dreamscape vignette that communes with the rapturous promises of youth. Putting archive material to use, Leckey entwined footage of underground dance and street culture in Britain with audio grifted and recorded in the artist's studio. In this illustrated study, the first comprehensive examination of the work, Mitch Speed argues that by interweaving personal and collective memory, this work gives voic…
Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music
Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happen…
The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America
2017 edition. 'This extraordinary and brilliantly curated book reveals how the tropes of cultured living were disseminated through the universal medium of music decades before the era of 'designer pop.' Revisionary and essential.' wrote Peter Saville, artist and designer; founder and art director of Factory Records. How record albums and their covers delivered mood music, lifestyle advice, global sounds, and travel tips to midcentury Americans who longed to be modern. The sleek hi-fi console in …
Wind Harp Recordings 1976-1977
In process of restock **300 copies, 2020 stock** This LP marks the first ever release of Sverre Larssen’s infamous wind harp recordings from the late 1970s – tonal long-form drone music akin to the works of Paul Panhuysen and Ellen Fullman.In the early 1970s the Norwegian businessman Sverre Larssen decided to construct a wind harp at his cabin at Sele, Jæren on the west coast of Norway. Using his free imagination and amateur engineering skills, Larssen constructed a harp with 12-strings, which w…
Tamis
**numbered edition of 25 copies** Gatefold Cover with Artwork by Ragnar Grippe. Signed by Ragnar Grippe. Unpublished Work from the 80’s by the Swedish legendary composer, who had relocated to Paris in the early 70’s to study at the famous Groupe de Recherches Musicales (more commonly known as GRM) founded by musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin. Around the same time, Grippe had struck up a close friendship with French avant-garde minimalist Luc Ferrari. I…
Protected and Preserved (Art edition)
Limited edition of 25 hand-numbered copies. Silkscreened wooden box includes; audiotape & 6 inserts (info-sheet, discography, biography, magazine with a selection of recipes, signed name card & portrait (photograph attached to sheet). Eric Andersen developed an interest in intermedia art very early on (as from 1959). In his Opus works from the early 60s, he investigated primarily the open interaction between performer and audience. He developed open works, works that altered themselves, “arte st…
Wounds
"Song Cycle is delighted to present the first reissue of Wounds by David Toop and Paul Burwell. Originally released in 1980 on Toop’s Quartz! label, the album is representative of a seminal moment within the British music scene evolved around the London Musicians Collective in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Founded in 1976 by a group of improvising musicians and sound artists including Evan Parker, Peter Cusack, Lol Coxhill, Sylvia Hallet, Max Eastley, the LMC contributed to shape a new generat…