‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen HatherleyPleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

"These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut." So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.

Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

When originally published in 1974, Ekkehard Jost's Free Jazz was the first examination of the new music of such innovators as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jost studied the music (not the lives) of a selection of musicians, black jazz artists who pioneered a new form of African American music, to arrive at the most in-depth look so far at the phenomenon of free jazz. Free jazz is not absolutely free, as Jost is at pains to point out. As each convention of the old music was abrogated, new conventions arose, whether they were rhythmic, melodic, tonal, or compositional, Coltrane's move into modal music was governed by different principles than Coleman's melodic excursions Sun Ra's attention to texture and rhythm created an entirely different big bang sound then had Mingus's attention to form. In Free Jazz, Jost paints a group of ten "style portraits", musical images of the styles and techniques of John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, the Chicago-based AACM (which included Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago), and Sun Ra and his Arkestra. As a composite picture of some of the most compelling music of the 1960s and '70s, Free Jazz is unequalled for the depth and clarity of its analysis and its even handed approach.

This outstanding biography of the cult guitar player will likely cause you to abandon everything you thought you knew about jazz improvisation, post-punk and the avant-garde. Derek Bailey was at the top of his profession as a dance band and record-session guitarist when, in the early 1960s, he began playing an uncompromisingly abstract form of music. Today his anti-idiom of “Free Improvisation” has become the lingua franca of the “avant” scene, with Pat Metheny, John Zorn, David Sylvian and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore among his admirers.

When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of club regulars called Pink Floyd recorded their first single, Joe Boyd was the producer; when a young songwriter named Nick Drake wanted to give his demo tape to someone, he chose Joe Boyd.More than any previous '60s music autobiography, Joe Boyd's White Bicycles offers the real story of what it was like to be there at the time. His greatest coup is bringing to life the famously elusive figure of Nick Drake - the first time he's been written about by anyone who knew him well.As well as the '60s heavy-hitters, this book also offers wonderfully vivid portraits of a whole host of other musicians: everyone from the great jazzman Coleman Hawkins to the folk diva Sandy Denny, Lonnie Johnson to Eric Clapton, The Incredible String Band to Fairport Convention.

A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits – books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century. Musician and artist Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and conventions for four decades. As a founding member of the hugely influential avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle, as one half of electronic pioneers Chris and Cosey, and as an artist channelling her experience in pornographic modelling and striptease, her work on the margins has come to reshape the mainstream. Shocking, wise and life-affirming, Art Sex Music is the fascinating memoir of an inspirational woman.

Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. Solitary Mathilda has long been enamored with the 'Bright Young Things' of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda's journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

“You wouldn’t have had hardcore had it not been for bleep. If you took bleep out of the equation, Britsh dance music would be completely different.” - Mark Archer, Altern8 “Bleep provided the building blocks of the UK sound that followed – the emotions, the edge, the darkness and the sub-bass. Later generations have taken these elements and done something new, but the fundamentals are still there.” - Neil Landstrumm “Since bleep, there’s always been a heavy bassline thing coming from Sheffield and Leeds. Look at what’s come later, with bassline, the Niche sound and Toddla T. From one generation to the next, it’s always been about bass.” - Luca LozanoThe previously untold story of British dance music’s first sub-bass revolution, tracing the origins, development, impact and influence of bleep techno, and the subsequent musical styles it inspired, on UK club culture. Originally published in 2019, it has now been revised, updated and expanded. Errors have been corrected, some chapters have been expanded, analysis has been added and further footnotes have been included to include even more information and citations. There’s also now an additional ‘Afterword’ chapter that reflects on the story, the author’s journey as a researcher, and changing perspectives around UK dance music history.

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room 'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' GuardianA cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Silvia Federici argues that, no less than the witch hunts in sixteenth and seventeenth century, the new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people's most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what we discover behind today's violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remoulding of women's reproductive activities and subjectivity. As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms.

Paperback608 pagesPublished September 4th 2001  The first major account of the history of reggae, black music journalist Lloyd Bradley describes its origins and development in Jamaica, from ska to rock-steady to dub and then to reggae itself, a local music which conquered the world. There are many extraordinary stories about characters like Prince Buster, King Tubby and Bob Marley. But this is more than a book of music history: it relates the story of reggae to the whole history of Jamaica, from colonial island to troubled independence, and Jamaicans, from Kingston to London.

"Myself, Delia and Margery - a trinity of the sacred and profane, sinners and saints of a kind. Three defiant women with our individual, unconventional attitude to life. Untameable spirits, progressive thinkers living within the inherent societal constraints of our times."In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. While researching Delia's life, Cosey became immersed in Derbyshire's story and uncovered some fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time Cosey began reading about Margery Kempe, the 15th century mystic visionary who wrote the first English language autobiography.Re-sisters is the story of three women consumed by their passion for life, a passion they expressed through music, art and lifestyle; they were undaunted by the consequences they faced in pursuit of enriching their lives, and fiercely challenged the societal and cultural norms of their time.

