Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.    December, 2006 Duke University Press pp.240  In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.   Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  Rough trade books, May 2023 17.1 x 1.5 x 12.9 cm        168pp 978-1914236310   Do Your Own Thing is a full-length work of non-fiction from artist and musician RICHARD PHOENIX detailing his experiences of the best underground arts scene you’ve never heard of—Do Your Own Thing, a project run by learning disability arts organisation Heart n Soul.Looking at the transformative potential of working to support creative young people make the music and art they want to, this book contributes essential new voices, reflections and considerations to the established ideas of ‘Do It Yourself’ culture. Phoenix’s book, written with a disarming and idiosyncratic voice, asks what our often reductive understanding of DIY aesthetics might mean in light of questions about access, support and who gives permission to whom to make art, guiding us through the kind of project only spoken about in funding reports and transforming it into a polyphonic, collaborative and joyful work of art.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  faber, 2014  originally published 1972 Edna O’Brien (born December 15, 1930, Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland) is an Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter  Edna O'Brien's haunting spectre of a novel, Night, is narrated by one of her most memorable characters, Mary Hooligan. Lying on a four-poster bed, unable to sleep, she recounts her (mis)adventures, courtships, and sexual encounters of the most transgressive kind in a narrative voice of blistering, radical originality.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  ISBN: 9781913689711 Paperback with flaps144 pp. | 124 x 191 mm published, May 2023, Strange Attractor PressThe legendary lost novel in which fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming passion for Pepsi Cola and his love for schoolmate Peggy."He walked into the turbulent super market. There were people everywhere. His eyes swept over the shelves and stabilised on a large stack of Pepsi-colas. He could almost experience the cool fizzy liquid descending his parched throat."Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is the uniquely vivid expression of a young woman trying to make sense of the confusing, often brutal world she in which found herself.Published in 1982 by a vanity press who took £800 from its young author and gave her only a single book in return, it's thought that fewer than ten original copies still exist in the world.Shortly after its publication, June-Alison and her sister Jennifer would become infamous as "The Silent Twins" and find themselves cruelly incarcerated for over a decade in Broadmoor Hospital. This author-approved edition makes June-Alison Gibbon's remarkable vision widely available for the first time.

Part of a special series curated by Roy Claire Potter on occasion of the upcoming launch of The Wastes, published this June by Bookworks.  Pages: 312 Published: December 2017, Duke University PressIn Authoring Autism M. Remi Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. They also critique early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. Using storying as their method, they present an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. In so doing, they demonstrate how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.

205 x 255mm 208 pages, softcover Sternberg Press, 2024A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people. In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023. The publication features newly commissioned texts including three long-form essays by Aruna D'Souza, Anthony Huberman, and Dylan Robinson/Patrick Nickleson; experimental short-form writing by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, and Sigbjørn Skåden; an introduction by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler; and a conclusion by Candice Hopkins.

With a Foreword (Programme Notes) by Erika Balsom ;an ‘Intermission’ from Bill Drummond ;& an Afterword by Nicole Brenez ...Edited by Dominic JaeckleTenement #10 / ISBN: 978-1-7393851-1-8324pp / 140 x 216mmDesigned and typeset by Traven T. CrovesPublished November 5th 2023, Tennement PressAll films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment.Alan Moore

staple-bound published, 2024 by runamok press Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. Shapeshifting is his eleventh book of poetry. His work was in the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has composed and performed music for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre. A collection of prose is forthcoming from Pilot Press.These poems grow out of ‘the hairline fracture/ writ through every dawn’, repeatingly remaking the forms of jackdaw, sycamore, Icarus. Life courses through them, taking the shape of raindrops that slick bodies with ‘a conductive gel razing separateness’. In a gesture that feels as timeless as it is astonishingly prescient, they build, and commit themselves to endlessly rebuilding, a space-time for joy within this ‘hell without echo/ entirely above ground’.ELLEN DILLONThis thorny and beautiful collection of poems is riven with wants realised, frustrations, moments of desire gnarled up. Amongst the delta, the thicket and the mountain, Timothy  Thornton declares an uneasy truce between the bitter and the euphoric.HUW LEMMEYPoems and language as cresting, skirmishing, released-exposed things — I can think of no better writer for our times. Thornton’s work draws upon Bosch-monstrous myths, the quiet undeniablities of folklore and the smarting contemporary moment where calculation and recklessness, the seething and the stark, vulnerability and mischief all pluck at narrative to provide its own omens. Full of consolation, grief, and smaller but pressing, bolting, rootling truths that buck between the reader’s hands, we are lucky to be in shapeshifting’s company, watchful all the while.ELEY WILLIAMS

