A5, 32 pp Veer Publication 101, April 2024  "Astrophil and Stella was published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press in 1999. Bonney had been attending the WF workshop for some time and had been impressed by Cobbing’s various energies. His later statement that he 'loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words till they fell apart, become simply marks on the page . . .' illuminates this collection. Here the passionate frustrations of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence are translated into feverishly-worked grids of improvised spattered charcoal markings. Bonney later moved to a more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric; this text—along with Baudelaire in English (Veer 012)— witnesses a strikingly original response to Cobbing’s practice."

Softcover, 335pp Wolke Verlag/ MusikTexte, Cologne, 2025Sven-Åke Johansson defies categorization. Oscillating between Free Music, Swing Jazz, composition, performance, music theater, vocal art, and visual experimentation, his work inhabits a space where genres dissolve and new forms emerge. This book is the most comprehensive collection of Johansson’s compositions, realized and unrealized concepts, alongside his distinctive drawings, sketches, and textual explorations. Just as his music shifts fluidly between acoustic ready-mades, bruitism, solo works, free ensembles, jazz combos, and theatrical experiments, his writing resists fixed identities. Texts explaining compositions double as poetic structures, aphorisms transform into song lyrics, and vocal declamations spill from Instant Composing into the realm of literature. Rather than imposing a historical framework, this book presents a vivid collage of materials, arranged in thematic constellations that reflect Johansson’s own artistic logic. At once an artist’s book and a curated volume, it offers deep insight into his creative practice. A series of interviews further illuminates his singular way of thinking and speaking, providing multiple entry points into the world of one of the most unclassifiable figures in contemporary music and art. Thomas Groetz and Bastian Zimmermann prepared the materials for this volume. Translated by Daniel Ryan Albertson.

Jean-Christophe Thomas (born 1959), trained at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMP) electroacoustic composition class, is research associate at the Ina-GRM with François Delalande (perceptive analysis in music), in particular in charge of studying approaches in composition. His musicological studies concern acousmatic repertoire. Maison ONA, September 2024 bilingual edition (English / French) Softcover, 184 ppJean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download). Diabolus in musica offers a guided and commented listening experience through François Bayle's catalog. Augmented with 151 sound files (examples), it can be approached in a non-linear way, through the listening or the concept it illustrates. The 52 thematics are characteristic traits or recurrences in the way he creates, conceives or organizes his materials—making his art unique. One of the major contributors to acousmatic music, François Bayle (born 1932 in Tamatave, Madagascar) strives to promote the GRM and its values, as well as pursuing the development of the acousmonium, a multi-speaker apparatus designed for the performative projection of sounds. As far as his music is concerned, he is known for his vast compositional cycles whose style unites articulation and fluidity, color, and energetic creation.François Bayle studied with Stockhausen and Messiaen. He joined the ORTF Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1960. He later led the group when it became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1966. Most of his compositions are electronic, and his first important work, "Espaces inhabitables" (1967) is suggestive of an imaginary world in which nature is distorted in a dream-like fashion. He later utilized natural and synthetic sounds in his compositions, such as the recorded sounds made in a Lebanese cave. He has stated that his purpose as a composer is to enable the listener to feel the motion and vibration of energy in the universe.

Softcover, 128pp DisVoir, 1993 Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The Pillow Book, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases.       The libretto to the opera Rosa, with music by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Imagined as a “novel-opera”, Rosa introduces the reader into a new relationship with the narrative through the visual and auditive qualities of language, creating a kind of mental opera: an opera directed by Peter Greenaway but in which the reader must make his own music. This tale is the first of a series devoted to the violent murders of ten composers during the twentieth century. The first investigation surrounds the death of J-M. de Rosa, a Brazilian who became successful in the 1950's by writing music for Western films. This experience naturally led to the realization of a genuine opera (performed in Amsterdam in 1994).

Duke University press, 2003The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Fugitivity pervaded American slavery, propelling slaveholders into acts to prevent the self-liberation of enslaved people. The paradox of free and slave states simultaneously enabled the freedom of uncaptured runaways and criminalized the act of seeking freedom with sanctions and state laws that controlled slave travel. A central paradigm of this counteraction to freedom was runaway ads. Fugitive slave advertisements illuminated the flight of the absconder. Within the brevity of ad lines, lives of the enslaved were laid bare in descriptions of physical scars, character depictions, labor competences, and speculations about their destinations, which often revealed kinship ties. With no definitive way of knowing the plight of particular runaway slaves, the poems in Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound reimagine and reconstruct narratives through ekphrastic responses to runaway ads and other documented artifacts. Embodying the aesthetics of the poetic forms haiku and tanka, poems in this collection embark on an inquiry into the natural world experienced by the enslaved. This approach extends beyond the traditional Zen-inspired approach to haiku writing. For the enslaved, nature was captivity. Runagate is a cartographic exploration into those who found courage in bondage and who gave their lives to build our country.

