Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar.
It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and ord…
The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and c…
In Sound arts now, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle explore contemporary artistic practices and theories, and what contributes to or hinders artistic and career development. This is conducted through a series of interviews with artists and curators, putting the often-unheard voice of the maker at the centre of the discourse. There is a conscious shift of reference away from the “white men from the global north” who have dominated the canon during the decades of the discipline’s emergence and establ…
In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s ninechannel video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpe…
Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging str…
From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands ‘possible world theory’ to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice MerleauPonty’s phenomenological life worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thin…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Impulse! presents Black To The Future by Sons Of Kemet. Fire and Fury! We're so hyped to welcome back Sons of Kemet with a whole host of guests too. The follow up to 2018’s Mercury Prize nominated breakout release Your Queen Is A Reptile. This is their 4th record, and 2nd on impulse! Compared with ”Your Queen is a Reptile”, this album has featured vocalists and more of an emphasis on fuller compositions and arrangements. Guest artists include Kojey Radical, Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, Joshua I…
** Edition of 120 ** B.A.A.D.M presents Schouwspel by Opéra Mort. Originally recorded in AB Salon, Brussels. Graphic Design: Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt. Thanks to Mich Leemans.
Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. After the Re-release of the legendary album “Biokinetics", which is superb subaquatic dub techno, we re-release Porter Ricks first album on Mille Plateaux. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkyness with an underlying almost organic rhythmight. But still its not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkyness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.
** 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…
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…
I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San…
An absolutely stunning effort from one of the great journeymen of Italian experimentalism, Walter Maioli's 'Il Suono delle Api / La Vibrazione del Cosmo', issued by Villa Lontana Records, is electroacoustic music at its absolute, vibrant best. Pressed in two extremely limited editions on black and transparent vinyl and laden with rich tonalities, deep drones, and hypnotic arpeggiations, it's a truly mind-melting, free-standing sonic world that encounters Maioli at the top of his game.
**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.
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.
Mohammad are back!! With their name compressed into MMMD deliver their most lyrical work to date on the original soundtrack for Lukas Feigelfeld's slow-burning gothic horror movie “Hagazussa – A heathen's curse”. The music is absorbing, emotional and powerful as ever and bears MMMD's familiar idiosyncratic universe galvanized in their previous releases, while open to new sonic territories that reflect the film's constant state of dread as well as key elements such as trauma, isolation, anxiety a…
** 2021 Stock ** Stone Garden started in a basement studio in Prague with a nearly continuous session over several days and nights. The original concept was influenced by the raw and seemingly endless jams of psychedelic pioneers. The freeform songs that emerged from these sessions were refined over several months at the band's home in Tokyo where each song was sculpted into an uncommon form. Compared to the relatively song-based House In The Tall Grass (2016), Stone Garden is a window into Kika…
** Limited 250 only transparent yellow vinyl LP housed in a colour gloss finished outer sleeve with black polylined inner ** Bootleg style LP from future Japanese psych legends Hibushibire! The band have gone through some line up changes since their 2019 second album 'Turn On, Tune In, Freak Out!, so while we eagerly await a new album here's a bonus. Recorded live at J.T. Soar in Nottingham (UK) on May 17th 2019.
Acid Jazz Records continue their exclusive licensing agreement with Albarika Store, the legendary record label that defined the sound of Benin and influenced the entire region of West Africa and beyond. Albarika Store is home to many rare recordings, from more traditional folkloric and Sato styles, to the funk, blues and psych inspired workouts of the All Mighty Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, as they referred to themselves. Many of the original records are sought after by DJs and collectors a…
** Edition of 150 ** Andromache is an unforeseen homage to an unfamiliar friend. Recorded over a five year period on abandoned and ruined pianos all over Europe, the project culminated inside a death-struck apartment in the south of Athens. Andromache includes new re-worked versions of previously released pieces from the MMMD discography. Recorded 2012-2017 in Copenhagen, Lausanne, Budapest, Kallithea.
Acid Jazz Records continue their exclusive licensing agreement with Albarika Store, the legendary record label that defined the sound of Benin and influenced the entire region of West Africa and beyond. Recorded and issued in 1974, Le Sato is one of the earliest releases on the Albarika label and it is also one of the deepest. Sato is the term for the traditional rhythms that soundtrack Vodun (Voodoo) rituals and ceremonies in Benin. Performance of Sato is reserved for these sacred rites, which …
** Edition of 300 copies pressed on clear vinyl. Mastered by Veronica Vasicka ** A weight of history flows through Ann Margaret Hogan’s keys with a stark intimacy, beautifully illuminated by naturally effortless, quietly grand songwriting. It’s a direct continuation of the landscaped themes and atavism of 2020’s ‘Honeysuckle Burials’ and the ‘Reversing Into Tomorrow’ collaboration with Karl O’Connor, vividly capturing the slow passage of time in a way that has quite literally compelled us to sto…
Not Waving renders his pop soul on a definitive album opus ‘How To Leave Your Body’, starcrossed with guest appearances by Jim O’Rourke, Jonnine Standish, Marie Davidson, Spivak and Mark Lanegan.
