“Compulsively readable, Sex Sounds deftly explores what we've always taken for granted but never paused to consider in so much historical and technological richness: why exactly is music sexy? It's a tremendous achievement.” Karen Tongson, author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters and Relocations: Queer Suburban ImaginariesAn investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of “electrosexual music” by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices. Sofer argues that “electrosexual music” has two central characteristics: the feminized voice and the “climax mechanism.” Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women's presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history's exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated—segregated—from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.

“This is the worthiest heir to John Cage’s Zen questioning of music’s shape and form, without the old master’s fear of pop music or jazz. Alien Listening is the best example we’ve yet seen of what 21st century music theory can be. It explains to us why music can be about everything without reducing its subjects to the numb face of data of any kind. Chua and Rehding celebrate an idea of music as vast as the universe itself. The aliens have been with us all along…in this strange thing called music that we can never define but always want to share…as far as our reach can go.” - The Wire  An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike. In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?The stakes could hardly be greater. Around the extreme scenario of the Golden Record, Chua and Rehding develop a thought-provoking, philosophically heterodox, and often humorous Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything, a string theory of communication, an object-oriented ontology of sound, and a Penelopean model woven together from strands of music and media theory. The significance of this exomusicology, like that of the Golden Record, ultimately takes us back to Earth and its denizens. By confronting the vast temporal and spatial distances the Golden Record traverses, the authors take listeners out of their comfort zone and offer new perspectives in which music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike.

Winner of the ARSC's Award for Best Research (History) in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music (2008)When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee "Scratch" Perry began crafting "dub" music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae's "golden age" of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings--electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks--to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub's development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub's social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the "dub revolution" that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around the globe

Paperback: 125 pages Published: September 1st 2000 by Reaktion Books ISBN: 1861890745    Chromophobia - a fear of corruption or contamination through colour - has lurked within Western culture since ancient times. This is apparent in the many attempts to purge colour from art, literature and architecture, either by making it the property of some "foreign" body - the oriental, the feminine, the infantile the vulgar or the pathological - or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the inessential or the cosmetic, which in many cases amounts to the same thing. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor analyzes the history of, and motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film, to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. Batchelor suggests how colour fits, or fails to fit, into the cultural imagination of the West, exploring such diverse themes as Melville's "great white whale," Le Corbusier's "journey to the East," Huxley's experiments with mescaline. Dorothy's travels in the Land of Oz and the implication of modern artists' experiments with industrial paints and materials.

Softcover, A4, 80pp smallestfunctionalunit, 2021"The dominant, traditional, western notation is only one aspect among many forms of expression in the field. We are interested in unconventional notational formats and graphic scores, as these represent visions of sound shapes that are open to diverse, idiosyncratic ways of interpreting and working. Works in which improvisation, composition, interpretation, performance and sound art merge require relevant modes of representation.In this first edition of Graphème artists Tomomi Adachi, Lotte Anker, Tony Buck & Lloyd Swanton, Marina Cyrino, Tina Douglas, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Phill Niblock, Jon Rose, Ute Wassermann and Nate Wooley work with photography, drawing, graphics, mixed media and object scores, finding ways to notate and share personal techniques and sonic elements. We intend to offer a much needed alternative to most current modes of publishing in a practical, accessible and approachable way.In addition to the publication of Graphème, smallest functional unit plan to present concerts, symposia and a festival within which composers will be given the opportunity to reflect and discuss their work." --- smallest functional unit was founded in 2020 by Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Ute Wassermann and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. The publication will appear as Graphème, a series with a thematic focus

