hardback  white rabbit, 2023Factory Records has become the stuff of legend. The histories of the label have been told from many perspectives, from visual catalogues and memoirs to exhibitions. Yet no in-depth history has ever been told from the perspectives of the women who were integral to Factory’s cultural significance.The untold history of Factory Records is one of women’s work at nearly every turn: recording music, playing live gigs, running the label behind the scenes, managing and promoting bands, designing record sleeves, making films and music videos, pioneering sound technology, DJing, and running one of the most chaotic clubs on the planet, The Haçienda.Told entirely in their voices and featuring contributions from Gillian Gilbert, Gina Birch, Cath Carroll, Penny Henry and over fifty more interviewees, I THOUGHT I HEARD YOU SPEAK is an oral history that reveals the true cultural reach of the label and its staying power in the twenty-first century.

Published: Duke University Press Book Pages: 352 Illustrations: 27  Published: April 2020The contributors to Playing for Keeps examine the ways in which musical improvisation can serve as a method for negotiating violence, trauma, systemic inequality, and the aftermaths of war and colonialism. Outlining the relation of improvisatory practices to local and global power structures, they show how in sites as varied as South Africa, Canada, Egypt, the United States, and the Canary Islands, improvisation provides the means for its participants to address the past and imagine the future. In addition to essays, the volume features a poem by saxophonist Matana Roberts, an interview with pianist Vijay Iyer about his work with U.S. veterans of color, and drawings by artist Randy DuBurke that chart Nina Simone's politicization. Throughout, the contributors illustrate how improvisation functions as a model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action that can foster the creation of alternate modes of being and knowing in the world.Contributors. Randy DuBurke, Rana El Kadi, Kevin Fellezs, Daniel Fischlin, Kate Galloway, Reem Abdul Hadi, Vijay Iyer, Mark Lomanno, Moshe Morad, Eric Porter, Sara Ramshaw, Matana Roberts, Darci Sprengel, Paul Stapleton, Odeh Turjman, Stephanie Vos

Paperback, 79pp, A4 smallest functional unit, 2022smallest 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.  The second instalment of Graphème presents twelve compositions from another set of varied and distinguished artists. These artists share a passionate interest in finding and expressing a personal language and vision beyond the standard systems of western notation, and represent the wide creative spectrum that makes up innovative new music composition today. The twelve pieces explore notions of the score as a result of interdisciplinary collaboration, architectural systems as inspiration, instrument building as composition, printing and materiality as sources for interpretation and performative practice, as well as investigations of personal vocabulary and shared histories. Many of the scores in this edition are graphically beautiful and intriguing, and hold their own as works of visual art. "The heart of the endeavor in publishing these scores and to have them reach a wide audience, is to see that this music, and these ideas and procedures are performed. Graphème is fundamentally a practical collection of pieces to be played. We hope that performers feel free to work on versions of these compositions and find ways to realise them. We invite you to dive in, explore and experience the ideas and creations of some of our most adventurous, curious, imaginative and inventive composers." - smallest functional unit

Robert Mitchell is an award winning pianist, composer, key player, arranger, bandleader, teacher, poet. 12 albums released and a Steinway Artist.Toured/performed/recorded w:Billy Harper, Courtney Pine, Phil Ranelin, Steve Coleman, Dayme Arocena, Michael Olatuja etc.Piano professor Guildhall School, Leeds Conservatoire, Published by Bucks Music Group Ltd. Leads:Panacea,Epiphany3,TRUE THINK.A book of poems by Robert Mitchell   'Mitchell’s political and poetic eloquence, his words delivered in impeccably enunciated English, is comparable to that of Linton Kwesi Johnson, even though the style of delivery, both musically and vocally, is very different. More than forty years after Johnson’s landmark album “Forces of Victory” and the track “Sonny’s Lettah” has that much really changed? Musically “A Son of Windrush Reflects” is another performance for voice and cello only, with Smart delivering another brilliantly empathic response, making effective use of both plucking and bowing techniques. Both “A Son of Windrush Reflects” and the earlier “The First Note” are featured in Mitchell’s forthcoming second poetry collection “City Of Sanctuary”.' Ian Mann - The Jazzmann