Paperback 304 pages‘A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea’ Brian Eno ‘As memorable, pleasurable and irrational as all the highest quests’ John Higgs ‘A perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music’ Cosey Fanni Tutti What does the foghorn sound like? It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn’s colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco. Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman’s intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.

paperback. 630 pp. feb 2024A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau's fundamental bass, Riemann's harmonic function, Schenker's hierarchic analysis, Forte's pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman's auditory scene, Terhardt's virtual pitch, Krumhansl's tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt's evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: • Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? • What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

Play for Today: Cornelius Cardew book in collaboration with Middlesex University and M HKA, Antwerp. ISBN 978-0-9558299-1-8This book was published to coincide with Cornelius Cardew: Play for Today exhibition which took place here at Drawing Room. This book was co-published by Drawing Room and MuHKA, Antwerp, in collaboration with Middlesex University. In this 112 page book extracts from ‘Treatise’, ‘Schooltime Compositions’, ‘Nature Study Notes’ and other visual material are interspersed with essays by Michael Parsons (composer, performer and co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra), Andrea Phillips (Director, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London), Adrian Rifkin (Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London), Rob Stone (Senior Research Fellow, Visual Culture Research Group, Middlesex University) , John Tilbury (musician and Cardew collaborator and biographer), international artists’ collective Ultra-red and Grant Watson and a photo-essay by the Otolith Group. These artists, writers and curators pursue and rekindle the questions and contradictions that Cardew’s practice incorporated.

220 pp., pbMaking audible what is usually inaudible, rendering sound visible in an unusual way, and facilitating a spatial experience of sound­—this is what constitutes the pioneering work that makes Alvin Lucier one of the most important representatives of American music in the second half of the twentieth century. The stated aim of the study at hand is the detailed historical and theoretical exploration of Alvin Lucier’s work, with particular focus on his decidedly reflexive experimental aesthetics. The research is thus based on two essential methodological approaches: on the one hand, a musicological study of the genesis of Lucier’s work, and on the other, an aesthetic analysis of the role of the real within Lucier’s aesthetics.Lucier’s experimental compositions are aesthetic reflections that are constantly making reference to the phenomenology of sound, as well as to the perception of perception itself. His aesthetic vision gravitated towards devising minimalist constellations and processes which, due to the withdrawal of the compositional subject, gave expression to an acoustic phenomenon and the unforeseeable idea inherent to it.

The thing about that kind of punk is that it is expansive & it expands you, sometimes in glorious ways… whatever way I took the lesson, punk was disciplining me in the epic trade of survival by any means necessary… An essay on falling in love with your teachers, following them home from school, and the emancipatory potential of DIY culture. ‘Hallelujah!’ — Shola von Reinhold140 x 200mm, 28 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitched, 2023 Jordan/Martin Hell is a black trans (2s) artist, writer, & researcher. He is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2022) as well as many other speculative novellas, hybrid genre, & critical texts in the CV universe. His writing on art, etc. & interviews have appeared in 032c, Real Review, Mousse Magazine, & others.

Historic pictures from Getatchew's private photo album Getatchew passed away on April 4, 2016 at the age of 81 after a musical career of more than 68 years. As a final tribute The Ex has published this photobook. 168 pages. Four sections of pictures; a selection from Getatchew's private album with historical photos and photos by three very different international photographers — Andy Moor, guitarist in The Ex, Matias Corral and Nick Helderman who came on tour in Europe, America and to Addis Abeba — to document this unique collaboration between Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests.This photobook is the result of what appears to be an unlikely collaboration between Dutch underground band The Ex and Ethiopian saxophone legend Getatchew Mekuria. The Ex fell in love with an old Getatchew cassette from 1972, and in 2004 they wanted to invite him for their 25th Anniversary Festival. They went to Addis to find him and when they met, Getatchew was up for it right away. The result was a fruitful 10-year collaboration with more than a 100 concerts worldwide, plenty of enthusiastic press and two beautiful CD/LPs.In 2014, because of diabetes, he developed serious problems with his legs and couldn't travel any more. The Ex at that point decided to organise a Celebration of Getatchew Mekuria concert series in Ethiopia, including the National Theatre in Addis Abeba. It sold out. 1500 people came and there was a standing ovation. A truly honourable farewell to a great musician. Soon after this, his health began to deteriorate quickly.