The long-awaited first book from Robert Fripp (guitarist and founder member of King Crimson), The Guitar Circle collects much of RF’s writing about Guitar Craft, as well as his unique approach to guitar playing, collaborating and personal development. Presented as a limited edition first-print hardback with cover, inside pages and jacket all printed on high-end Italian Fedrigoni paper, all copies will be individually wrapped and boxed. This is the first in a series of books to include The DGM Diaries, Crimson Chronicles and membership of King Crimson (1969-2021) and personal commentary on living in New York during and after the recording of Exposure at a point in the late 1970s when New York was the fulcrum of a wider cultural rebirth. --------- “Where there is music there is hope” If one had to choose a single aphorism, of the many associated with Robert Fripp, this is probably the key line. It informs everything he does as a writer, performer, band member and teacher. That last description is also significant. Of all of Robert’s diverse work, it is Guitar Craft that he describes as 'my proper work in life’. So it comes as no surprise that, when choosing what aspect of his life to present in his first book, it is Guitar Craft that was, without hesitation, chosen as the subject. Begun in 1985, Guitar Craft and the Guitar Circle has welcomed over 3,500 musicians – including former King Crimson members Trey Gunn and Bill Rieflin. “Music creates the musician” The Guitar Circle collects much of Robert’s Writing on the subject across decades of diaries, introductions to seminars and courses, online writing and more, to present a comprehensive guide to developing a relationship with the guitar, with music, with the individual musician and working with others. It won’t teach readers how to ‘play in a day’, a week, or even a year. It might, however, help an inquisitive musician to develop a personal discipline/approach to playing the guitar that will accompany that musician for life. “Three capacities of the excellent player: to solo; to accompany; to be silent.” The book also encompasses the Four Pillars Of Ethical Conduct: Honesty, Responsibility, Equity, Goodwill Straightforwardness + Transparency translate as Honesty. Accountability + Owning-up equate to Responsibility. Fairness + Distributive justice we understand as Equity. Common decency we recognise as Goodwill. Principles which Robert Fripp insists are met in all his work including within the music industry, an industry most often noted for ignoring all Four Pillars and, just as frequently, music itself. The Guitar Circle is unlike other books by contemporary artists on guitar playing and music. “In strange and uncertain times, a reasonable person might despair.
 But Hope is unreasonable, and Love is greater even than this.” - Robert Fripp 564 pages.

smallest functional unit and Graphème is an initiative, founded in 2020 by Mazen Kerbaj, Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Magda Mayas, and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers.  In this first edition of Graphème artists Tomomi Adachi, Ute Wassermann, Lotte Anker, Phill Niblock, Tony Buck & Lloyd Swanton, Marina Cyrino, Tina Douglas, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Jon Rose and Nate Wooley work with photography, drawing, graphics, mixed media and object scores, finding ways to notate and share personal techniques and sonic elements. "We intend to offer a much needed alternative to most current modes of publishing in a practical, accessible and approachable way. In addition to the publication of Graphème, smallest functional unit plan to present concerts, symposia and a festival within which composers will be given the opportunity to reflect and discuss their work."

Book includes download codeA large book-object of scores by artist and composer Philip Corner, including a numbered art print and a supplemental audio download which features recordings of many scores from the book, played on a variety of instruments by 10 musicians (limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies). The Art of No-Art is a collection of 385 new graphic scores written between 2019 and 2022. Each score is a single-page meditation based around octaves. Though written mostly for piano, the scores could be arranged for other instrumentation (for those with fewer than an 8 octave range). The Art of No-Art explores the endless possibilities of one musical note (and its bounded harmonics). The pieces can be performed by people of any skill level; rudimentary or advanced navigations are possible.A supplemental audio download is included, which features recordings of many scores from the book, played on a variety of instruments by Agnese Toniutti, Rhodri Davies, Sarah Davachi, Derek Baron, Philip Corner, Matt Hannafin, Charlie Morrow, Zachary Paul, and Silvia Tarozzi. Additionally, Philip Corner wrote instructions for Sean McCann to collage all these recordings into a grand piece of No-Art. A numbered art print of the score "Life's A Joke" is included, a piece for voice which invites the reader to sing (or shout), "LIFE'S A JOKE AND ALL THINGS SHOW IT, I THOUGHT SO ONCE AND NOW I KNOW IT."