Edited by Sophie Orlando.Texts by Adelaide Bannerman, Cecile Bargues, Sonia Boyce, Jean Fisher, Sophie Orlando, Allison Thompson. published in October 2017   English edition 13 x 23 cm (softcover) 136 pages (color & b/w ill.)Focusing on several major collaborative performance-videos by a figure of the British Black Art movement, this illustrated monograph includes a series of essays which interpret Boyce's interdisciplinary practice in the light of art history, and analyse her interest in black feminism, cultural studies, film studies, art history and critical theory.

ISBN 9781789388619 Paperback 244 x 170 mm 320 pp This first academic collection dedicated to popular music in Leeds - developed from the work of interdisciplinary scholars, drawn from a major public museum exhibition “Sounds of Our City” and built upon contemporary research. Leeds has rich musical histories and heritage, a long tradition of vibrant music venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs and other sites of musical entertainment.The city has spawned crooners, folk singers, punks, post- punks, Goths, DJs, popstars, rappers and indie rockers, yet – with a few exceptions - Leeds has not been studied for its scenes in ways that other UK cities have. In ways that the chapters explore, Leeds’ popular music exemplifies and informs understandings of broader cultural and urban changes – both in Britain and across wider global contexts – of the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialisation and social equity; industrial decline, de-industrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of the 24-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicisation and de-politicisation, while concomitantly tracing arguments about “heritagising” popular music within discussions about music’s “place” in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds, and beyond.

erica lewis (San Francisco, CA) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her books include the precipice of jupiter (2009, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), camera obscura (2010, with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory (2013); and the first two books of the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend (2015) and mary wants to be a superwoman (2017).mahogany is about the passing of time and unimaginable loss, strength, humor, and love mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.

Paperback, 70pp, A4 smallest functional unit, 2023   Graphème is a project founded in 2020 by smallest functional unit (Tony Buck, Racha Garbieh, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Ute Wassermann) with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. Volume 3 features scores by Merche Blasco, Nicolás Carrasco, William Engelen, Julian Galay, Cat Hope, Charlotte Hug, @verkomponist, Lucie Vitkova, Sabine Vogel, Michael ZerangThe third edition of Graphème: a series of graphic and experimental music scores by composers from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Each composer offers a rigorous conceptual framework and provides an often sensual dialog between composer, performer, sound and space in spirit of collaborative creativity. The pieces here represent imaginative and inventive ways to notate a musical vision, making use of innovative approaches – photographic representation, geometric and cartographic schema and various degrees of indetermination and precision – as well as extending more traditional ideas of notation, to expand on expressive possibilities. Some composers embrace deep and abstract conceptual propositions while others exploit the aesthetic potential of graphic sign making to transfer ideas into a sounding choreography of possibilities, inviting performers and listeners to find connections in unexpected places. Progress in science and technology over the last decades has opened up new choices for expression and interaction, and we indeed find many composers taking up these new challenges with vibrant energy and enthusiasm. Some aspects of technology and new experimental score-making, for example, those that engage with video and interactive media, are beyond the scope of this publication. We have, however, found artists who have taken these ideas and influences as a point of departure, responding to this increasingly rational, mathematical and scientific world by using notions of data collection, the ever increasing precision of measurement and use structures derived from geometry and mathematics in innovative ways.