published by Tatum Special 216 pp Hardback  edition of 500    Photographs & editing: George NelsonCover design: Charlotte MannA considered meditation on London's contemporary jazz landscape, Scenes is a collection of fly-on-the-wall pictures of its musicians and spaces, from a period when folks got good to the music all over again. The scenes depicted here run the gamut from packed houses to clandestine jams, from the much lauded to the lesser pronounced, allowing for a candid visual exploration on topical themes of multiculturalism, tradition and modernity, age and youth, community and solitude.

published by Cesura//Acceso, Journal for music, politics, and poetics   Cesura was formed in 2014 as a place to think through the politics of music. The first issue was published in 2014. They have since held workshops, talks, radio shows, and put on gigs exploring the politics of music, poetry and performance. http://cesura-acceso.org/Howard Slater's pamphlet A Blind Eye Turned: Notes on Music and Libidinal Economy (Cesura//Acceso, 2016), which looks at the aesthetics of control, alienation and S/M in industrial and experimental music as a critique of libidinal economy.

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.  McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies—particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa—have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

Pages: 384 Illustrations: 32 illustrationsMusical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know American jazz and popular music through the radio, movies, records, and live stage and dance band performances. She was especially moved by the voice of Billie Holiday. In 1962 she and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) left South Africa together for Europe, where they met and recorded with Duke Ellington. Benjamin and Ibrahim spent their lives on the move between Europe, the United States, and South Africa until 1977, when they left Africa for New York City and declared their support for the African National Congress. In New York, Benjamin established her own record company and recorded her music independently from Ibrahim. Musical Echoes reflects twenty years of archival research and conversation between this extraordinary jazz singer and the South African musicologist Carol Ann Muller. The narrative of Benjamin’s life and times is interspersed with Muller’s reflections on the vocalist’s story and its implications for jazz history. --- “Musical Echoes is a wide reaching and important missing link in the development of late twentieth-century jazz. This book needed to be written and deserves to be read with the same patient attention to detail as was poured into it by the author.” — Gregg Akkerman, Journal of Jazz Studies “We get frank and rich recollections by Benjamin of her early life. . . . The sections on Benjamin’s childhood and early adulthood double as something of a social history of coloured cultural and social life in Cape Town before the National Party came to power in 1948. The book contains a rich description of talent concerts, dance bands, jazz clubs, and the impact of radio, records, and cinema on Benjamin’s imagination and musical education. It also deals with Benjamin’s complex racial politics.” — Sean Jacobs, International Journal of African Historical Studies “[A] fascinating biography. . . .” — Bobbi Booker, Philadelphia Tribune “Ibrahim has cited the loss of information as one legacy of apartheid, and the broader context—filling in those gaps—is also key to the appeal of Muller’s meticulously researched book.” — Marcus O'Dair, Jazzwise “Muller . . . does a remarkable job in piecing together Benjamin’s life, work, and significance within the context of post-apartheid history.” — Brian Morton, The Wire “Muller examines Benjamin's experiences with apartheid, her exile from South Africa, and how these experiences helped form her career as a jazz musician. Benjamin's life story is quite colorful, and Muller effectively captures the essence of that story with this call-and-response nature of the presentation and with a writing style that is both engaging and highly descriptive. Recommended. All readers.” — D. J. Schmalenberger, Choice “Muller's biography-plus, of and with Sathima Bea Benjamin, is welcome for many reasons; first and foremost because it spotlights a brilliant architect of song who is far less well known than she should be. But Muller goes further. She challenges still dominant androcentric and Amerocentric jazz discourses, offering alternative frameworks that allow us to consider the dynamics of race, class and gender within whose maelstrom Benjamin shaped her sound.” — Gwen Ansell, Mail & Guardian “Musical Echoes not only introduces a very important vocalist, Sathima Bea Benjamin, to audiences who may not know of her. It also makes a great contribution to scholarship on jazz, world music, cultural theory, and the African diaspora. It challenges us to reconsider and revise the nationalist narratives that characterize much writing on jazz, and it provides a new framework for discussing the production, circulation, and transformation of musical cultures.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday “Sathima Bea Benjamin ought to share company with the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter. . . . [She] never compromis[es] her own musical vision, refusing to either remake herself into an ‘American’ jazz singer or into what the world imagines to be authentically ‘African.’ She is who she is, Sathima Bea Benjamin, South Africa’s greatest jazz singer and one of the best the world has ever known.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, JazzTimes