170 x 240mm, 244 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2022  An acoustic mapping of colonial history. From his longstanding engagement to "un-mute" colonial sound collections captured during the European colonial period, Satch Hoyt's practice has been dedicated to intervene those collections and awake their sonicity, releasing phonogram recordings and instruments of different regions in Africa from the museological silence. For Hoyt, the sonic opens a portal to the acoustic mappings of history—testimonies of enslavement, resistance, empowerment and liberation, and also the amalgamations of today and the future. For the book launch, Satch Hoyt in collaboration with Dirk Leyers performs live, intertwining historical and present recordings, vintage instruments and electronic music. By combining processed electric flute, electronic percussions, Congolese Sanzas, Brazilian Berimbau, synthesizers and recordings, Hoyt uncoveres layers of diasporic experience, reimagining memories of the African Diaspora from contemporary and future spaces in which, as Hoyt stays in the book, "the recorded past becomes the present". "Imagine a counter-journey through a multi-media mixing board of Afro-Sonic resistance beginning on the Southwest coast of Africa in 1483 and playing back live the layered improvisations of Angolan musicians and artists from the Congo, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. With breathtaking scope, Satch Hoyt has scrambled the signals of settlers and colonial theft. He chronicles here his archival research and exuberant artistic collaborations across a map of Afro-sensibility that resoundingly displays that culture is a living activity and a practice of creative hospitality and ultimately, the jam". —Tsitsi Jaji, author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism, and Pan-African Solidarity (2014)

Publisher :W. W. Norton & CompanyLanguage :EnglishPaperback :224 pagesISBN-10 :0811226603ISBN-13 :978-0811226608Dimensions :13.46 x 1.52 x 20.32 cmNathaniel Mackey's Late Arcade opens in Los Angeles. A musician known only as N. writes the first of a series of letters to the enigmatic Angel of Dust. N.'s jazz sextet, Molimo m'Atet, has just rehearsed a new tune: the horn players read from The Egyptian Book of the Dead with lips clothes pinned shut, while the rest of the band struts and saunters in a cosmic hymn to the sun god Ra. N. ends this breathless session by sending the Angel of Dust a cassette tape of their rehearsal. Over the next nine months, N.'s epistolary narration follows the musical goings-on of the ensemble. N. suffers from what he calls "cowrie shell at- tacks"--oil spills, N.'s memory of his mother's melancholy musical Sundays-- which all becomes the source of fresh artistic invention. --- Here is the newest installment of the National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Mackey's From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the great American jazz novel of "exquisite rhythmic lyricism" (Bookforum). --- W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Published by The Grass is Greeen In Fields For You 200mm x 250mm, 116pp, perfect bound Medium blue and light teal risograph printing throughout, perfect bound, softcover, full colour sticker adheared to the cover, includes a fold out poster, first edition of 200, 2022  Collected from published and unpublished sources Watercolor of Jandek Debut charts the writing of David Roeder between 2015 and 2020. Roeder has an ability to coax out familiarity in his writing whilst opening up ideas you may not have considered. It is a personal, enthusiastic and heartfelt whilst still keeping music and writing at the fore. There are glimmers of the finest time of DIY music 'journalism' where immediacy and stream-of-consciousness fold together with craft and editing to create extremely hopeful moments.The book and its subjects are broad in their approach. See a mention of the Pacific Northwest scene, the dreaminess of Grouper, a beautifully tempered consideration of David Berman. Following these are the liner notes for a previous band of David’s and mine, Mordwaffe. It opens with a sentiment close to this press; 'Not that anybody asked for these...' as we walk through this almost bootleg release. In the centre of the book is a work of fiction: a transcript of a radioplay titled Chitlin Etc. which takes on various voices and thoughts on the sonic impact and internalisation of sound. We move forth and another series of artists are worked upon; Charlie Megira, Vital Idles, and a heap of reviews and write ups for a sound orientated exhibition That's Life very much based in Glasgow. Alice Coltrane and Sophie Dickinson are the final subjects with two previously unpublished texts which show Roeder's tastes and mind closer to the present. --- David Roeder is an artist, music maker and mental health worker based in Berlin.These practices are connected by an effort to connect everyday experience with deeper psychological structures by means of contemplating, making and facilitating art of various kinds. He is a board member of Berlin's Society for Outsider Art and records music as Nein Rodere.