Softcover, 256pp Duke University Press, 2001In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Softcover, 448pp Duke University Press, 2001Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell's odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there." Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell's openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.

Volume 43, Number 3 Softcover, 288pp Duke University Press, November 2016The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the “heroic” or high-bourgeois era to late modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s Aktualität—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo paperback, 218pp Editions 1989, May 2025  Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound is the first publication devoted to Tom Wilson (1931–1978). Wilson started Transition Records in 1955, a pioneering label that painted a picture of vibrant jazz scenes from Boston to Memphis. Based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Transition came to prominence with releases featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd, among others, before running out of money in 1958. Wilson then moved to New York and began an extensive career as an “A&R; man” (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, crafting innovative productions at Columbia for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel before signing the Velvet Underground, Nico, and the Mothers of Invention at MGM Records. His work as a record producer is as expansive as it is little known. Through newly commissioned essays from music historians Wolfram Knauer and Richie Unterberger, journalist Ignacio Juliá, and essayist Pacôme Thiellement, this book explores Wilson’s role in documenting avant-garde jazz, producing some of the key folk-rock recordings of the 1960s, and his daring collaborations with influential US rock bands. It also includes a rare full-length interview with Wilson and a selection of unpublished photographs. Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound tells the untold story of a visionary record producer.

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to “uncuration”: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding, 48pp Varamo Press, November 2022, series Gestures  In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’ Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Tunes transcribed from recordings and annotated by Francis Collinson Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Paperback, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893. Volumes 2 and 3 are based on John Lorne Campbell's recordings of songs made between 1938 and 1965 in Barra, South Uist, Eriskay and Benbecula. The translations for all the songs in Volumes 2 and 3 and many of those in Volume 1 are by John Lorne Campbell, who also wrote detailed notes discussing the songs. Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

Made in Kilphedir in South Uist in the year 1983 Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Softcover, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893.  Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

Softcover, 104pp Granta, 2024Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.

Softcover, 60pp, Risograph printed Old Hair Comix, Glasgow 2024Look Out! is a new anthology of graphic and narrative art from Glasgow (and her satellites). Old Hair Comix has been initiated as a holding cell in which to gather the work of mavrick artists that draw the non-idiomatic, psychedelic, folk, rap, techno, ambient, pop, free moods typically dispersed through an overlapping and undulating art/music scene. Often congealed into the form of posters, album art, t-shirts, pamphlets and phone ephemera their works are now available bound and portable for your pleasure. Sixty pages of colour risograph and digital printing by Sunday's Print Service, published by Old Hair Comix; a division of OLD HAIR CORPS.   Your Look Out! artists are: Marc Baines, Rob Churm, Jim Colquhoun, Malcy Duff, Aki Hassan, Jamie Johnson, Peter 'Suds' McKenna, Metaphrog, Julian Dicken, Hardeep Pandhal, Verity Pease, Mick Peter, Oliver Pitt, Sue Tompkins, Nat Walpole, Fritz Welch, Al White

Softcover, 12x19cm, 224pp Varamo Press, Brussels/Oslo, January 2025    After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together. Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

Hardback, 544pp   White Rabbit Press, March 2025Volcanic Tongue presents the first ever collection of multi-award-winning author David Keenan's music writings. Keenan has been writing about music since publishing his first fanzine, inspired by The Pastels and by Glasgow (and Airdrie's) DIY music scene, in 1988. Since then, he has written about music for Melody Maker, NME, Uncut, Mojo, The New York Times, Ugly Things, The Literary Review, The Social and, most consistently, The Wire. Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the record shop and mail order that Keenan ran with his partner, Heather Leigh, in Glasgow from 2005-2015.Volcanic Tongue features the best of his reviews, interviews and think pieces, with exclusive in-depth conversations between Keenan and Nick Cave, members of legendary industrial bands Coil and Throbbing Gristle, krautrock legends like Faust, Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, German auto-destructives Einstürzende Neubauten, as well as discographical analysis of the back catalogues of groups like Sonic Youth and musicians like John Fahey, extensive writings on free jazz and obsessive in-depth digs into favourites like Pere Ubu, Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd, Sun Ra, guitarist and vocalist John Martyn and many more. It is an essential addition to any music fan's bookshelf.This first collection of his legendary criticism functions as an extended love letter to the revolutionary music of the 20th century and the incredible culture that sustained it.