Paperback, 112pp Wolke Verlag, Berlin  Some think Eric Dolphy was an otherworldly apparition. His stellar career lasted little more than 5 years. He was one of the most important pioneers of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s. As a multi-instrumentalist, Dolphy played flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone and clarinet. He also composed and arranged. His brilliant solos in performances with the Mingus Band, among others, are milestones in jazz and music history. Guillaume Belhomme traces his biography in sketches. “For having been an innovator, Eric Dolphy became an original. The depth of his message then caught up with him. At the source he created, a lineage of individual musicians that has not yet faded out of sight has continuously drawn, searching, perhaps, for ways to cross to the other side, beyond the obvious and the easy.”Guillaume Belhomme “Finally we have an English translation of Guillaume Belhomme’s wonderful biography of Eric Dolphy. I can read just enough French to know that it is a heart-felt homage to the great man. This translation will make a fuller appreciation possible.” - Evan Parker

23 Sentences from DESERT PLANTS MORTON FELDMAN: Something that is beautiful is made in isolation. CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I try wherever possible to discourage competitive sort of careerism. JOHN CAGE: So that it takes an old fogey like myself to suggest again as Thoreau did all of his life, revolution. PHILIP CORNER: A lot of people hang up to restrictions which are not only in the external institutions. They are in your own mind. PHIL GLASS: The quintessence of harmonic music is in cadence for me. STEVE REICH: You must love music or be a duck. ROBERT ASHLEY: If you record a conversation with fifty people in the United States about their ideas, and if you get into each conversation really deeply, that when you get to the end, you will have one of me, one of Steve Reich, but you will have fifty of yourself. ALVIN LUCIER: But when you stutter, you scan the language. You are scanning your past. JOAN LA BARBARA: You know, instead of trying to direct the voice, I try to let the voice direct me. PAULINE OLIVEROS: I’m aware of my own physiology. And then I’m hearing it as a whole, and I’m aware of the various rates that are going on, the kinds of breaks in concentration that occur and how they are corrected. DAVID ROSENBOOM: What I’m looking at really is the existence of regularly pulsing energy. RICHARD TEITELBAUM: I played the same synthesizer for ten years. Me and it are very close to each other. LARRY AUSTIN: Ives’ main thing, I feel, was the concept of layering and getting us out of the idea that the sounds always had to come from the same place; that is, right in front of you. JAMES TENNEY: I realized in writing these pieces that this was one way to avoid drama, which I’m still trying to find ways to avoid. J. B. FLOYD about NANCARROW: Somebody actually brought up what was going to happen to the piano roles after he died; and he said, “Why? Do you want one?” LA MONTE YOUNG: You can always say that you wanted La Monte Young, but it was impossible. He was so mercenary, he wanted money. CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE: I’m searching for sort of this golden sonority. CHARLES MORROW: The high art itself is a form of power consciousness, that in a way one listens to the high art in the same way that one walks around being a flirt. GARRETT LIST: The only way for a one-world kind of feeling is where each nationality, each locality, has its own strength; so that people don’t need to have to take from another place. FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners. JOHN MC GUIRE: But sooner or later I am sure that I will return to America. BEN JOHNSTON about HARRY PARTCH: He was really willing to be as direct and as simple and as corny as you like, as people are when they aren’t trying to be concert artists."Desert Plants" was a cult book in the seventies because it brought the first information about the US-American composer-performer scene to Europe. Numerous examples of sheet music and entire scores enrich this insight into a time of experimentation that needs to be brought back into consciousness. The book, which has been reprinted unchanged, is dedicated to Carol Byl, who at the time transcribed the tapes largely literally in order to maintain the "stream of consciousness". The cover picture was drawn by Michael von Biel. The edition is accompanied by a CD which makes the surviving sound documents available in restored form as mp3 files, including the famous telephone conversation with La Monte Young. Thus the original voices from 1975 can be heard – a contemporary document.   Walter Zimmermann's interview partners are 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).

