A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and a range of musicians, from Mtume to Black Unity Trio, to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—“a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,” as Spellman writes in the book’s preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, “to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool” and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers “to finally make a way for themselves.” This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.” --- David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton  (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). He is currently a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, where he is working on two manuscripts, Survival Music: Free Jazz Then and Now and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1943–Present  (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and a further edited collection on Umbra.  A.B. Spellman is a poet, music critic, and former director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the National Endowment of the Arts.

The Synth History interviews… available in tangible 'zine form! The second thick high quality 150+ page issue is bigger than the last one! It features a compilation of interviews with contemporary and legendary icons within the synth world. Including interviews with Weyes Blood, Trent Reznor, Sylvan Esso, Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Nikolai Fraiture of The Strokes, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (cover photo), John Carpenter, Jean-Michel Jarre, Jackie Cohen & Jonathan Rado, Izzy Glaudini of Automatic, Hudson Mohawke, Hiroshi Sato interviewed by P-THugg, Fatboy Slim, Ela Minus, Chrome Sparks, Carl Craig, Black Marble, Alan Palomo, A-Trak, and specials from Alison Tavel with the Resyntaor Synth, and Lance Hill with Vintage Synthesizer Museum.

An indispensable guide to a deeper understanding of the nature of the human voice and its harmonic possibilities from East to West. Overtone Singing is the most comprehensive book ever written on the hidden harmonies of the human voice. Ethnomusicologist and vocalist Mark van Tongeren offers fascinating insights into the timeless and universal aspects of sound and vibration. Grounded in the author's decade-long study of Asian music, the book draws upon field work, interviews with Eastern and Western musicians, and copious scholarship to present a multidisciplinary vision of sound that runs from global music to the science of acoustics and perception, onward to the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of music. Written in a nontechnical style, this generously illustrated book is an indispensable guide for musicians, listeners, and performers seeking a deeper understanding of the nature of the human voice and its harmonic possibilities from East to West.

‘In this blown-away piece of Jarman magic, a fantasy / fable about how to see differently and a cornucopic visual version of the psyche, Derek Jarman casually reconstructs notions of empire, the road trip, and the mid-twentieth century journey of the soul. Trippy, light, fantastic.’ – Ali Smith ‘Derek Jarman was always an inspirational Renaissance figure, whose solidarity and commitment grounded his intense imagination. Here we can see for the first time how this remarkable conjunction of forces was present in his earliest work, and in a medium we did not associate with him – until now. Carry this volume with you as you would the key to all those doors that matter the most.’ – John Akomfrah"Published here for the very first time through our House Sparrow Press imprint, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who ‘smiles with the art of mirrors’, as well as a Sphinx with ‘Silence is Golden’ written in her eyes. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity. This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing."

‘microbursts is a sparklingly original, tender book that remakes language with delicacy and verve – finding new ways to speak loss, change and the many layered movements of the self.’ – Rebecca Tamás --- ‘Haunting, beautiful, honest. This is an incredibly relatable and carefully curated collection of writing and imagery about love, grief and creativity. It is a wholly original, truthful and sensitive portrayal of life and loss’ – Annie Lyonsmicrobursts is a collection of hybrid, lyric essays about the places between life and death; memoir and poetry; making and letting go. Originally written by Reeder as an intense text-based collection of lyric and experimental essays responding to the illnesses and deaths of her parents, it confronts the raw emotions of crisis, grief and creativity. Through collaboration with Thomson, the project expanded to consider how design and visual intervention might alter the nature and impact of the text. The outcome is a book which explores the subjects of illness, crisis, creativity, caring, death and grief, alongside the aesthetic and formal concerns of cross-genre writing, including how image, formatting and text work together to create tension, understanding and pace, expanding the possibilities of the essay and the artist’s book. Formally audacious, linguistically fluid, sensitive and intricate in its visual presentation, microbursts uses the potential and elasticity of the essay form to explore intensely personal, yet universal, experiences and considers the ways in which we can express and communicate these through spatial and linguistic form. Crucially, it achieves these things effortlessly, with its accessible, poetic language and engaging narrative of family, love, care, grief, dying, death and creativity. --- Elizabeth Reeder, originally from Chicago, now lives in Scotland. She writes fiction, narrative non-fiction and hybrid work that creates spaces between forms, subjects and disciplines. Her work explores identity, family, illness and grief, creativity and landscapes. She has published two previous novels, Ramshackle and Fremont, and her latest novel, An Archive of Happiness, was published by Penned in the Margins in September 2020. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. Her website is: elizabethkreeder.com Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer who is also a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her interdisciplinary practice is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made, and she has exhibited nationally and internationally. She earned her doctorate in interdisciplinary arts practice, based around the landscapes and the forests of the North of Scotland, in 2013. She lives and works in Glasgow and in Strathspey. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, is published by Saraband Books. Her website is: www.passingplace.com

