Anne Bean: Self Etc. is the first major monograph about the performance work of artist Anne Bean, a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. Part of the Intellect Live series, co-published with the Live Art Development Agency, this book includes extensive visual documentation of Bean’s performances, critical essays by leading scholars of art and performance and a series of new visual essays by the artist. Additional contributions include documentation of collaborations with influential artists, such as Bean’s Drawn Conversations, made at Franklin Furnace, New York, in collaboration with Harry Kipper, Karen Finley, Kim Jones and Fiona Templeton; and TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, involving numerous artists, including Paul McCarthy, Steven Berkoff, Evan Parker, Brian Catling, Carlyle Reedy, Rose English, David Toop, Lol Coxhill, Jacky Lansley and Maggie Nicols. Lavishly illustrated and including previously unseen images, Anne Bean explores and expands the nature, form and contexts that artistic collaboration can take.

“Before punk was even called ‘punk’ – when something foul to most but the sweetest
nectar to the few was bubbling up from the depths – there was Max.” Ted Polhemus “Max was there – from proto-punk performing and the early punk rock Sex shop scene, to drumming at the beginning of Adam and the Ants and the Monochrome Set, then on through post-punk with Rema-Rema and cyber-psychedelic-punk with Psychic TV.”
 Tom Vague A vibrant, wry, and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual. While working as a photographer’s model, gallery usher, and exotic dancer, Dorothy “Max” Prior witnessed the births of Adam and the Ants, The Monochrome Set, The Sex Pistols, and Throbbing Gristle, as well as drumming in her own cult band Rema Rema and recording with Industrial Records.  Her exuberant commentaries, each presented as a stand-alone episode, illustrate the multilayered nature of the London music, art, and fashion worlds of the late 1970s, and the overlap between the early punk scene with the city’s rapidly evolving club and queer cultures. --- The title refers to the legendary house in South Kensington, where the author lived from 1976 to 1982. Through twelve vivid, engaging, and occasionally shocking vignettes, Max maps out the wild and exhuberant counter-cultures of late ’70s London, including: • Working life as a go-go dancer, model and stripper. • The queer counter-culture that gave way to punk. Disco meets Punk in the gay clubs of 1970s London. • A celebration of the women at the crux of the gay/punk axis, including Vivienne Westwood, Jordan, Louise’s DJ Caroline, and the fabulous and feisty Sharon of the Bromley Contingent. •Inside The Band With No Name, which became Adam and the Ants and The Monochrome Set; and spawned Bow Wow Wow and Rema Rema.  • Halcyon days working at the ICA: including Helmut Newton’s ‘dead’ women, Mary Kelly’s dirty nappies and Throbbing Gristle’s infamous Prostitution exhibition. • The notorious Eaton Square squat, whose inhabitants included various gay and trans performance artists and a real live lion.

Publisher: Canongate Books Published: Oct 2000 Pages: 512 ISBN: 9781841950556This ground-breaking biography is as much about Sun Ra's music as it is about his passionate, often wildly unorthodox views on the galaxy, black people and spiritual matters. With the various incarnations of his inimitable Arkestra, his repertoire ranged from boogie-woogie to swing to be-bop to fusion to New Age, and his influence extended throughout the jazz and rock worlds. While Sun Ra made a lifelong effort to obscure many of the facts of his early years, he did acknowledge that he was born on the planet Saturn. John Szwed has succeeded brilliantly in delving into and evoking the life and work of this extraordinary artist. --- Canongate Books, 2000

Jazz musicians call it The Bible. Critics call it the one jazz album every fan must own. Forty-one years since its recording in 1959, it has sold millions worldwide and sits near the top of any list of most important records of the century. How did two impromptu sessions produce such a timeless acknowledged masterpiece? Now, for the first time, Ashley Kahn takes us into the studio to witness the creation of an album that still thrills jazz musicians, enthusiasts, and newcomers alike with its deceptively simple tunes. Using eyewitness accounts and newly discovered documents, Kahn traces Miles’s move from bop to modal jazz, re-creates the sessions using master tapes (weighing in on fragmentary takes and the dispute about composers), and follows the rise of the album from its contemporary reception to its transformation into a cultural landmark through conversations with those who were there. Extensively researched and copiously illustrated, Kind of Blue recovers an invaluable piece of musical history and heightens fans’ appreciation of the album they know and love.New and never-before-published material in Kind of Blue includes: The complete, unedited master session tapes, with analysis of fragmentary takes that have never been released, and studio dialogue between Davis and the musicians Over forty new interviews with musicians, producers, and critics, including Herbie Hancock, Elvin Jones, Quincy Troupe, George Avakian, Nat Hentoff-and the only people still living who witnessed the making of the album: Jimmy Cobb, engineer Bob Waller, and photographer Don Hunstein Previously unpublished photos of the recording session, featuring a rare shot of Miles’s charts Studio logs and internal memos from Columbia about the making and marketing of the album The handwritten version of Bill Evans’s famous liner notes