“Alex Wheatle is an inspirer. He sheds light in dark places . . . He is a vital writer” LEMN SISSAY Abandoned as a baby to the British care system, Alex Wheatle grows up with no knowledge of his Jamaican parentage or family history. Later, he is inexorably drawn to reggae, his lifeline through disrupted teenage years and the challenges of living as a young Black man in 1980s Britain. “Alex Wheatle is the real deal; he writes with heart and authenticity, books that make you laugh and worry and cry and hold your breath” KIT DE WAAL Alex’s youth was portrayed in Oscar Award-winning director Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series (2020). In Sufferah, he tells his own story urgently, vividly and unsentimentally. His award-winning fiction – and this memoir – are a call to never give up hope. Sufferah reminds us that words can be our sustenance, and music our heartbeat. “Alex Wheatle writes from a place of honesty and passion” STEVE McQUEEN, director of Small AxeIn this breathtaking memoir, acclaimed writer Alex Wheatle shows how music became his salvation through a childhood marred by abuse and his imprisonment as a young man protesting against systemic racism and police brutality. Abandoned as a baby to the British care system, Alex grows up with no knowledge of his Jamaican parentage or family history. Later, he is inexorably drawn to reggae, his lifeline through disrupted teenage years, the challenges of living as a young Black man in 1980s Britain and his imprisonment for protesting against systemic racism and police brutality.Alex’s youth was portrayed in Oscar Award-winning director Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series. In Sufferah, he tells his own story, urgently, vividly and unsentimentally. His award-winning fiction – and this memoir – are a call to never give up hope. They remind us that words can be our sustenance, and music our heartbeat.

François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician based in Paris. In addition to being Director of INA GRM, Bonnet is also a writer and theoretician. As a musician, Bonnet often works under the project name Kassel Jaeger. He has been collaborating with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Akira Rabelais or James Rushford Graphic design : Bartolomé Sanson. English edition11 x 16 cm (softcover)56 pages This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as “music” is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music—this, ultimately, is the ambition of the lines to come.

Reprinted for the first time in over twenty years, Kevin Killian’s first book of poetry is an audacious, operatic dive into the darkest recesses of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Killian reported he was “frozen, unable to think of a way to write about AIDS crisis”. A year later, his friend Kathy Acker suggested the “films of Dario Argento as a prism through which to take apart horror of living and dying in AIDS era”. The result is Argento Series, framing Killian’s real-life experience of losing his friends and lovers to the disease through the camera lens of Italian horror filmmaker, Dario Argento. Here, AIDS is cast as the horror film monster, wreaking cold, unfeeling chaos and destruction wherever it finds itself. Blending a chilling, impersonal observation of death with Killian's typical high camp, tenderness and O'Hara-like wit, the poems use unflinching honesty and gallows humour to devastating effect. In Argento Series, Killian finds expression for a crisis, and moment in history, that changed everything, forever. --- Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Fascination: Memoirs and the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019.

‘John Wieners has been described as both ‘the greatest poet of emotion’ (by Robert Creeley) and ‘the poet laureate of gay liberation’ (within the Gay Liberation press). Solitary Pleasure delivers us this poet raw with mid-century queer feelings. Here, we encounter a writer preoccupied with the power and magic of poetics to profoundly render love, loss and survival in the face of destruction.’— Nat Raha, from the introduction 'Any "selected poems" is going to reveal the tastes of its editor, especially when those poems are selected from among an extensive body of work like the one John Wieners left us. Richard Porter's taste is exquisite, and his selection covers great ground, from the torch song poems of Wieners' early career to the rich, tessellated works of his beautiful and anguished late-sixties period. If I wanted a friend to fall in love with John Wieners, I'd give them this book.' — Michael Seth Stewart, editor of Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (City Lights) 'This book is a great love held on paper, groaning out of Black Mountain and Boston. You are hit accurately by the poet flying around you as a reincarnated bow and arrow cherub. John Wieners is a fever dream where the poems forever maintain their mystery, releasing a flood of spontaneity in the reader's imagination. Let's get in the magic with both feet; let's do it now!' — CAConrad, author of Amanda Paradise and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books)Solitary Pleasure is a new collection of poetry, journal entries, letters and ephemera by the American poet John Wieners, edited by Richard Porter with an introduction by Nat Raha. --- John Wieners (1934-2002) was a poet, a Black Mountain College alumnus and an antiwar, gay rights & mental health activist.