Sam Dolbear is the cofounder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio. He took up a fellowship at the ICI-Berlin as part of the 2020–2022 Project Reductions and continues working on a number projects, on palmist and sexologist Charlotte Wolff, a diagram of friendship constructed by Walter Benjamin, and a translation of Dora Kellner's feminist sci-fi novel Gas gegen Gas. Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London. She is frequently invited to speak in the UK, Europe, the US, and occasionally Australia, China, and India.An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity. Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might. Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises. An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

Dual language book. German translation by Lotta Thiessen   “I wanted to remember how to forget:   I found something I thought I knew well—   the colour of a childhood room; the path taken to school each day; a pool of water collecting in the iris,   —took something: lines of a poem or the pages of a book, placed them in these spaces I thought I knew well.   I had to train myself, I couldn’t carry all the pages—”THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT​​— traces the trying of language: “first as fact, / then as claim; then finally as call.” Consisting of a long poem and a short essay, the book attempts to both unravel and complicate the she that speaks: gendered experience and its relationship to fragmented memory and the violence of narrative time; to sexual violence; to surveillance and grief; to solitude and collectivity; to song and dissent. "What if the hour is left incomplete?" asks the speaker, twisting and turning through the past, present and future all at once in its possession and simultaneous dispossession of the “‘I am.’ / ‘We are.’”. Oscillating between the gestures of daily experience, and the political and social conditions that shape it, both unflinchingly utopian and wildly sceptical in its outlook, THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— attempts to write through the continual negotiation between the desire to speak and the desire to keep your mouth shut, all the time chasing what it means to live out one's political convictions through poetry, and through life.    "THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT— is thought turned [into] song. The singer, an ‘ambivalent woman / of non personhood’, trusts the productive energy of doubt to take her deeper into feeling and farther from naming. Lotte LS reveals the violent imperatives placed on us to speak and inhabit our pains as the limits of our personhood. In tracing the ‘tyranny of language under capitalist authoritarianism’ what emerges is the chance to become a subject always in motion, one who knows that what is not remembered is not identical to what is forgotten. " --Mira Mattar

"Insightful, passionate, flowing and jarring. Stage of Recovery is a creative journey that invites the reader to reflect on and reimagine society." - Marina Sitrin "This book proposes a singular bio-aesthetic, an original way of living with each other, against the ever more delirious diktats of planetary techno-capitalism. Sagri’s is an extraordinary example of a practice where, as with the Situationists, art becomes indiscernible from politics." - Mehdi Belhaj Kacem "I am convinced that Sagri's thinking in action is ultimately dedicated to the empowerment of the mass corporeality of the nameless, and to self-recovery from psychosomatic pains suffered in this world of hell." - Sabu Kohso Close to spiritual anarchism, Georgia Sagri’s writing happens in the heat of negotiation. Starting in the months leading up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park in 2011, which became the movement for people’s self-governance known as Occupy, this book carries the energy and commitment of open struggle, direct address, self-organisation and public assembly. It is a critique of representation and its implicit oblivion, told through a decade of artistic and activist practice. The writing is a mode of recovery, it is pre-content shared to encourage open processes in art, thinking and action. Georgia Sagri (born Athens, 1979) lives and works in Athens and New York. Her practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Pages:100Binding: PaperbackInterior Color: Black & WhiteDimensions: Executive (7 x 10 in / 178 x 254 mm)Most books of poetry either greet us with the expected lineaments or else ask that we modestly reorient ourselves towards the slightly unfamiliar. Emily Martin's "Marking a Salt Ridge" is that rare book that seems actually to reconfigure sites of poetic writing and reading—to find new nodes and wormholes in the graphic text. More impressively still, it locates the points at which its medium appears to buckle into the refulgence of the plastic arts, turning recursive cadence and motif into a paint-like material through which all of the richly textured pentimenti are visible. A spectacularly conceived and executed book, as well as a beguilingly moving one.

