A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau's fundamental bass, Riemann's harmonic function, Schenker's hierarchic analysis, Forte's pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman's auditory scene, Terhardt's virtual pitch, Krumhansl's tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt's evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: • Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? • What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

Sound American Publications announces its 27th issue, THE LIFE ISSUE, a reflection upon the smallness—and largeness—of living amidst a tumultuous, globally-shared moment..The Life Issue contributors include claire rousay, who writes about the many cuts accumulated while learning something new; pedal steel superhero Susan Alcorn recounts a battle with injury; composer Jack Langdon offers Sound American’s second fiction offering, a story of how the pandemic affects a fictional musician, presenter, and listener; composer Lea Bertucci interviews improvising vocalist Audrey Chen about identity, commitment to music, and motherhood; bass clarinetist Katie Porter lets us in on a quarantine’s worth of deep-questioning and the looping beauty of banality.Sound American’s ongoing series, “Sites of Formation”, celebrates the piano, featuring writing by pianists Pat Thomas (on Ahmed Abdul-Malik) and Cory Smythe (on Henri Pousseur), as well as Dr. Douglas Rust on the Elliott Carter Piano Sonata and Sound American’s editor, Nate Wooley on the Vangelis’s keyboard-heavy soundtrack to Chariots of Fire. This issue also includes writing by saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos on NYC guerilla concerts during lockdown and a roundtable discussion from members of the Catalytic Sound collective—Ken Vandermark, Luke Stewart, and Bonnie Jones led by Brock Stuessi—on their work to create a streaming platform as an alternative to Spotify.This issue’s Exquisite Corpse is an elegant, nostalgic site-specific work by composer, flutist, vocalist Ka Baird. The Life Issue also features a world-premiere, sixteen-page set of drawings with introduction by Lebanese-born, Berlin-based artist Mazen Kerbaj. The drawings feature his intimate, aching, everyday trek through multiple shutdowns.As we move on from a generation-defining year-and-a-half, The Life Issue allows some of the artists we love to speak intimately as people: people who happen to make art. Without requiring responses to the great traumas of the last eighteen months, the issues allows them to reaffirm their everyday humanity through the small injuries and victories, the days of nothing happening, and the ways that they try to fit in as small parts of a huge world. A unique issue of Sound American, it reaffirms the journal’s mission of making music for everyone in new and unexpected ways.

Emerging from avant-garde art performances of the 1960s, light shows became the hip accompaniment to gigs and clubs in the 1970s. Swirling coloured oils and kaleidoscopic patterns were projected across bands and venues, while 360 degree painted ‘panorama wheels’ would slowly rotate in projectors, showing only a section of the image at any one time. Wheels of Light brings together the images made by the key projection companies that sprung up in the UK, including Optikinetics, Pluto and Orion, and tells their story. From abstract psychedelia to alien planets, the designs for these rotating projections are a snapshot of the creativity and inventiveness of an era.  

This book was published to coincide with Cornelius Cardew: Play for Today exhibition which took place here at Drawing Room. This book was co-published by Drawing Room and MuHKA, Antwerp, in collaboration with Middlesex University. In this 112 page book extracts from ‘Treatise’, ‘Schooltime Compositions’, ‘Nature Study Notes’ and other visual material are interspersed with essays by Michael Parsons (composer, performer and co-founder of the Scratch Orchestra), Andrea Phillips (Director, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London), Adrian Rifkin (Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London), Rob Stone (Senior Research Fellow, Visual Culture Research Group, Middlesex University) , John Tilbury (musician and Cardew collaborator and biographer), international artists’ collective Ultra-red and Grant Watson and a photo-essay by the Otolith Group. These artists, writers and curators pursue and rekindle the questions and contradictions that Cardew’s practice incorporated.

Making audible what is usually inaudible, rendering sound visible in an unusual way, and facilitating a spatial experience of sound­—this is what constitutes the pioneering work that makes Alvin Lucier one of the most important representatives of American music in the second half of the twentieth century. The stated aim of the study at hand is the detailed historical and theoretical exploration of Alvin Lucier’s work, with particular focus on his decidedly reflexive experimental aesthetics. The research is thus based on two essential methodological approaches: on the one hand, a musicological study of the genesis of Lucier’s work, and on the other, an aesthetic analysis of the role of the real within Lucier’s aesthetics.Lucier’s experimental compositions are aesthetic reflections that are constantly making reference to the phenomenology of sound, as well as to the perception of perception itself. His aesthetic vision gravitated towards devising minimalist constellations and processes which, due to the withdrawal of the compositional subject, gave expression to an acoustic phenomenon and the unforeseeable idea inherent to it.

