A5, Staplebound, November, 2021 feat Bärchen und die Milchbubis, Burka Band, Gudrun Gut, Haru Nemuri, Östro 430, Radamel and SIKSA.A Feminist Fanzine About Composition and Sound Art, based in Cologne

a5, staplebound, issue 02, april 2020 featuring AMET, Laurie Anderson, Junko, Annea Lockwood, Julia Mihály and PhewA Feminist Fanzine About Composition and Sound Art, based in Cologne

A5, Staplebound  A Feminist Fanzine About Composition and Sound Art, based in Colognefeaturing Maryanne Amacher, Alessandra Leone, Zoë McPherson, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  translated by: Ranya Abdelrahman published November, 2022, Arablit BooksIn June of 1967, after watching the shape of her country suddenly change for the second time, with hundreds of thousands more Palestinians expelled from their homes, Samira Azzam destroyed the novel she had been working on. Its title must have seemed particularly tragic in the wake of ’67: Sinai Without Borders. Two months later, at the age of 39, Azzam went on a road trip with friends. They were outside of al-Ramtha, Syria, when she suffered a heart attack and died.We had Samira Azzam (1927–1967) for far too few years, and we never got to read what she would do with a novel. Still, she did leave us with five vivid short-story collections, as well as reviews, articles, translations, and countless hours of broadcast radio. Yet after her death, her work fell into a half-shadow, in which she was acknowledged as great, but not quite canonized. In a 2018 article on the Palestinian short story, the critic Faisal Darraj says it plainly: “Azzam has not yet received the accolades she deserves.”This translated collection -- full of her vivid snapshots of life in Palestine and Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century -- is a start at giving Samira Azzam a few of the accolades she deserves.

In 1992, Frans de Waard (of Kapotte Muziek, Beequeen and the Korm Plastics label) was asked to work for Staalplaat, then one of the biggest independent labels for experimental and electronic music. Staalplaat was the home for bands like Muslimgauze, :zoviet*france:, Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate as well as Jaap Blonk, Normally Invisible and Kingdom Scum. With an average of three new releases every month, Staalplaat remained a major player for the next eleven years. Hired to set-up a database and to sell and buy new music, Frans de Waard over the years also assumed a role as (unofficial) business director and A&R; man, and came to be regarded as thehead honcho. In 2003 he’d had enough and decided to quit. This book tells his story about those eleven years, the many high and as many lows of working for a small independent record label, which also functioned as a shop, mail order, radio programme, news outlet, and concert organiser. It’s about embarrassing confrontations with musicians, labels, distributors, and the endless spending on the most unique packagingCD-Land ever saw. Including an interview with Staalplaat founder Geert-Jan Hobijn, a transcript of a radio interview with Muslimgauze, a 1980’s account of Staalplaat’s activities, and a discography, among others. For everyone with an interest in the experimental music scene, and anyone else who wants to read a crazy, funny and sad story about a small struggling record label. Anyone who is interested in a manual of how (not) to run your record label might want to take notes.

From 1984 to 1988 Anthony Blokdijk frequently visited Threshold House in London and corresponded with John Balance of Coil about playing live, releasing music and personal affairs. This book collects scans of Balance’s original letters, including idiosyncratic decorative flourishes and provides insight into his colourful world. Also included two articles on Coil from Blokdijk’s Abrahadabra magazine, and an interview with Coil he conducted for the Dutch magazine Opscene. Translations included. Foreword by Nick Soulsby.