English-German Edition in two volumes 906 pages. These lectures, discussions were within the last years of Feldman's life, he died in September 1987, these were 1985 to 1987, for the "Nieuwe Muziek" in Middleburg, and the topics, subject matter runs the entire cornocopia of post war music, modernity, complexity, post-modernity, post-truth, post metaphysics. The discussion(s) are with all top-recorgnized composers Kaija Saariho, Iannis Xenakis, pianist Geoffrey D. Madge, Louis Andriessen, and not-so-well-known composers but important nonetheless as Konrad Boehmer and Bunita Marcus, Feldman's companion.Feldman was always a very engaging talker, conversationaist, he primed himslef with into-the-night discussions at the Cedar Bar in New York City, speaking with great painters de Kooning, Franz Kline, Pollock, Marc Rothko, Philip Guston his close friend.There is much anecdotal shibboleths here as well, as when a student who came to Alban Berg, and after some hours was not examining the student's composition. Berg said something like "how can you be a composer and not smoke cigarettes?". Time spent with Stefan Wolpe was also productive, right out of high school, and the house concerts of his works and others.

Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be “an addict” and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. ‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness.softcover, 345pp Pilot Press, London 2025

During the crucifixion Christ is said to have sustained 5 wounds: 1 in each hand and foot from the nails of the cross, and the 5th was formed when the side of Christ was pierced by the sword of Longinus. These 5 wounds became objects of specific veneration in the late Middle Ages and in manuscripts the side wound is usually depicted as a mandorla: an almond/diamond/vulvic shape, generally isolated from Christ's body and oriented vertically on the page. It is the vulvic shape of these images, and their implications, that this publication takes as its focus. Images of the side wound were used as talismans, one could gain magical protections by looking at them, touching, ingesting, or wrapping them around your body, and they are often found on birth girdles: rolls of parchment with magical formulae for easing birth. Mystics of this time speak of drinking from the wound, kissing it, entering it, living within it, and subsequently being birthed from the wound. The vulvic representation of the wound produced a state where Christ was seen as neither fully male, nor fully female, but rather as an unstably sexed figure, asserting a constant fluidity. Through this side wound Christ became a mother, lover, object of erotic desire, and a portal for the whole universe to emerge from. SIDE WOUND: The Female Christ provides an overview of the many ways the side wound has been interpreted historically and includes images and archival information of the numerous manuscripts depicting the side wound.Softcover, Staplebound 128 x 177mm, 36pp Hildegard Press, Canada, 2025

originally published in 1999 A4, 30pp Veer Books 1002 & Writers Forum, 2024‘The voice “dead a hundred years … from the bottom of the Thames … “ speaks: “my friend and I tore up the pavements and sucked all the ghosts out … “. Thereafter through 3 chapters it modulates into collage, disconnected discursive fragments, fractured narrative and a derisive scenario; throughout death lurks in the background of a society defined by political oppression and haunted by its spectral victims.“we crawl out from the river and knock on the doors of dead poets when they answer with violence we are less than amazed … “The challenge is a genuine collectivity: “from highgate through hackney and holloway towards london”.This collection from 1999 foreshadows the themes of later work with a less relentless approach. But though more unpredictably deployed its energies are no less obvious.’

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.  Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge. If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.Softcover, A6, 32pp Spiral House, London, November 2025   Imprint: Spiral HouseSeries: PortalsPaperback OriginalPublication date: 13 November 2025ISBN: 978-1-0685918-9-1Extent: 32 pages

Miles Krassen has gathered and re-edited over 1,000 tunes, bringing up to date Capt. Francis O'Neill's famed collection of Irish dance music, airs, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and marches. Includes an introduction on the history ofIrish music with tips on playing with an authentic feeling. Features new settings from the playing of Michael Coleman & the Sligo Fiddle Masters.Softcover, A4, 256pp Oak Publications, originally published 1976, 1992