THE SCREENPLAY FOR A HORROR FILM THAT NEVER WAS “Read The Otherwise and shed a tear for one of cinema’s great, long-lost screenplays.”   Ben Wheatley In 2015, Mark E. Smith of legendary post-punk group The Fall and screenwriter Graham Duff co-wrote the script for a horror feature film entitled The Otherwise.  The Fall are recording an EP in an isolated recording studio on Pendle Hill. The surrounding Lancashire landscape is at the mercy of a Satanic biker gang, and haunted by Scottish clansmen who have slipped through time from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.  Every film production company they showed it to said it was “too weird” to ever be made. Yes, The Otherwise is weird. It’s also witty, shocking, and genuinely scary. Now the screenplay is published for the first time, alongside handwritten notes and previously unpublished photographs by Jim Moir and Smith’s widow and Fall keyboardist Elena Poulou.  Also within are essays by Duff and Poulou, and transcripts of conversations between Smith and Duff, in which they discuss creativity, dreams, musical loves (from Can to acid house) and favourite films (from Britannia Hospital to White Heat).  With Manchester’s visionary frontman Mark E. Smith as their one constant, The Fall were the most individual and influential group of their era. From post punk angularity to mutant rockabilly and machine-driven garage rock, via slanted Northern pop, The Fall were one of Britain’s last great singles bands.   As well as their own unmistakable songs, The Fall’s single discography also takes in a panoramic range of cover versions, including the psychedelia of The Move, the northern soul of R. Dean Taylor, the country rock of George Jones, the quintessential Englishness of The Kinks and William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.    Covering a diverse and thrilling run of over 50 releases between 1978 and 2016, Graham Duff has interviewed key members of The Fall, including Marc Riley, Elena Poulou, Simon Wolstencroft, Keiron Melling, Una Baines, Tim Presley and Paul Hanley.

36 pagesprinted in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm Between 1976 and 1981 Rock Against Racism and the youth of Britain unleashed the explosive rebel chemistry of Punk and Reggae bands in a five year festival of multi culturalism. Under the slogan ‘Love Music, Hate Racism’, Rock Against Racism took on the orthodoxy through 5 Carnivals, and over 500 gigs throughout the UK. In those five years the National Front went from a serious electoral threat into political oblivion.

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36 pagesprinted and manufactured in Englandstaple bound14cm x 20cm I often think back and thank my lucky stars that I just happened to arrive in Manchester in 1988. I’d enrolled on a Photography Course at Manchester Polytechnic and while still only 22, I was ready for a new chapter in my life after leaving behind my past in Birmingham. I had no idea that I was about to walk into the global phenomenon that the media called “MADCHESTER”. The Years of 1989–91 in Manchester saw an incredible explosion of creativity across many art forms and it certainly wasn’t just the music scene that benefitted. If you’re thinking Madchester only meant Happy Mondays & the Stone Roses then think again. There was also the poets, comedians, designers, entrepreneurs, journalists, DJs, photographers, — artists of all descriptions, as well as all round chancers that helped give the city an incredible buzz and ensuring the rest of the world was looking on with envy. As a Photographer I was perfectly set up to cover what was developing. I’d set up my Photo studio and darkroom where I was living, which at the time was a squat in one of the four big crescents which dominated the district of Hulme. Squatting in Hulme was really convenient, not only did it mean all my money could go on photography but also meant I was walking distance to the centre of Manchester, where all the fun was. I couldn’t help but get caught up in all the general mayhem, momentum and energy that these years provided. I became determined as much as possible to document what was going on around me.

Including images of The Roxy, Sunsplash, the Marquee, The Tunnel NYC, Rock Against Racism, Notting Hill Carnival, Exploited, Empire Ballroom, Wetlands, Gossips, Glastonbury. David Corio began his freelance photography career in 1978 after leaving art school at the age of 18. Moving to London he began taking portraits and going to concerts and clubs across the capital for personal projects and as assignments for New Musical Express, Time Out, The Face and Black Echoes. He worked at London listings magazine City Limits in the early 1980’s helping to write the music listings and editing their Nightclub section. He moved to New York in 1992 for 16 years continuing to shoot musicians, nightlife and the arts for the New York Times, The Times and various reggae and hip hop record labels and magazines. From daytime bhangra shows at Leicester Square’s Empire Ballroom to the first hip hop club in Soho’s ‘Gossips’ and the first Jungle Club in NYC, this collection of Fans and Clubbers, taken over an 18 year period shows many different musical genres in their infancy - their energy and excitement still fresh and raw. David Corio’s photographs are held by the National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The ICA and The Photographer’s Gallery, London and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC and the Institute of Contemporary Photography, NYC.

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