New Arrivals
Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79
Finally available after long pressing delays, comes a never before issued recording of Horace Tapscott leading his legendary Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, "Live at Century City Playhouse 9/9/79", documenting the entirety of a 2 hours performance that sprawls across glorious 3 LPs. Easily one of the most beautiful, striking, and historically important records of the year, it’s a joyous explosion of sound, seeded by social, political, and community-based action, at the juncture of spiritual and fr…
Journeys In Modern Jazz: Britain 1961-1973
Decca presents Journeys In Modern Jazz: Britain 1961-1973. The rediscovery of British jazz of the 60s & 70s is a phenomenon of our days. Some time ago this music seemed forgotten, today it is cult and artists like Shabaka Hutchings and Kamasi Washington call it a formative influence on their own music. British Jazz is cool again! Now, under the title British Jazz Explosion, Universal Music is diving deep into its jazz archives and reissuing the most sought-after, hip and collector-market pricele…
Kirtan: Turiya Sings
Impulse! is releasing a virtually unreleased work by the legendary and late jazz godmother Alice Coltrane, a 1981 recording titled Kirtan: Turiya Sings. The album, to be released on 16 July 2021 as part of the historic label's 60th anniversary celebrations, comprises nine devotional songs originally released in 1982 only on cassette for ashram students. In addition to Alice's voice and instrument, those recordings included parts for synthesizer, strings and effects. In 2004, Alice's son (and pro…
Space Walk
** Vinyl audio remastered & cut from the original master tapes by Gearbox Records. 180grm Optimal Pressing. Flip-back LP sleeves on 380g heavy card, front laminated sleeves with 12 x12 insert with new liner note insert + audio download voucher ** Heavyweight Vinyl / U.S.A. Original Glued Prints on Thick Cardboard / handily gluing / Original Black and White Private Press artwork. Originally issued in 1972, Space Walk was the final album recorded for the famed Lansdowne Studios by iconic British s…
Raft
The Northwoods Improvisers return with a new album comprising their first release in 10 years. Raft is the latest effort with an augmented lineup that includes veterans Mike Johnston (bass, bass recorder, wood flutes, percussion) and Nick Ashton (drums, percussion) and unites them with a fierce front line of saxophones with Dominic Berenga (tenor/alto/soprano saxophones, flute, percussion) and Donovan Boxey (alto/soprano saxophone, clarinet, melodica, wood flutes, percussion). The music is all a…
Emerging Field
** 2021 Stock ** Emerging Field marks the sixth release of Faruq Z. Bey with the Northwoods Improvisers on the Entropy Stereo label. This release finds the group exploring rhythm and space in a broader sense than previous offerings. Faruq Z. Bey, Mike Carey, and Skeeter Shelton create thoughtful space and intricate conversations in their horn lines evoking a relaxed and passionate response with a solid blues focus. Mike Johnston and Nick Ashton root the group with their sound rhythmic foundation…
Midnight Pacific Airwaves
** 2021 Stock ** A rare recording from an under recorded period of Bobby Bradford's music. This date stems from a California radio broadcast. The line up is Bobby Bradford on trumpet, James Newton (flute), Richard Rehwald (bass) and John Goldsmith (drums). Includes a bonus track duet with Vinny Golia (clarinet) from a 2003 gig.
Journey into the Valley
** 2021 Stock ** "Once a member of Detroit legends Griot Galaxy, Bey's take on jazz is informed by the spectral divinations of Sun Ra, and pieces like "Moors" and "sherrif Sam (Sound By Law)" remind you of prime era Arkestra, floating between beautifully extended melody heads and stretches of languid free blowing, all underpinned by a steady, rolling rhythm section." Jon Dale; Signal To Noise Fall 2008. "If this were merely an audio CD, it would garner excellent reviews. But this set with DVD an…
Ancestry
** 2021 Stock ** On Ancestry, Trevor Watts approaches improvisation in a more stripped down approach with percussionist Jamie Harris. Both Watts and Harris combine an incredible sense of rhythm with exploration and subtlety. The recordings were culled from live performances and more intimate settings at Trevor's home studio to give a balance of the high energy of performance and relaxed musical exploration between friends. The end result is a stunning document of duo interplay on various hand pe…
Music Composition in the 21st Century: A Practical Guide for the New Common Practice
The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the 21st Century is a guide for composers and students that helps them navigate the often daunting complexity and abundance of resources and influences that confront them as they work to achieve a personal expression.
From pop to classical, the book speaks to the creative ways that new composers mix and synthesi…
Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design
What is sound design? What is its function in the early 21st century and into the future? Sound Works examines these questions in four parts: Part 1, "Why This Sound?", presents an overview of the modern history of sound design. Part 2 is highly visual and provides a glance onto a sound designer's workbench and the current state of "Sonic Labor." Part 3 uses cultural analysis to explore our contemporary "Living with Sounds." The final and fourth part then proposes a series of anthropological and…
Annihilating Noise
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
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…
Sound Arts now
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…
Sound, Art, and the Promise of Hospitality
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 : Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation
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…
Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition Hearing the Continuum of Sound
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…
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…