Softcover, 96pp Ossian Publications, originally published 1974    The Whistle and Sing! handbooks were designed by the author, Eamon Jordan, with a dual purpose; to offer modern arrangements of the more tuneful songs, airs and dance music of Ireland and to write these down from actual players in a  Songs, airs and dance music from Ireland. A delightful book containing eighteen songs and more than sixty tunes in simple, modern arrangements. Beginners can approach this book with confidence and more experienced players have theopportunity to elaborate. There are specific notes and hints for most traditional instruments. Eamonn Jordan is the son of Brigid McElroy, a traditional folk singer from Lurgan, Co. Armagh and grandson of Thomas McElroy, fiddler and healer.  He has always been fascinated by the richness of the folk tradition in Ulster, a meld of the Scottish. English and native Gaelic traditions. Donegal, that cultural bridge between Scotland and Ireland, is where he has chosen to make his home. Arising from the years spent by Eamonn in teaching traditional music in Ulster. Thomas O'Canainn, lecturer, composer and musician, and author of the influential 'Traditional Music in Ireland' has described Eamonn as 'the teacher of a whole new generation of Irish musicians'.

"Find a shell or a flute," Fanny Howe insists in one poem, "inhabit it with music." The Lyrics, the first book in a new trilogy, explores the poet's relationship between the world and the spirit, haplessness and happiness, the thing uttered and the utterly lost. Howe's spiritual struggle demands a paring down, a recognition of political and class warfare, and an offering up of oneself and one's talents. But to do so, one must discern the difference between good and evil, even when the two often look alike. The Lyrics is the new work by an essential poet, "driven by the lyric's / Quest for rest that never / (God willing) will be found."Paperback, 80pp Graywolf Press, 2007

Weaving together history, literature and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss and the enduring power of the spirit world. The strange word ‘Mdeilmm’ was reported to have been uttered by the spirit of Shakespeare when called up during a séance in 1854 at the instigation of the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo was then living in exile on the island of Jersey where he took part in several such séances. Hélène Cixous weaves this scene into a rich tapestry that draws from many corners of her world both real and fictional: Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man, Poe’s story ‘The Gold Bug’, but also film footage of the assassination of Itzhak Rabin and many layers of memories of her Algerian childhood. These memories are especially provoked by family archives that turn up against all odds, including her father’s obituary from an Algiers newspaper. The most curious documents are pages of transcribed communications from spirits of the departed, her father and grandfather among them. These lead Cixous’s narrator to vivid evocations of the odd couple Alice and Mr Émile who lived on the topmost floor of the house occupied below by three generations of the Cixous family in Oran. They were practising spiritualists who regularly received visits from the dead whose messages Alice faithfully wrote down. The narrator, in the end, thinks that she could become a believer. Weaving together history, literature and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss and the enduring power of the spirit world. Meanwhile, Cixous’s reader falls under the spell of the author’s incomparable ‘mole speech’, the language in which poets communicate.Mole SpeechTranslated by Peggy KamufHardback, 164ppSeagull Books, 2025

The Cosmic Oval is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear. In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time. Commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.Softcover, A6, 95pp Spiral House, Portal Series, November 2025

What does it mean to process field recordings from the Ukrainian war in an electronic music track? How can the sampling of an Armenian keyboard melody be read as a critique of traditional gender roles? And what does it say about voyeurism in our culture when a techno producer uses viral YouTube videos as the basic material of his compositions? A book by Norient curator and editor Hannes Liechti. Across five detailed case studies, Hannes Liechti discusses the culture and politics of musical sampling from a new perspective. Giving particular attention to the reasons behind sampling processes, Liechti’s in-depth analysis of sampling strategies by artists such as COOL FOR YOU and Lara Sarkissian shows that sampling political material, and sampling with political intentions reveals a complex net of contexts, meanings, and often deeply personal choices and creative decisions. Offering tangible tools and concepts for further exploration of sample-based music, the book illustrates the potential of popular music to tell stories about the world, and it describes the habits, thoughts, and realities of the laptop producer, one of the core actors in 21st century music-making.Softcover, full colour, 16.5 × 23.5 cm, 354pp Norient Books, Bern, Sept 2022

