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Cover of England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

Strange Attractor Press

England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

David Keenan

€34.00

This newly expanded edition of England's Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands' personal archives.

Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. Over four decades, the three intertwined groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy, relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their music, beliefs, and practices have repelled them from it. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Joe Orton, Shirley Collins, Björk, and Marc Almond. The story of this Hidden Reverse has, necessarily, remained a secret. Until now.  

This new volume contains almost 100 pages of extra material culled from Furfur, a collection of interviews with musicians and artists whose careers intersected with the bands', initially published alongside Strange Attractor's first limited edition of the book.

Published in 2023 ┊ 508 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

If I Can't Dance

Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

Derrais Carter

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Cover of Spring Brakers

Kraak

Spring Brakers

The Sludgehead Contingent

An account of Spring Brakers, a project launched during the so-called First Wave. Spring Brakers was an online platform hosting video performances by a different artist each week alongside podcasts on various topics focusing on other labels or musical persuasions.

For this publication, all of the musicians who participated in the project are profiled, resulting in a grounded and oddly inspiring collection of testimonies of how artistic practices are shaped by an era that is still ongoing.

Artists include locals such as Bear Bones, Lay Low, Quanta Qualia, Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Orphan Fairytale, and more, as well as far-out friends like Ka Baird, MSHR, Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, and so on.

Each profile has a handy QR to redirect to each artist's video, and each copy includes a code to download a compilation made especially for the publication.

Cover of Quantum Dreaming

Silver Press

Quantum Dreaming

Ione

Essays €11.00

IONE is a Dream Keeper: a facilitator of dreams. Sharing this intimate part of our being, she believes, can be the start of new ways of being with one another. 

Exploring the reality of the dream and the dream of reality over many decades has led IONE to appreciate the quantum nature of dreams. Weaving science and dream traditions from around the world together with her own memories and the dreams of her friends and community members, Quantum Dreaming shows that as we start practising awareness, our consciousness also deepens.

IONE and Pauline Oliveros’s shared vision of a harmonious, self-sustaining network of artists and dreamers led to the founding of the Deep Listening Institute. Quantum Dreaming similarly seeks a radical shift in our collective consciousness, across all states of dreaming and waking.

Afterword by Sarah Shin
Images by Sammy Lee

Cover of Ticking Stripe

Blank Forms

Ticking Stripe

Spencer Gerhardt

A new collection of writings by the composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt, considering among other topics the rich points of contact between minimalist musical aesthetics and intuitionistic mathematics.

Noted composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt presents Ticking Stripe, a groundbreaking collection of essays linking notions of continuity and construction across the boundaries of math, art, music and philosophy. Gerhardt offers new, and deeply informed interpretations of the 1960s New York avant-garde, viewed through the lens of trailblazing artists such as La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Catherine Christer Hennix, Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad.

Ticking Stripe pairs the spirit of L. E. J. Brouwer—a mathematician who brilliantly, and controversially, sought to reconstruct the continuum in his own philosophical terms called intuitionism—with the ambitions of pioneering minimalists who combined continued constructions, idealized processes of introspection, and conceptual world-building with a host of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual concerns. Informed by his own work as a professional mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality. Spanning over two decades, these essays feature rich historical explorations of minimalist music, writing on contemporary art, and work in logic and algebraic groups, all approached with rare clarity and technical aplomb.

Spencer Gerhardt is a composer and mathematician. His music engages constructive, introspective and romantic traditions. Gerhardt has written solo piano music, piano based songs, and works of minimalism. He studied raga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, piano performance with Sung-Hwa Park, and has collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ankersmit and Charles Curtis.

Cover of Gut Feelings – Melodies and Aromas

DUUU

Gut Feelings – Melodies and Aromas

Louise Siffert

With the vinyl recording of a musical, the artist proposes a new chapter in her project on fermentation as a living, palpable theory that blends body, feminism, and community.

Gut Feelings is a musical sung and performed by giant bacteria. It is a reference to lesbian separatist communities and more specifically to their capacity to create other forms and ways of life, outside of unliveable norms. The motif of fermentation here becomes a metaphor for the activity of a micro-organic and ungendered community, both human and non-human, alive, moving and changing form. In the manner of fermentation, this community in constant activity evolves autonomously, feeding itself and the space around it.

Louise Siffert (born 1988 in Strasbourg, lives and works in Paris) is a French performer. The world of work, alienation, the search for well-being, the place of habits: Louise Siffert's performances question and relate these current themes in theatrical and burlesque settings. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological reflections, she creates characters with exacerbated personalities, overexploiting the codes of language and behavior that are attributed to them.