Adam Morris spent more than twenty years at the coal face of the music industry. In 1979, he co-founded the DIY label Malicious Damage Records, releasing post-punk classics by Killing Joke as well as the highly rated John Peel favourite, “Agent Orange” by Ski Patrol.  He worked for two years as an unpaid tour manager for Killing Joke, an experience that later led him to tour manage the reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry, who paid him. He moved from the label into distribution, working in imports and exports where he bought and sold thousands of records from labels like Beggar’s Banquet, 4AD and Alternative Tentacles (Dead Kennedys). He distributed On-U Sounds for Adrian Sherwood, called at Dr Alimantado’s house for breakfast and represented Big Black and Sub Pop Records in Europe.  In 1988 he founded Mr Modo Records, which collaborated with many of the new MIDI based electronic music producers evolving on the scene at that time. This included Coldcut, 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald. He formed the alliance WAU! Mr Modo with Youth and Dr LX Paterson and became manager of The Orb when that group formed.  At one point he was known as the “Peter Grant of Ambient House”.  Ambient house (or chill out music) was a highly influential genre of the new electronic dance culture that achieved global domination from the end of the 1980’s.  Chill Out was a forerunner for what is now known as EDM. Adam became the first manager to take a MIDI based act on a coast to coast tour of North America. At the time, the main stream music industry saw no long term future in MIDI. They could not see how you could play EDM live or tour it globally. In doing their sell out American tours, The Orb pioneered the way forward and proved most of the music industry wrong.  In 1994, Adam lost his “job for life” on his 40th birthday and was ostracised by most of the biz. At that point, he began the first draft of “Losing It,” a fictional account of some of his working experiences inspired by the novels “Spinal Tap” and “Trainspotting.” He described his effort as “Spinal Tap for ravers.” He completed that in 1996.  Little did he know then that it would take another twenty six years before his stories made it into print. But it did. Its a trip, a mad ride to oblivion, but also a warning to us all.

The book details the history of The Legendary Pink Dots, the band well-known for combining melody and mood in beautiful, haunting songs and soundscapes. This book documents the band’s first decade in all its despair and glory. Based on their extensive discography, it combines facts and confabulation from various members of the Legendary Pink Dots and close associates. With unique images and an exclusive compact disc featuring Dots-songs from the 1980s (including two previously unreleased ones!) selected by band members, Close Your Eyes, You Can Be A Space Captain is an incentive to sing while you may!

Book containing all six issues of the Neumusik fanzine which David Elliott edited between 1979-82 while at university. The ‘zine focussed on European, electronic and experimental music which had come out of krautrock, French progressive rock and the more esoteric side of British post-punk. David travelled extensively meeting musicians in Germany and France, and for a year was based in Strasbourg. Interviews and articles range from Conrad Schnitzler and Richard Pinhas to Florian Fricke and Chris Carter. Most issues were 60-80 pages long so, together with new text and photos, this compendium weighs in at a chunky 425 pages. It also touches on the parallel YHR label.

Translated from the Italianby Cristina Viti Tenement Press, Dec 2022 170ppWritten in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.   Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense.

Tenement Press, October 2021 408pp   An anthology publication,featuring contributions fromJohn Akomfrah;Chloe Aridjis;Dennis Cooper;Laura Mulvey;Chris Petit;Mania Akbari;Elena Gorfinkel;Juliet Jacques;Ben Rivers;Dan Fox;Sean Price Williams;Adam Christensen;Stewart Home;Stephen Watts;Tony Grisoni;Gideon Koppel;Astra Taylor;Miranda Pennell;Gareth Evans;Adam Roberts;Tai Shani;Anna Thew;Xiaolu Guo;Andrea Luka Zimmerman;William Fowler;Athina Tsangari;John Rogers;Shama Khanna;Shezad Dawood;Damien Sanville;& Stanley (& Winstanley) Schtinter.The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

(eds.) Sanja Perovic,Rosa Mucignat,Jacob McGuinn, & Cristina Viti, with Dominic J. Jaeckle& Benjamin PickfordTenement Press / No University Press #1978-1-7393851-3-2247pp March, 2024 English/ FrenchAssembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

This is a book about records considered ‘in themselves’.  It is not about musicians, or music, or design, or music history — though all those things are considered at various points.  This book tries to cast light on the unique role played by records in western culture in the late twentieth century.  Records deeply penetrated everyday life and encompassed entire worldviews through their combination of sound, design and modern mythology.  In this book a diverse group of people reflect on their relationship to a specific vinyl record, and in the process reflect the diversity of human connections, needs and aspirations that records can represent.    In addition thematic essays by contributors look at specific kinds of records and their significance to popular culture, providing a broader context in which to consider the personal stories that form the core of the book.