• 4x Cassettes (nearly 5 hours of music)• 240-page book, 6"x9" perfect bound• Housed in printed box• Digital download card• Hand-numbered edition of 200 (+35 AP)After years of preparation, Recital is proud to present the 12th Annual International Sound Poetry Festival box set. Held in New York in 1980, this was the last festival of the pioneering series, first started in Stockholm in the 1960s. This ambitious document holds nearly five hours of audio from 30 artists. A 240-page book with biographies, texts, and artwork from each artist supplements the edition, including program notes by Charlie Morrow and Sean McCann.The 10-day festival collected a battalion of sound poets from around the globe to share the stage at Washington Square Church in Manhattan. Both established sound poets are juxtaposed with more obscure artists, some more fervent than others. Carles Santos, John Giorno, and The Four Horsemen, for example, convey a verbal onslaught. And Bernard Heidsieck, you can hear his shouted and snarled words of “Democratie II” shimmer against the walls and ceiling, amplifying in intensity as if he is screaming at the French Parliament in the Palais du Luxembourg. Not all performances are aggressive; Alison Knowles presents a theatrical ensemble reading (with bean performance), and the subdued conceptual work of Robert Joseph and Pier Van Dijk’s for voice and the sound of turning book pages is particularly interesting.The year 1980 seemed like a turning point for sound poetry: there were seemingly more new sound poets than ever, yet the genre began to dissipate and melt into a pool of other experimental sound practices with newer digital technologies. One can almost hear the generational change in these tapes, mid-exhale. But of course at the end of the day sound poetry is still alive and well, and splitting hairs as fine as these becomes more a matter of personal taste/perception than anything else. There will always be a romanticization of the beginning of any project or movement, the pure state, and luckily this collection includes many of the pioneers. Artists included: Carles Santos, Jackson Mac Low, Greta Monach, Bernard Heidsieck, Katalin Ladik, Jerome Rothenberg, Mary Ellen Solt, John Giorno, Armand Schwerner, Charles Stein, Beth Anderson, Charles Amirkhanian, Richard Kostelanetz, Franz Kamin, Michael Gibbs, The Four Horsemen (bpNichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton and Steve McCaffery), Adriano Spatola, Paula Claire, Sten Hanson, Charlie Morrow, Glen Velez, Larry Wendt, Nina Yankowitz, Robert Joseph, Pier Van Dijk, Alison Knowles, Bern Porter, P. Clive Fencott, Bob Cobbing, and the Ocarina Orchestra.

12" x 8.5" – 100 color pages, perfect bound book Edition of 200Night of Rain is the second art book by musician and artist Loren Connors, following last year’s Wildweeds (Recital, 2021).The book is comprised of two parts: ‘Night of Rain,’ which Loren describes as “seascapes, or expressions of the sea and shore. [They are] about the power of rain and the sea, lagoons, bays, tides." Taken from small pencil and black ink drawings enlarged again and again at a copy store. The pieces would often be drawn over and modified throughout this process – ultimately reaching sizes of 8 x 6 feet or larger. In this series, Loren considers the digital images as the "originals” – so this section of the book acts as a sort of swatch, a gallery exhibiting an element of this process.The second section of the book is “A Coming to Shore.” Nineteen acrylic paintings on stretched canvas, which are often cast in hazy and dreamlike blues, greys, and yellows. They span across the page in stark simplicity. “They all have the feeling of horizon, but not all of them depict horizons,” Loren remarks. Supplemented with a foreword written by artist and friend Aki Onda, Night of Rain is part of a continuing series of limited books published by Recital that explore Loren’s visual art.

165 x 235mm, 184 pages, Colour printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2022Premodern acoustic traces as the basis for new communities of thought in the present (a project responding to the work of the self-taught acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi). Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure—a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now. This book was conceived in relation to the programme Coming to Know, accompanying the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. It is the second in a series of volumes titled An Archaeology of Listening.

