In 1976, Walter Zimmermann decided to travel to America to interview American composers who were important and influential to him. He did not personally know the composers, he would simply try to locate and contact them armed with his Nagra tape deck and two microphones.

This journey became the book Desert Plants, a landmark both for American experimental music and for its account of a young West German composer discovering his own musical sensibility. While several of the musicians interviewed remain less well-known or well-known only in niches, with the passage of time the music of many of those included in Desert Plants has attained a prominence that sometimes makes it hard to recall how great a challenge their music posed to the then-establishment (and, to some extent, still-institutional) avant-gardes, American and European alike.

Long out of print yet always in demand, Zimmermann decided to reprint Desert Plants as a facsimile reproduction of the original: softcover, still typeset in the original IBM Selectric typewriter font, etc. Only some typos have been corrected. For this reissue, for the first time a CD is included with MP3 files of the original interviews audio, with the exception of a couple which were lost or damaged.

High quality printing imported from Germany.

Interview partners: Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (about Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire and Ben Johnston (about Harry Partch).