On a quiet day, near the Caribbean island of Black Conch, a mermaid raises her barnacled head from the flat grey sea. She is attracted by David, a fisherman waiting for a catch, singing to himself with his guitar. Aycayia the mermaid has been living in the vast ocean all alone for centuries.When Aycayia is caught and dragged ashore by American tourists, David rescues her with the aim of putting her back in the ocean. But it is soon clear that the mermaid is already transforming into a woman.This is the story of their love affair, of an island and of the great wide sea.

With a Foreword by Francesca Wade and an Introduction by Sophie Lewis 'Di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation.' Chris Kraus 'Explosive and nourishing . . . Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future.' Ken ChenDiane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago. During the last years of her life, di Prima worked on the final iteration of her enduring project. This volume brings together fifteen new poems with all the previously published Letters in an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition.

Fiction by Alison Mills NewmanWith a contribution by Saidiya Hartman The book makes space for rumination, complexity, and transience. It offers a unique window into the mind of one woman, at one moment in history, and by doing so examines beauty, sex, and art through her eyes. Once you get into the flow of Newman’s prose, you’ll find artistic and intellectual riches.—Kirkus ReviewsAlison Mills Newman’s novel Francisco—“profoundly underappreciated” (NY Times)—has long been out of print and impossible to find. Written in her early twenties in a “fluently funky mix of standard and nonstandard English” (Harryette Mullen), Mills Newman tells the vibrant story of a young black woman’s love affair with an indie filmmaker, Francisco. Described as “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself” in the new foreword by Saidiya Hartman, Francisco unfolds like an on-the-road diary of a young actress and musician as she becomes increasingly disillusioned with success in Hollywood. She chronicles her bohemian life with her filmmaker lover, visiting friends and family up and down California, and her involvement in the 1970s Black Arts movement. Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders, Melvin Van Peebles, Frank Silvera, and Amiri Baraka make appearances, along with other artists and writers like Ishmael Reed and Joe Overstreet. Love and friendship, long revealing conversations, parties and dancing in Berkeley and LA—Francisco celebrates “the workins of a positive alive life that is good value, quality, carin, truth . . . the gift of art for the survival of the human heart."

A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written - Sunday Times Not only the best jazz novel ever written, but one of the best novels of any kind published in English in the last ten years - The Musician Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet - Chicago TribuneBased on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the field with two women, and inside his head was a ticking time-bomb which he was unable to stop.

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers ISBN: 9780007319053 Number of pages: 784 Weight: 1150 g Dimensions:240 x159 x52 mmHardback EditionAlex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence. For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Bunuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. In many ways,Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivalled Shakespeare in universal reach is implicated in an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world. --- 'An absolutely masterly work' Stephen Fry --- HarperCollins Publishing, 2020

This is a masterpiece, heavy, fun, mad, wild, inspiring, mind-blowing, massively deep though never precious, so many tangents somehow brought together with clarity and vision, love the idea of a left-hand path history, and the connections between the beginnings of the universe, ritual music and modern electronic rock is jaw-dropping. I love it, this is the music book of the year and the ultimate book on the sound of the eternal now. This is going to drop like a true fucking monolith from the skies.   - DAVID KEENAN     Every now and then a book comes out that redefines a form, creates the narrative and is a startling jolt to the culture fabric . . . [MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW] is thrilling, inspiring, informative and makes you jump all over the internet looking for the soundtrack. The book is a game changer and you will never listen to music in the same way again   - John Robb, LOUDER THAN WAR "Monolithic Undertow alights a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers. It traces the line from ancient traditions to the modern underground, navigating archaeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub-bass, avant-garde eccentricity, sound weaponry and fervent spiritualism. From Neolithic beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, cone shattering dubwise bass, Hawkwind’s Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust and Ash Ra Temple; the hash-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Melvins, seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow explores the power of the drone – an audio carrier vessel capable of evoking womb like warmth or cavernous dread alike.In 1977 Sniffin’ Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous ‘this is a chord; this is another; now form a band’ illustration. The drone requires neither chord nor band, representing – via its infinite pliability and accessibility – the ultimate folk music: a potent audio tool of personal liberation. Immersion in hypnotic and repetitive sounds allows us to step outside of ourselves, be it chant, a 120dB beasting from Sunn O))), standing front of the system as Jah Shaka drops a fresh dub or going full headphone immersion with Hawkwind. These experiences are akin to an audio portal – a sound Tardis to silence the hum and fizz of the unceasing inner voice. The drone exists outside of us, but also – paradoxically – within us all; an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel…"