Pages: 288 + insertDimensions: 170 × 224.764mmCover: SoftcoverISBN: 978‐0‐9956835‐2‐5Language: EnglishBricks from the Kiln is an irregular journal edited by Andrew Lister and Matthew Stuart, sometimes with guest editors, that presents graphic design and typography as disciplines activated by and through other disciplines and lenses such as language, archives, collage, and more. It borrows its title from the glossary notes of Ret Marut’s "Der Ziegelbrenner," which was the ‘size, shape and colour of a brick’, and ran for 13 issues between 1917 and 1921.The latest installment, "#4: On Translation, Transmission & Transposition," was published as an event (and now) a publication, with events at London College of Communication, Burley Fisher Books & Pig Rock bothy, Socttish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Inga (in November, 2019). ---Featuring contributions from Helen Marten, Sophie Collins, Don Lee Choi, Kate Briggs, Phil Baber, Joyce Dizon, Florian Roithmayr, Jen Calleja, J.R. Carpenter, Edgar Wind, Natalie Ferris, Byrony Quinn, Rebecca Collins, Naomi Pearce, Karen Di Franco, James Bulley, Saki Mafundikwa, Natalie Ferris, Matthew Stuart, James Langdon, Peter Nencini, Sophia Seita, Caroline Bergvall, Seb McLauchlan, and Maria Fusco. Editor: Natalie Ferris, Bryony Quinn, Matthew Stuart& Andrew Walsh‐Lister ---

Publisher: Goldsmith Press Publication date: 15 Dec. 2017 Language: English   ISBN-10: 1906897514 ISBN-13: 978-1906897512 A timely exploration of whether sound and listening can be the basis of political change. In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? This timely and important book from Goldsmiths Press highlights sound's invisible, disruptive, and affective qualities and asks whether the unseen nature of sound can support a political transformation. In Sonic Agency,Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative “unlikely publics” in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the “space of appearance” as the condition for political action and survival. By examining the experience of listening and being heard, LaBelle illuminates a path from the fringes toward hope, citizenship, and vibrancy. In a current climate that has left many feeling they have lost their voices, it may be sound itself that restores it to them. --- Goldsmiths Press, 2017

'One of the world’s most singular guitarists, Loren Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades, Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstraction that defines his current work, Connors has earned the admiration of many, leading to collaborations with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon.  In the mid-80s, Connors took a partial break from music and focused instead on the art of haiku, for which he received the Lafcadio Hearn Award in 1987. With his wife Suzanne Langille he also co-wrote an article on blues and haiku, “The Dancing Ear,” published in the Haiku Society of America’s journal. It was during this period that Connors penned the material that appears in Autumn’s Sun, a chapbook first published by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s Glass Eye in 1999. The text features diary excerpts from 1987, lyrically fragmented observations interspersed with haiku-like poems that paint an idyllic impression of the passing seasons in his home of New Haven, Connecticut. With synesthetic perception, Connors gazes from tranquil domestic streets. Sycamore, elm, and catalpa trees are activated by the breeze and made to rustle in unison with their natural and artificial surroundings, including the howling dogs from which Connors derived his ‘Mazzacane’ moniker. As summer fades to winter, Connors portrays death as an undramatic certitude, the flux of his own maturation reflected in musings on his son’s. Like his music, Autumn’s Sun is tender without being sentimental, conjuring those rare, delicate moments when time stands still. --- 82 pages 5 x 7.5 inches  Paperback Edition of 1,000 This edition includes “The Dancing Ear” and an introduction by Lawrence Kumpf.

Fieldnotes is a quarterly print journal publishing new writing and artworks with a focus on practices that work between disciplines and against type. The purpose of the journal is to provide a test site for ideas and research; a space for experimental modes and new prototypes. --- The second issue of Fieldnotes contains new work by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Steve Dutton Liesl Ujvary Akio Yuguchi Evan Lavender-Smith Dodie Bellamy Paul Maheke & Giles Bailey Yan Jun Emily Charlton Ed Atkins Sam Buchan-Watts Elizabeth Price Mary Mussman Carolyn Ferrucci Hanne Lippard Charlie Godet Thomas Hannah Regel