‘A real quantum strangeness abounds in Lila Matsumoto’s poems – actual glimpses of life’s fast-running plurality, all the sprouting impressions and perspectives, in misleadingly tidy sentences that unfold like intricate inventions.’– Sam Riviere ‘Visually masterful, painting images like an artist, and summoning scenes from nothing, so that we see them clearly in our own mind’s eye, Matsumoto also has a joyful, wayward sense of humour which made me snort-laugh here and there. If you like your poetry wildly inventive, then this is the book for you!’– Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine ‘An experimental poet whose work is characterised by genuine humour and a simmering sense of the ominous, Matsumoto has a sharp eye for an image, and seems to write with a specificity that draws out the uncanny within the real . . .Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water showcases a poet whose formal experiments are varied, admirable and, taken in succession, full of the unexpected.’– Seán Hewitt, The Irish TimesTwo Twin Pipes Sprout Water brings together five discrete sequences of poems and poem- stories. Moving through different voices and times, landscapes and interiors, Lila Matsumoto’s new collection offers a sense of the world as an observed tableau, inviting the reader to participate in a creation of a strange yet familiar world full of ordinary-extraordinary moments. Rooted in descriptions of objects and nature, these illustrative poems offer a sense of the world as an observed tableau, inviting the reader in as an involved and knowing participant in the creation of a strange yet familiar world. Moving through different voices and times, landscapes and interiors, Matsumoto’s poetry is one of energetic precision, alert to the subtleties of rhythm and to the inherently visual nature of poetry, embracing the hybrid potential of the form.

Journeys Across Breath collects poems from the extraordinary career of one of the UK’s most significant poets, Stephen Watts. Gathering all of Watts’ published works between 1975 and 2005 – as well as a number of unpublished pieces appearing here for the very first time – this collection is an astonishing journey through the life and eyes of a remarkable writer of people and place. This long-awaited volume presents the breadth of Watts’ writing, from early prose poems, through long narrative sequences, fragmentary episodes, and later poetic meditations – all in Watts’ unmistakable voice. A writer of both the intensely personal and deeply-felt universal, Watts’ poetry charts familial histories, friendships, and encounters, set in both remote, rural landscapes across Europe and the changing, urban environs of East London, where Watts has spent much of his life. Journeys Across Breath is a vital collection of work by a major voice in UK poetry, offering an indispensable companion to readers for years to come.

Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas. --- hey say we aren’t built for it. This species or another.Crewcut & fatigued, a swollen head on the box says thin-lipped,When most people talk about killing,they are like virgins talking about sex. Experiential and mapped, VIRGINS takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas. ‘VIRGINS is a mnemonic playlist in the washer-dryer drum-hum of trial and error; the experiment in Poetry of poetry’s worldliness, debauchery, and angst. If we “walk the broken line,” as JD suggests, it’s something we do together through underground and under-resourced subculture formations. These are poems to take with you and read aloud in transit, in public spaces, or quietly to your ride and die comrades. These are poems for the real ones.’ — Ziddy Ibn Sharam Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. They live and work in Berlin, and have received commissions from MoMA Warsaw, The Serpentine Gallery, London, and Volksbühne, Berlin, among others. Drawing on personal experiences as well as history and counter histories, their work addresses the fallibility, adaptability and vulnerability of living being, societies and technologies: the condition of being a body caught in the structures of the social and material world.

‘Etchells makes the comic and cosmic collide. There’s richness in the debris.’ — Jonathan Meades   ‘Micro, macro and all metaphysical states in between, Amends holds our sensory world through death, breath and the first person present tense.’ — Maria Fusco ‘Tim Etchells explores how our 21st-century maladies—the technologies that multiply but cannot meet our desires, social humiliation, the accumulation of capital—have infected our words. He finds a way through by testing language to antic destruction: rehearsing our stupid desires over and over like a playground game, or setting our crap proprieties against sublime acts of god. Amends is a relentless, bleak and funny liturgy against the debasement of how we address ourselves to ourselves, to each other and the world.’ — Jennifer Hodgson  ‘I want to apologise for being drunk at the eclipse…’ Amends by Tim Etchells is a selection of texts haunted by performance but written for the page. In three uncanny acts, Amends exhausts the inauthentic languages of device, correction and apology, while remaining deeply sorry. Tim Etchells is an artist and writer whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. Living and working in London and Sheffield, he has produced major commissions for public spaces and exhibited in museums and galleries in many international contexts. Etchells is the leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment.