Keenan makes serious magic with this kaleidoscopic crowd of shamen and showmen, this host of flawed, unexpected, brilliant characters. Industry of Magic & Light is a spell-binding inventory of 1960s culture and a glorious, thrilling, funny reading experience. It's Keenan in excelsis: transcendent, violent in intensity, full of joy and utter wonder. - Wendy Erskine Brilliant - pure undiluted Keenan in crystalised form. Less a book and more of a passport, INDUSTRY OF MAGIC & LIGHT is nothing like you expected but everything you hoped for. - John HiggsIndustry of Magic & Light is a love letter to the counterculture of the 1960s and a requiem for its passing.The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan’s cult classic debut, This is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early 70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves – the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading – it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade’s energies, bringing to life how even the smallest and dreariest of working class towns felt so full of possibility in the wake of the psychedelic moment. Via artefacts from the time – everything from poetry chapbooks, record reviews and musical instruments through bubblegum wrappers, bicycle repair kits and mysterious cassette recordings – the book opens out into adventures along the hippy trail in Afghanistan and behind the Iron Curtain that leads a cast of new and returning characters – as well as the authorities – to believe that they are literally making magic. Simultaneously a forensics of the 1960s, a detective novel, an occult thriller, a vision quest, and the hallucinatory exposition of a moment where it felt like anything was possible, Industry of Magic & Life brings to life the streets of small working class towns as transformational sites of utopian joy.

Publisher: Reaktion Books Pub date: 15 Feb 2018 Language: English Number of pages:317 ISBN: 9781780238111Multimedia experiments are everywhere in contemporary art, but the collaboration and conflict associated with multimedia is not a new phenomenon. From opera to the symphonic poem to paintings inspired by music, many attempts have been made to pair sounds with pictures and to combine the arts of time and space. Counterpoints explores this artistic evolution from ancient times to the present day. The book's main focus is music and its relationship with painting, sculpture, and architecture. Philippe Junod draws on theoretical and practical examples to show how different art movements throughout history have embraced or rejected creative combinations. He explains how the Renaissance, neoclassicism, and certain brands of modernism tried to claim the purity of each mode of expression, while other movements such as romanticism, symbolism, and surrealism called for a fusion of the arts. Counterpoints is a unique cultural history, one that provides a critical understanding of a popular but previously unheralded art form.

Tristan Honsinger : textsJoel Grip : drawings (ink and graphite) and paintings Umdicht Förlag 2021 in collaboration with Topsi Series and Umlaut Records.Printed by Livonia 2021Copyright to the authorsLayout and design : Joel GripThanks to Erik Viklund, Seymour Wright and Tobias Delius for their help with checking files and proofreading, and to Fritz Margull, Norbert, Heino and Marcus for their support.On many levels Tristan Honsinger invites the reader to embark on the trip of embracing, chasing and changing the perception of what is possible. The routines and wisdom retrieved from his 50 years of living in the world of spontaneous imagery within the expression of sound and body are transmitted in a way that is both lucid and ludic. His texts are not about music per se, but they are musical in the sense that they welcome you to take part in the mysterious act of transformation. And in the end you are challenged to lead the trip elsewhere, based on your own associations in being the essence of us. “This book has been written over the course of a couple of months in the spring of 2020 and contains dialogues, aphorisms, songs, poems and short stories, sometimes combined. Counterpointing Tristan’s handwritings are the breezy, chasing and questioning drawings of Joel Grip. These two individuals form one of the most formidable acts in improvisation that I’ve ever seen. It’s a match!” – from the introduction by Antonio Borghini. Compiled by Klaus Kürvers, this book includes the complete discography of Tristan Honsinger‘s issued recordings so far, 1972-2020 : a 15-page directory of treasures from the recent history of modern music.