What happens to curatorial practices when treated as multi-voiced, pluralistic, and process-based? Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions asks what curatorship could be when it is freed from its elitist notions. It gathers essays, academic articles, poems, interviews, and photo essays from 33 contributors from all over the world. Together, they seek to open up the term from a linear and often single-voiced method, offering to understand curating also as a queer, non-binary, or a mundane, individual activity that includes one’s own experiences and perceptions. On the occasion of Norient’s 20th anniversary, we attempt to disentangle the term curatorship from the received definition as a mere selecting process within the creative realm.   with 33 contributions incl. short essays, comments, poems, articles, and photo essays by Monia Acciari, AGF aka poemproducer, Ailín Grad aka Aylu, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Lendl Barcelos, Sandeep Bhagwati, Phila Bergmann, Thomas Burkhalter, Vivian Caccuri, Chico Dub, Daniel «duex» Fontana, Andrea Goetzke, Natalie Gravenor, Nikhila H., Rim Jasmin Irscheid, Raphael Kariuki aka DJ Raph, Steph Kretowicz, Felipe Larozza, Ari Robey-Lawrence, Sulgi Lie, Imaad Majeed, Laura Mascarenhas, Thea Reifler, Philipp Rhensius, Sergio Salazar, Rebecca Salvadori, Suvani Suri, Gisela Swaragita, Chafic Tabbara, Lucia Udvardyová, Gita Viswanath, Salomé VoegelinSoftcover, full colour, 15.5 × 23 cm, 288ppNorient Books, Bern, 2023

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is everywhere, writers, thinkers, poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances. Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation. This collection is edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, with contributions from Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al-Nakhala, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny, Houria Bouteldja, Anees Ghanima, Sahar Khalifeh, Laleh Khalili, Lujayn, Mira Mattar, Lina Meruane, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana, Rahul Rao, Nasser Rabah, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri. Co-published by TBA21. Visit the Palestine is everywhere digital platform. All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas Paperback, 192pp Silver Press, October 2025

Turn My Head Into Sound: A history of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine tells the story of one of the great sonic innovators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My Bloody Valentine have released only three albums in their forty-year career, but each of them has made a seismic impact. Isn’t Anything (1988) is often cited as one of the Ur-texts of shoegaze and dream rock; Loveless (1991) is an undisputed masterpiece heralded by many as the best album of the 1990s; m b v (2013) is one of the best-loved comeback albums in recent memory. For those who know Kevin Shields and his work already, he is an indie-rock icon, but by other measures he’s still a relatively obscure figure in the musical mainstream, and to date there has been no full-length appraisal of his work or his band’s career. Until now. Shields is truly a one-of-a-kind musician, and this book—which fills in the gaps, corrects errors, and takes an objective look at the band’s entire career, warts and all—paints the full picture of one of the most revolutionary sonic artists of our time. Turn My Head Into Sound is based on numerous interviews with people who were there (some of them speaking on the record for the first time) as well as an exhaustive archive of band-related material that the author has been assembling since 1990. Longtime fans of the band will find plenty of new information here, including the full story of the tumultuous period at Island Records following the release of Loveless. The lost years that followed would see Shields employed as engineer, producer, and remixer while also becoming an auxiliary member of Primal Scream. This book’s analysis of this diverse but lesser-known work offers reader a much fuller picture of the relentless creativity and perfectionism at the center of his process.Softcover, 15 x 22cm, 336pp Jawbone Press, Oct 2025

Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly... Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her.Paperback, 174pp Moist Books, London, September 2025

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.trans. Grace Nissan   Softcover, 280pp Divided, London, September 2025