★Primary Information
The RCA Mark II
C Spencer Yeh presents an album of electro-acoustic music made on the legendary but defunct RCA Mark II modular synth - nicknamed ‘Victor’ - at Columbia Uni. An ingenious concept, captivatingly executed. “The RCA Mark II is a follow-up to Yeh’s recent vocal work and is focused solely on the non-musical operation of the famed RCA Mark II synthesizer. Built and installed in 1959 at Columbia University, it was the first programmable synthesizer and became the bedrock upon which the Columbia-Princet…
Solo Voice I - X
Solo Voice I – X is the first LP by C Spencer Yeh devoted entirely to the voice. Yeh’s practice has its most obvious precedents in the sound poetry scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s—recalling an outlier group like the Four Horsemen, at their most raw and a-verbal, as much as the circles and canons forged around post-Lettrist France—as well as in figures like Joan La Barbara.
Over the past few years, he has moved from virtuosic, intensely physical performances to more focused studies whose specifi…
Live From The Commodore Ballroom
Live from the Commodore Ballroom captures a legendary performance by UJ3RK5 in Vancouver in 1980. A strongly visual Canadian art-rock group, sharing an affinity with bands such as Devo and Talking Heads, UJ3RK5 emerged out of punk, new wave, and post-punk music, as well as the Vancouver School of photo conceptualism that some of the members were associated with. The band included artists Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, and Ian Wallace among others, and while at the time the band eschewed the art…
Siri Aurdal and Eline Mugaas
Siri Aurdal by Eline Mugaas is an artist book produced on the occasion of a two-person exhibition by the artists at Kunstnernes Hus (Norway). The publication features Eline Mugaas collaging together decades of drawings, documentation, collages, and ephemera by Siri Aurdal with a lyrical approach reminiscent of Mugaas’ work with the magazine ALBUM. This method unfolds the traditional logic of an exhibition catalog, replacing its typical organizational structure (chronology, installation views, th…
Removal Technician
Alex Hubbard and Dan Mains’ Removal Technician, a compilation of the late-nineties zine of the same name that details their afterschool job at an Oregon funeral home. Removal Technician features Hubbard and Mains’ writings, drawings, and photographs along with appropriated advertisements, illustrations, and instructions from this hidden industry. While the overall effect is raw, the writing is insightful and adds levity to the difficult reality of people reduced to material remains.
Alex Hubbard…
Publication
Publication is a facsimile edition of the 1970 artist book by David Lamelas. It features contributions from thirteen international artists and critics who the artist chose due to their relationship to language-based practices. Produced from conversations with these fellow artists and writers, Publication collects their responses to three statements provided by Lamelas:
1. Use of oral and written language as an Art Form.2. Language can be considered as an Art Form.3. Language cannot be considered…
Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentio
George Maciunas’ Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional, Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial and Tactile Art Forms, was released in 1979 in the Swedish magazine Kalejdoskop (Issue 3). This issue of the magazine consisted of three versions of Fluxus, one being Maciunas’ historical diagram and the others being two essays (one in English and one in Swedish) summarizing the movement by Mats B. on the poster’s sleeve. Primary Information’s edition recreates all three as t…
Dan Graham & The Static at Riverside Studios London
Dan Graham & The Static at Riverside Studios London was originally released in 1979 by Audio Arts. The cassette features two tracks, one documenting Dan Graham’s performance of Performer/Audience/Mirror and the other documenting a live set by The Static. Both tracks were recorded live in London on February 24, 1979. Primary Information’s facsimile edition of the cassette also contains a printed interview between William Furlong and Dan Graham.
Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (first perfor…
Canciones de Cadaques
Canciones de Cadaques is a musical collaboration between Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton that was originally published by Hansjörg Mayer in 1976. It takes the form of a double 45 record and features the two artists alternately performing on vocals and guitar, with assistance from a Cadaqués dog named Chispas Luis, who periodically takes over vocal duties with a particularly sharp bark. This facsimile editions reproduces the original’s gatefold design, and features eight color photographs of the…
Program Notes
Max Neuhaus’ Program Notes records the aphoristic statements of the innovative sound artist as he redefined the boundaries of his new audio practice. Seeking to eschew the “small area music [had] been concentrating on for the past several hundred years,” Neuhaus consciously relocated his work in the late ‘60s to what he deemed “the realm of space” as opposed to that of time—choosing to present his music in public and communal settings, decidedly outside of the “proscenium situation.” This…
Fantastic Architecture
Primary Information is reprinting the seminal book, Fantastic Architecture, making the book widely available for the first time since it was originally published: first in 1969 by Droste Verlag in German (with the title Pop Architektur) and later in 1970 by Something Else Press as Fantastic Architecture. Edited by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell, this artist’s book/anthology explores the boundaries between pop art and architecture through writings and projects by key artists and thinkers of t…
Hegemony of Delete
Hegemony of Delete is electronic music in dialogue with the real rhythms of work and leisure. As Co La, Matthew Papich courts the minor distractions and interruptions typically seen to dilute workflow or artistic process. With or without an audience—in the studio and in performance—his music subtly works the room, not unlike those comedians who semi-secretly draw their momentum from crowd “interruptions.”
The six songs of this 12” bear the marks of Co La’s working method, to which the title refe…
Album, by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen
Created entirely from found images, ALBUM collects the first ten issues of a zine by the same name begun by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen in 2008. Comprised of full page photographic illustrations, advertisements, and other ubiquitous media images culled from etiquette manuals, cookbooks, travel magazines, craft books, fashion magazines, and sexual manuals, ALBUM reflects the popular imagery found in Scandinavian households from the 1960s through the 1980s. The chosen imagery is then a…
REAL LIFE Magazine
REAL LIFE Magazine: Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994 highlights a selection of writings and artists’ projects from REAL LIFE magazine, which was originally edited by artist, writer, and curator, Thomas Lawson and writer, Susan Morgan. Published in twenty-three issues from 1979-1994 as an intermittent black and white magazine, REAL LIFE featured artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture interspersed with pictorial contributions. The development of the magazine t…
An Anthology of Concrete Poetry
First published by the legendary Something Else Press in 1967, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry was the first American anthology on the international movement of Concrete poetry. The movement itself began in the early 1950s, in Germany–through Eugen Gomringer, who borrowed the term “concrete” from the art of his mentor, Max Bill–and in Brazil, through the Noigandres group, which included the de Campos brothers and Decio Pignatari. Over the course of the 1960s it exploded across Europe, America an…
Aram Saroyan Complete Minimal Poems
The second edition of Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems is a co-publication with Ugly Duckling Presse and includes a new preface by Ron Silliman who chose the first edition for the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. (Complete Minimal Poems was originally edited by Primary Information’s James Hoff and published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2007.) Long-cherished in out-of-print editions, anthologies and text books, and more recently celebrated on the internet, Aram…
The George Kuchar Reader
This expansive anthology explores the writings that underscore George Kuchar’s work and life. The most comprehensive collection of writings on the artist to date, this volume features film scripts, comics, drawings, paintings, correspondence, autobiographical musings, tales of UFO encounters, student recommendation letters, emails, photos, film stills, and a wide range of ephemeral, often hysterical autobiographical and critical writings by the late auteur behind such underground film classics a…
Cannibal
Cannibal is the trio of artists-musicians Cary Loren, Cameron Jamie and Dennis Tyfus. Culled from a recording made live in Antwerp, each of the fifteen songs-episodes on this - their first - record is a protracted pulse of the band's energy and radical point of entry to a teeming flux of erratic electronics, deranged-incantatory narration, harmonica, jaw harp, dollar bin records, found poetry, vocal sound techniques, etc. A uniquely disorienting tour de force of the lower forms of music and a ha…
Mirror | Me
This Zine was developed from a collaborative exhibition and performance organized by the writer, Brandon Stosuy, and the artist, Kai Althoff in the Summer of 2009 at Dispatch Bureau in NYC. It was displayed during the White Columns Annual 2009, during which pages were added by the original exhibition's various participants. The Zine features new materials by artists, writers and musicians such as Adam Helms, Brandon Stosuy, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Kai Althoff, Karlynn Holland, Lionel Maunz, Matt Za…
Do You Love Me?
Do You Love Me? is an extension of Lutz Bacher's videos of the same name, in which Bacher interviews curators, artists, friends, and family about Bacher the person and Bacher the artist. Though Lutz Bacher is the starting point, the interviews often reveal more about the people being interviewed than Bacher herself. The publication takes the form of transcripts interwoven with images of Bacher's artwork from the 70s to the present as well as photos, letters, and ephemera.