"With his gratifying archive, Matt Goody details one of the most successful eras in the history of rock music – Flying Nun Records, formed in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in a Christchurch record shop. Shepherd and his brilliant cohorts served up the legendary output of not only kingpins like The Clean, The Chills and Tall Dwarfs, but also captured the best from favourites of mine like Able Tasmans, Bird Nest Roys, Look Blue Go Purple and The Verlaines. Goody provides the most comprehensive presentation yet of Flying Nun’s rise from Shepherd’s notepad to international underground rock sovereignty – and a vital part of one nation’s collective art history." — Bob Nastanovich, PavementIn this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand – and the world’s – great independent music labels. Hundreds of full color & black and white photos illustrate the story!Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in Christchurch, New Zealand, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of music that had an impact around the world. Needles and Plastic is the first comprehensive history of the early years of the label and its bands covering the critical period from 1981–1988 when many of the most influential and critically acclaimed artists emerged on Flying Nun, bands like – from The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space. The influence of the obscure label became apparent in the 1990s, when big-time indie acts like Pavement, Cat Power or Yo La Tengo started covering Flying Nun bands.In entries on over 140 records from The Clean’s ‘Tally Ho!’ 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines Bird-Dog LP in 1988, Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. His book draws on years of in-depth research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs, and the audience, with a host of significant characters contributing along the way – Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour and many more. In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one the world’s great independent music labels.

Gathering together interviews, essays, rare archival material and translations, The Tempest Society revisits and resuscitates the forgotten heritage of a politicised theatre group – ‘Al Assifa’ – that was born out of the struggles of the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (MTA), Palestine, anti-colonialism, and workers’ and immigrant labour rights. Contributors explore the legacy of the group – placing this history in the context of the European economic crisis and its effect on Greece, contemporary migration and the conditions of immigrant workers and refugees. Conversations with the artist, and participants and collaborators in her film, consider the potential for politicised art to move between the street and the factory in cultural production today. Following The Tempest Society (2017), the original video installation commissioned for documenta 14, which took Athens as a site to reflect on radical equality, democracy and theatre as a civic space, the book brings to light the specific history, the archive, and the ongoing resonance of the agit-prop theatre group ‘Al-Assifa’ in the context of urgent economic, political and humanitarian upheaval. With contributions from Abdellali Hajjat, Hendrik Folkerts, Pothiti Hantzaroula, and interviews with Philippe Tancelin, surviving member of Al Assifa, Bouchra Khalili, Omar Berrada, and Alexandre Kauffmann, and Isavella Alopoudi, Elias Kiama Tzogonas, and Giannis Sotiriou, the performers in The Tempest Society. Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist. Raised between Morocco and France, she studied Film at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Fine Arts at École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at MFA, Boston, Jeu de Paume, Paris and Sessession, Vienna. In 2018 she has been shortlisted for both the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize. She currently lives in Berlin.

Co-published by Book Works and DACS, as part of Co-Series No. 21, in an edition of 1,000. Softback, 128pp, printed full colour, 170 x 220 mm. Designed by Simon Kennedy.This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works. Citing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Brisley emphasises the critical importance of error to the creation of his performances: ‘You can say what you’re going to do, you can think about it, you can prepare it, and then when you start, it’s all disappeared because it’s actually meaningless… errors make for where the key value lies.’ The enduring resonance of Brisley’s work lies in its formless and slippery characteristics that resonate so poignantly with our shared human condition.

Can processors now make better music than human producers? How do algorithms alter our sense of authorship? What historical and social fault lines can be felt juddering in the design of autonomous sound generators? Be it in the home studio, on streaming platforms, or in the corporate business plans of global companies, artificial intelligence is defining the sound of the future. The essays in Artificial Music focus on the key developments, extending beyond digital little helpers to examine the balance between humans and machine learning and the process that enables non-human creativity to become a resonance chamber for new synergies. What sound might be produced in the dialogue between man and machine?

“If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history.” Drawing on Louis Chude­ Sokei’s metaphorical, political, and technopoetic investigations, this volume experiments with how the echo of past ideas of life and form has brought forth the technolo­gies and lifestyles that our contemporary world is based on. The essays, conversations, and artist contributions delineate a varie­gated array of technologies, creating an image of their past and their future potentials.