Format: 210 x 285 mm100 pagesColourInterviews with:CHRISTIAN BLANDHOELMARTÌN ESCALANTERUSSELL HASWELLCAMPBELL KNEALETINE SUREL LANGEGREG POPEJOE POTTSMARIAM REZAEIEDWARD SOL

A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music.Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes or their impact on the neighborhoods around them.Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you’ll find that they’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish. The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves.Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays and scenesters (including members of Peter, Paul and Mary; White Zombie; Moldy Peaches; Sonic Youth; Treacherous Three; Cro-Mags; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Suicide), writer, historian and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place examines how these scenes came together and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.

Songs, barks, roars, hoots, squeals, and growls: exploring the mysteries of how animals communicate by soundWhat is the meaning of a bird's song, a baboon's bark, an owl's hoot, or a dolphin's clicks? In The Voices of Nature, Nicolas Mathevon explores the mysteries of animal sound. Putting readers in the middle of animal soundscapes that range from the steamy heat of the Amazon jungle to the icy terrain of the Arctic, Mathevon reveals the amazing variety of animal vocalizations. He describes how animals use sound to express emotion, to choose a mate, to trick others, to mark their territory, to call for help, and much more.What may seem like random chirps, squawks, and cries are actually signals that, like our human words, allow animals to carry on conversations with others. Mathevon explains how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher the ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in these sound signals, and what this information is used for in daily life. Drawing on these findings as well as observations in the wild, Mathevon describes, among many other things, how animals communicate with their offspring, how they exchange information despite ambient noise, how sound travels underwater, how birds and mammals learn to vocalize, and even how animals express emotion though sound.Finally, Mathevon asks if these vocalizations, complex and expressive as they are, amount to language. For readers who have wondered about the meaning behind a robin's song or cicadas' relentless "tchik-tchik-tchik," this book offers a listening guide for the endlessly varied concert of nature.

In the early 1960s, pianist Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hampton's band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension collective, was at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movement in Black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artists-musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artists-passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame.In The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra's participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles. This revised and updated edition brings the story of the Arkestra up to date, as its ethos and aesthetic remain vital forces in jazz and popular music to this day.

We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.

When Juan Atkins said he wanted to land a UFO on a track, what kind of place would he be landing it on?... Via the psychogeographies and cartographies of South London by way of ‘Ghettoville’, South and West Chicago’s ‘Teklife’ and East London’s ‘Eski’ — what Brar’s analysis does is highlight and connect the race/class intersections that are so often overlooked in mainstream coverage of music. - Lee Gamble Brar propels us through landscapes of sound and sense at once utterly familiar and strange. We emerge from this book with a shocked recognition that we as urban residents are living in contexts that both exceed the ways in which we understand them yet which penetrate our very core as metabolism, infection, and vibration. The book is one of the most accomplished demonstrations of the critical importance of black study and its capacities to articulate urban life in unprecedent ways.   - AbdouMaliq Simone Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiments with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Brar foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life. Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of Blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Brar rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary Black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in Blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism. Dhanveer Singh Brar Dhanveer Singh Brar is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter, and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. He is lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has previously held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at University of Pennsylvania and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL.

Redefining the counterculture as a time of Acid Communism, Acid Detroit diverges from most books on the Sixties, which centre on California, to show that Detroit was an unequalled hotbed of radical activism, urban unrest and sonic innovation. Considering Detroit’s unique mix of people and cultures and enduring sonic legacies, it covers everything from incendiary garage rock, to European-influenced techno and experimental hip-hop crews, intertwining the artist’s lives and works with the city’s rise and decline, from its establishment as an industrial powerhouse to the high point of Motor City, into its decline and tentative rebirth. A mind-expanding tour through time and space that explores the lost possibilities, histories and hidden potentials of the city, Acid Detroit reveals a history of resilience and transformation hidden in the shadows of the abandoned factories and warehouses of the Motor City.

This collection pairs a selection of stories from lost authors with notes on the case recognising the importance of the auditory sense on our whole experience of the horror medium. Editor Manon Burz-Labrande’s research is treading new ground, and is presented in the collection in an engaging and exciting way alongside each tale which brings a new understanding to the concept. Darkness now was around me – and sound. I seemed to stand in the centre of some yelling planet, the row resembling the resounding of many thousands of cannon, punctuated by strange crashing.The violent peals of a disconnected bell in the night; a trudging footfall in the hush of an abandoned manor; the whisper of a deathly voice in the ear: uncanny sounds remain the most frightening heralds of danger and terror in supernatural fiction. Gathered here are fourteen tales which resonate with the unique note of fear struck by weird happenings experienced through the aural sense.Divided into four sections exploring noises from invisible presences, ghostly voices, possessed technology and the power of extreme levels of sound or silence, this collection pulses with pioneering pieces from B. M. Croker, Algernon Blackwood, Edith Wharton and M. P. Shiel alongside haunting obscurities from the British Library collections.