Montparnasse
**Small repress soon available** First reissue of this enigmatic and sought-after Japanese rarity from the 80's, originally released on the cultish Unbalance label (run by Naoto Hayashi and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan fame). Comprised of cut-up and collaged recordings from various unspecified French movies intertwined with the occasional spoken word segments ~ all seemingly recorded using a cheap-o cassette player making for quite the lo-fi work. A walk in Paris somewhere between the 30's and t…
Revox, Paper, Scissors
**100 copies** Using a singular repetitive gesture, Liz Rácz draws on a 10 metre-long roll of paper that she gradually unfurls, revealing a mass of regular strokes. Jérôme Noetinger records this gesture on magnetic tape, capturing, repeating, and transforming it. An auscultation of detail in a magnetic tape loop continuum.Jérôme Noetinger is a composer, improviser and sound artist who works with electroacoustic devices such as the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder and magnetic tape, analogue …
Italienische Stucke (Art edition)
**Special edition of 50 numbered copies. Includes signed photograph (13x18 cm) and reproduction of the score of "Liquid Piece“ (245g linen-stock, 29,7 x 42 cm) handcoloured with china ink by Christina Kubisch, signed & numbered.** Sound is almost always at its most thrilling, whether in practice or source, when it can not be easily defined. This is the liminal zone within which only the bravest and most ambitious among the avant-garde dare to tread, constantly pushing forward into unexplored zon…
Italienische Stucke
**Edition of 300. Also available as a 50 copies special Art edition** Sound is almost always at its most thrilling, whether in practice or source, when it can not be easily defined. This is the liminal zone within which only the bravest and most ambitious among the avant-garde dare to tread, constantly pushing forward into unexplored zones which are yet to be claimed by the known. Of those artists who have taken on such a task, it is hard to call to mind any as important as the German composer, …
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 …