528 pages, softback, Omnibus Press, 2024Listening To The Music The Machines Make tells the story of a single generation of post-punk musicians, mavericks, visionaries and opportunists tinkering with primitive synthesisers in bedrooms, bedsits and basements around Britain, who assembled a potent cocktail of ideas and influences, took them apart, mixed them up, and reassembled them in entirely new ways to create a genuine golden age of British pop, and along the way creating some of the most enduring, iconic and influential records in pop history. It sets out to examine the multitude of influences that led to the synthpop revolution that spanned 1978 to 1983; tell the definitive story of a true golden age of British pop through the careers, releases and stories of the movement’s pioneers, mavericks and superstars; and explores the era’s lasting musical impact and enduring influence, including it’s role in the development of hip-hop, house, techno and beyond.

240pp, Duke, 2024, softback In Making Value, Timothy D. Taylor examines how people's conceptions of value inform and shape their production and consumption of music. Drawing on anthropological value theory, Taylor theorizes music's economic and noneconomic forms of value both ethnographically and historically. He covers the creation and exchange of value in a wide range of contexts: indie rock scenes, an Irish traditional music session, the work of music managers, how supply chains function to create various forms of value, how trendspotters seek out and create value, and how musical performances act as media of value. Taylor shows that to focus on value is to attend to what is meaningful to people as they move through their worlds. Ultimately, Taylor demonstrates that theorizing value aids us in moving beyond the music itself toward understanding how musicians, workers in the music business, and audiences struggle to make and maintain what they value.

Music | English Heretic (bandcamp.com)    The English heretic project began in 2003 as a kind of shadowy twin and dark antidote to the sterility of English Heritage. The English Heretic Collection is a visionary field report based on fifteen years of deep-vein travel to England's strangest landscapes – with a host of tragic players.  From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making. Part countercultural history of England, part ghost story, and part magickal psychogeography, The English Heretic Collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making. Comprising 14 magazine type sections within the book, imagine living the gaudy occult reality of Man, Myth and Magic. Somewhere in that fetid, yellow smell awaits your favourite nightmare of culture...

Distillation of Sound traces the beginnings of dub music in Jamaica and how the culture is distilled throughout the world. It focuses on the analysis of some of the most famous full-length albums of dub music and how the engineers, producers, and musicians created a new sound that changed the way that people heard music. Distillation of Sound focuses on the original music of Jamaica and how, through dub reggae, Jamaican culture was expanded and shifted.  It will further the discussion on dub music, its importance to Jamaican culture, and its influence on the rest of the world. Dub music in Jamaica started in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade had influenced an entire population.  The music began to use the rhythm track of a song as a song itself and spread quickly throughout the sound systems of the island.  The importance of dub music and its influence on the music world frames the discussions in this new book. How dub travelled and distilled to three places in the world is covered in chapters focussing on the rise and spread of dub in New York City, in England and in Japan. Abbey discusses the separation between dub as a product and dub as an act of the engineer.  Codifying these two elements, and tracing them, will allow for a more definitive approach to the culture and music of dub. To define it, and its surrounding elements, five of the first albums produced in the genre are discussed in three parameters that help to define and set up the culture of dub music.  The albums discussed are Java, Java, Java, Java (Impact All Stars), Aquarius Dub (Herman Chin Loy), Blackboard Jungle Dub (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry), The Message Dubwise (Prince Buster), King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Augustus Pablo).

Edited by: Alejandra Luciana Cárdenas. published, 2020 Contributions by: Agustín Genoud, Aleyda Rocha Sepulveda, Carlos Colmenares Gil, Daniela Medina Poch, Donovan Adrián, Hernández Castellanos José, Cláudio S. Castanheira, Louise M. Hisayasu, Luis Alvarado, Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira, Rodrigo Toro, Susan Campos Fonseca. This book was published within the framework of the second edition of the festival Radical Sounds Latin America. English / Spanish 170 pages12,5 X 19,0 cmSoftcoverA timely new book of ten essays stemming from the second edition of the Radical Sounds Latin America festival, which took place virtually in October 2020. Writers, academics and musicians discuss new perspectives on Latin American music, with essays tackling case studies and research in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Guajira peninsula.