The First Concert: An Adaptive Appraisal of a Meta Music (Book)
* 2021 stock * Percussionist Eddie Prévost co-founded in the 1960s the seminal improvising music ensemble AMM. In this book he presents a very personal philosophy of music informed by his long working practice and inspired by the London weekly improvisation workshop he first convened in 1999. Perhaps controversially, this view is mediated through the developing critical discourse of adaptionism; a perspective grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature. Music herein is examined for its cog…
Wendy Carlos: A Biography
This book is the first full-length biography to be written about the American composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939). With her debut album, Switched-On Bach, Carlos brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners. She not only blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but also intersected with many aspects of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Her story features an eclectic cast of chara…
Sound and light
* 2021 Repress * The first full-length book dedicated entirely to the work of La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela. Includes essays and analyses by Mitchell Clark, Henry Flynt, Kyle Gann, Catherine Christer Hennix, Ben Neill, Robert Palmer, Terry Riley & John Schaefer with an introduction by the editors & writings by the artists.La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela have been pursuing their art for more than three decades. Together, they have created large-scale works for light and sound of many hours' d…
The Art of Sound
A celebration of the visual artistry behind the evolution of sound recording with specially commissioned photography of iconic, rarely-seen artefacts from the collections of the EMI Archive Trust
America Señores Naturales
** Artist book. Hardcover, 64 pages, 37 B&W illustrations, 16 color illustrations. ** America Señores Naturales retraces the history of one of Lothar Baumgarten’s most famous site-specific interventions from 1984, Señores Naturales, and uses it as a point of departure to explore some of the key concepts that have shaped his oeuvre. In a newly commissioned essay, “Ground, Map, Floor: The Site and the Subject of Lothar Baumgarten’s Señores Naturales”, author Joanna Vickery-Barkow retraces the imp…
Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation
Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sa…
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art explores and delineates what Sound Art is in the 21st century. Sound artworks today embody the contemporary and transcultural trends towards the post-apocalyptic, a wide sensorial spectrum of sonic imaginaries as well as the decolonization and deinstitutionalization around the making of sound.
Within the areas of musicology, art history, and, later, sound studies, Sound Art has evolved at least since the 1980s into a turbulant field of academic critique and a…
Mute Records : Artists, Business, History
Mute Records is one of the most influential, commercially successful, and long-lasting of the British independent record labels formed in the wake of the late1970’s punk explosion. Yet, in comparison with contemporaries such as Rough Trade or Stiff, its legacy remains under-explored. This edited collection addresses Mute’s wideranging impact. Drawing from disciplines such as popular music studies, musicology, and fan studies, it takes a distinctive, artist- led approach, outlining the history …
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…
Three Essays on Spirituality and Art
A stunning marvel and the first text from the wild and wonderful mind of Henry Flynt, "Three Essays on Spirituality and Art", across 196 pages - issued in a beautifully produced edition of 500 copies - takes on a rarely explored subject in contemporary context, seeded in the anti-authoritarian positions that Flynt laid down at the dawn of Fluxus and has embraced ever since. Radical, vibrant, and fascinating, before us rests an essential illumination of the inner workings of one of the most impor…
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…