**Edition of 80** New live recordings, oriented with only two instruments, viola and frame drums. The album was recorded during a period of many live sessions between 2019 and 2020 with just a Rode nt4 stereo microphone and one of the very first Sony mz md. The sessions were amplified. Frédéric Charlot - Viola. Olivier Charlot - Frame drums.
**Edition of 60** "Growing up means your mental models of the world are more likely to match observable results in the 'real world'. Or to say it differently: Growing up means, your plants are not dying anymore. I am not sure we have grown up quite yet, but maybe embarking on a 25 minute free form improvisation, with the tape rolling, relies just as much on what you know, as trusting the things you do not know yet. Just as much being in touch with the grown-up as the child in you and the partner…
**Edition of 60** Ikuisuus presents 2021 by Boom Edan. "On the 1st of October 2020 I had a dream I was part of something. A late night open mic jam at an under-water jazz cellar, literally a flooded space underground. I set to recreate that experience Home Alone, with what sounds that looked like it. By November I had completed building a version of a machine for accessing the dream. The Dream Machine, however, solved nothing as a bigger parallel problem had simultaneously revealed it to me that…
** Edition of 300. Coloured 12" Vinyl LP housed in a black liner bag, full colour four page booklet featuring photography and artist notes, download token featuring the album tracks plus extra track not included on vinyl album ** Folding is the new vinyl LP and CD of collective compositions featuring piano by Izumi Kimura, violin & viola by Cora Venus Lunny and field recordings by Anthony Kelly. The wonderfully nuanced music of Izumi Kimura and Cora Venus Lunny folds with immersive field recordi…
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 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 …
** Edition of 50 ** Meditations on almost falling. All proceeds will be donated to Vagus, a local organisation helping people experiencing homelessness. Thank you to mu tate, Ivan Zoloto, Adela Mede (Adela Donoval, Ashley Grace, Cecilia Morgan, Eleanor Ferrand-Brooke, Rebecca Cockram, Jacob McGarry, Verity Alderman), Lucy Duncombe, HMOT, Medina Bazargali, Elina Bolshenkova, Malvern Brume, Leila Bordreuil, Zach Rowden, Ferrand, Sonicwilderness Brno Crew (AGF, Antonie Bernadová, Eva Marie Sližová,…
** Limited edition clear cassette housed in a transparent jewel case ** Asemix is the collaborative project of Mari Maurice (aka more eaze) and Nick Zanca (aka Mister Lies) exploring the blurry space between pop abstraction, electro-acoustic zones and sound collage. Their self-titled debut record is the culmination of a year of remote collaboration, stem-swapping, blind trust and an almost telepathic creative process. “I really had no idea what form it would take. It seemed equally likely to man…
** Limited Edition 500 Copies Individually Numbered On Clear Vinyl! ** During the 1950s, ‘Father of Exotica’ Martin Denny helped American audiences expand their horizons by incorporating Asian, Polynesian, and Latin instrumentation into his group’s easy-listening repertoire, along with birdcalls and other sounds, spawning a new genre that took the nation by storm; he toured South America and had a residency in Hawaii earlier on, embedding such elements. Third LP Primitiva is a total delight, Jul…
** Limited Edition 500 Copies Individually Numbered On Clear Vinyl! ** Despite the futurism that the title of the set might imply, the material on this LP is actually some of Sun Ra's earliest, and dates back to the years when the Arkestra was first beginning to make itself heard in Chicago. That doesn't stop the material from being amazing, though, as these prime early tracks really show how strong Ra's vision was, even when it was being applied to material that might look more simple on the su…
Life Goes On presents Medasi by Haki R. Madhubuti. Super-rare deep spiritual jazz from 1977! A little-known sought after obscurity of indy label afro-centric deep jazz recorded in 1976-7!
Though he was originally from Brooklyn and raised by adoptive parents in rural Kansas, George Alexander Aberle aka Eden Ahbez, is about as California as they come. He was discovered in the 1940s while working in one of Los Angeles' earliest raw vegetarian restaurants and was known throughout the 50s and 60s for being spotted on the streets of LA in full white robe, sandals, and beard, and legendarily camping underneath the first L in the Hollywood sign. After writing numerous hits for jazz and p…
Thomas Leer, the scottish musician, born in 1953 in Port Glasgow, is one of the most eclectic artist of the so-called minimal wave scene. Alongside german singer Claudia Brücken (vocalist of the hit-makers Propaganda) he formed Act a short-lived synthpop group signed to ZTT Records in the late eighties. Licensed by Cherry Red in 1982, the double album ‘Contradictions’ is the third effort in Leer high and rising career. After the seminal debut on Industrial Records with Robert Rental – The Bridge…