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New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega…
So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the C…
The Dead C's Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised b…
The story of Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos stitches together histories of 1960s-1980s jazz, psychedelia, world music, experimentalism and post-punk. Based in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, New York City and Paris, Naná played with musicians …
This comprehensive portrait of Tropicália, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, demonstrates how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world.
What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music p…
Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history.
In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the Euro…
When you think of techno and electronic dance music, you first think of clubs and festivals, ecstatic dancers and enraptured DJs. But in which spaces is this music actually created? Artists' studios and writing rooms of authors and composers have lon…
Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to,…
In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide r…
An illustrated monograph documenting and extending Resynthesizers, a project by artist Florian Hecker combining electroacoustic, olfactory, and textual elements, staged at the modernist Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles.
Florian Hecker is an ar…
Following the success of “A Brief History of Curating” (now available in nine different languages, in its sixth reprint, and as an e-book), this publication gathers together interviews with pioneering musicians of the 1950s to the 1980s. The book thu…
Why does the letter 'M' stand alone as the title of this book by the author of Silence and For the Birds? The dictionary gives the definition of 'M' as the 13th letter of the alphabet, the symbol for 1000, and if you think they fit, they do. Or you m…
John Cage (1912-1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker and amateur mycologist. He is arguably the most influential composer of the mid-twentieth century. He dedicated himself to the search for new horizo…
From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes a wholly original hero's journey that wages war on the cliché of the “misery memoir.” Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and …
Stereolab are one of the most fascinating groups of the past fifty years, a source of constant reinvention and illuminating contrasts, where political ideology meets the sweetest pop melodies and driving guitars rub along with space-age jazz. They ar…
30th anniversary edition. Revised and expanded printed book edition of The Crack In The Cosmic Egg. Thirty years after its original publication, Steve Freeman and Alan Freeman return to print with an anniversary edition of their encyclopaedic work on…