A Disco Pogo Tribute (Book)
Hardback cover. 250 pages, richly illustrated. Aphex Twin: A Disco Pogo Tribute compiles interviews, essays and features from various music journalists, all exploring Richard D. James' decades-long career. Like Daft Punk, the people behind Disco Pogo have had a long-standing relationship with Richard D. James for over 30 years via their 90s magazine Jockey Slut. The book is edited by Disco Pogo editor Jim Butler and features interviews, essays and features from the best music journalists working…
Interviews with American Composers: Barney Childs in Conversation
*2024 stock* In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff and others. Virginia Anderson edits the first published collectio…
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz in the 1950s. The LP’s increased fidelity and playback capacity allowed lengthy compositions and extended improvisations to fit onto a single record, ushering in a period of artistic exploration. Despite these innovations, LP production became another site of negotiating the uneven power relations of a heavily segregated music industry. E…
Keywords In Sound
*2024 stock* In twenty essays on subjects such as noise, acoustics, music, and silence, Keywords in Sound presents a definitive resource for sound studies, and a compelling argument for why studying sound matters. Each contributor details their keyword's intellectual history, outlines its role in cultural, social and political discourses, and suggests possibilities for further research. Keywords in Sound charts the philosophical debates and core problems in defining, classifying and conceptualiz…
Sound Objects
*2024 stock* Is a sound an object, an experience, an event, or a relation? What exactly does the emerging discipline of sound studies study? Sound Objects pursues these questions while exploring how history, culture, and mediation entwine with sound’s elusive objectivity. Examining the genealogy and evolution of the concept of the sound object, the commodification of sound, acousmatic listening, nonhuman sounds, and sound and memory, the contributors not only probe conceptual issues that lie in …
Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-gris
Two-Headed Doctor is David Toop's forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invoc…
Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
In Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, Eric Drott analyzes the political economy of online music streaming platforms. Attentive to the way streaming has reordered the production, circulation, and consumption of music, Drott examines key features of this new musical economy, including the roles played by data collection, playlisting, new methods of copyright enforcement, and the calculation of listening metrics. Yet because streaming underscores how uneasily music sits within existing regimes of …
The Voice in the Headphones
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . .
Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours
With Good night the pleasure was ours, David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem, bringing to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones. In Good night the pleasure was ours, the world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles without fixed membership, and from solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, Grubbs presents…
A Most Valuable Medium: The Remediation of Oral Performance on Early Commercial Recordings
Between 1895 and 1920, the United States saw a sharp increase in commercial sound recording, the first mass medium of home entertainment. As companies sought to discover what kinds of records would appeal to consumers, they turned to performance forms already familiar to contemporary audiences—sales pitches, oratory, sermons, and stories. In A Most Valuable Medium, Richard Bauman explores the practical problems that producers and performers confronted when adapting familiar oral genres to this i…
England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground (Book, revised and expanded edition)
Strange Attractor Press are proud to announce the release of a new revised and expanded edition of David Keenan’s seminal secret history of the UK’s esoteric underground, England’s Hidden Reverse.
Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil
Nearly 600 pages! Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover. In this heavily illustrated compendium, the legendary British experimental band Coil tell their story in the present tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established itself as a shape-shifting doyen of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since its untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficu…
The Radio Phonics Laboratory - Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis & The Birth of Electronic Music
The Radio Phonics Laboratory explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th century. This fascinating story unravels the intricate threads of telecommunications, from the invention of the telephone to the advent of global communication networks. At the heart of the narrative is the evolution of speech synthesis, a groundbreaking innovation that not only revolutionised telecommunications but also birthed a new era in electronic music. Tracing th…
Wild Combination - A Zine Inspired By The Music Of Arthur Russell
A 24-page A4 2 colour riso zine inspired by the words and music of Arthur Russell. Combining Arthur's lyrics with full page illustrations and comics, this was 1st printed nearly 10 years ago and is back in print again!
They Said! - On Julius Eastman's Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D'Arc
THEY SAID! simmers, boils and simmers again on the 1981 solo vocal composition Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Language, listening and voice are at the core of the essay. As is the relationship between Julius Eastman and Joan d’Arc which, as readers, we’re invited not to divide into two individual histories but encouraged to consider a singular position which both figures may have inhabited across distances. The essay opens with an exclamation mark which weaves through the text, aliv…
Haze - Almanacco Di CUltura Di Sonora N.2 (Magazine)
*Italian Language Edition* Un libro/almanacco con cadenza quadrimestrale che raccoglie saggi, interviste, approfondimenti sulla ricerca sonora contemporanea per un concetto allargato di musica. Nel secondo volume: Fred Frith, Paolo Conte, William Parker, Erik Satie, Roberto Masotti, Stefano Scodanibbio, Toshio Hosokawa e altro ancora...
Nuove Destinazioni Per L'Improvvisazione Radicale (Book)
*Italian Language Edition* Dall’Introspezione all’Interazione. Un compendio per tutti i musicisti, gli appassionati e gli ascoltatori che desiderino avvicinarsi al mondo dell’improvvisazione radicale. Un breve saggio per chiunque voglia comprendere come l’improvvisazione radicale possa affrontare e contribuire a risolvere problematiche di natura politica, economica, sociale.
Auditory Poverty and its Discontents – An Essay (Book)
Where sounding is understood as an exhibition of activity, vitality, and power, Nina Dragičević proposes that we analyse sonic phenomena in econo-political terms.
In this essay—or is it perhaps a long love poem?—she dives into the sounding-listening dynamics and reveals them as class relations in which audibility is not an event following an occurrence of sound but a point in an intersectional class structure. With audibility, or rather the lack thereof, comes auditory poverty. And where there i…
This Embodiment
This Embodiment consists of work stemming from exhibitions and performances by Hanne Lippard over the past number of years. Including texts from her most recent exhibition entitled ‘Flesh’, at Berlin’s KW, that saw the artist use ‘her body and words to counterfeit perimeters given by established standards in art production and create a universe where the audience is physically as well as mentally brought outside of their confinements.’ The works collected display the various areas to which Lippa…
A Natural Gesture: Thoughts on Musical Praxis and Conducting
Luigi Gaggero, a native of Genoa, has graced the stages of Europe’s most prestigious venues. He is currently Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra as well as musical director and co-founder of the Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, with which he has recorded acclaimed CDs of con- temporary music repertoire. Before launching his conducting career, Gaggero performed for 25 years as a cimbalom player and percussionist, collaborating with the finest European orchestras and ensembles …