140 x 200mm, 28 pages, black and white printing, saddle stitched, 2023 Jordan/Martin Hell is a black trans (2s) artist, writer, & researcher. He is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2022) as well as many other speculative novellas, hybrid genre, & critical texts in the CV universe. His writing on art, etc. & interviews have appeared in 032c, Real Review, Mousse Magazine, & others.

The story of two outsiders and obsessives whose collision prompted an evangelistic alliance on the furthest frontiers of underground music.Steve Davis first met Kavus Torabi - guitarist with Gong, Guapo, Cardiacs and Knifeworld - in the mid-2000's at a gig by French underground rock legends Magma. Over the next few years, this unlikely duo's shared affinity for visionary psychedelic music would become the foundation of not only a firm friendship, but also the most infectiously inclusive broadcasting style since the much-mourned death of John Peel.In their weekly radio shows and a one-of-a-kind live DJ roadshow which included a legendary appearance at Glastonbury, Steve and Kavus mapped out a musical landscape of rare enchantment, where the only passport needed was a pair of open ears. No-one, least of all Davis and Torabi themselves, was expecting the 6-time former World Snooker champion and a British-Iranian underground rock musician to become one of the most trusted brands in British alternative music.As Steve and Kavus were starting to get to grips with the challenge of their newfound status, events took a further unexpected turn. Suddenly they found themselves in a band together. And not just any band ... as two thirds of Britain's (if not the world's) leading harmonium, guitar and analogue synth power-trio (with Michael J.York of Coil)The Utopia Strong, the two friends found themselves plunging into a vortex of spontaneous compositional excitement.How Steve and Kavus pulled this off is just one of the many questions MEDICAL GRADE MUSIC will try to answer. Part sonic memoir, part Socratic dialogue, part gonzo mission to the heart of what makes music truly psychedelic this book is the first work of joint autobiography to ever trace the evolution of a life-changing friendship through the discographies of Gentle Giant and Voivod. From the chip-shops of Plumstead to the the wildest shores of Plymouth's nineties thrash scene. it's a funny and fearless buddy movie of the soul, with a soundtrack that will make your eyes bleed.

Factory 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.

Getatchew passed away on April 4, 2016 at the age of 81 after a musical career of more than 68 years. As a final tribute The Ex has published this photobook. 168 pages. Four sections of pictures; a selection from Getatchew's private album with historical photos and photos by three very different international photographers — Andy Moor, guitarist in The Ex, Matias Corral and Nick Helderman who came on tour in Europe, America and to Addis Abeba — to document this unique collaboration between Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Guests.This photobook is the result of what appears to be an unlikely collaboration between Dutch underground band The Ex and Ethiopian saxophone legend Getatchew Mekuria. The Ex fell in love with an old Getatchew cassette from 1972, and in 2004 they wanted to invite him for their 25th Anniversary Festival. They went to Addis to find him and when they met, Getatchew was up for it right away. The result was a fruitful 10-year collaboration with more than a 100 concerts worldwide, plenty of enthusiastic press and two beautiful CD/LPs.In 2014, because of diabetes, he developed serious problems with his legs and couldn't travel any more. The Ex at that point decided to organise a Celebration of Getatchew Mekuria concert series in Ethiopia, including the National Theatre in Addis Abeba. It sold out. 1500 people came and there was a standing ovation. A truly honourable farewell to a great musician. Soon after this, his health began to deteriorate quickly.

A considered meditation on London's contemporary jazz landscape, Scenes is a collection of fly-on-the-wall pictures of its musicians and spaces, from a period when folks got good to the music all over again. The scenes depicted here run the gamut from packed houses to clandestine jams, from the much lauded to the lesser pronounced, allowing for a candid visual exploration on topical themes of multiculturalism, tradition and modernity, age and youth, community and solitude.

Howard Slater's pamphlet A Blind Eye Turned: Notes on Music and Libidinal Economy (Cesura//Acceso, 2016), which looks at the aesthetics of control, alienation and S/M in industrial and experimental music as a critique of libidinal economy.

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected; they insist that they must be connected. Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

In Circular Breathing, George McKay, a leading chronicler of British countercultures, uncovers the often surprising ways that jazz has accompanied social change during a period of rapid transformation in Great Britain. Examining jazz from the founding of George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943 through the burgeoning British bebop scene of the early 1950s, the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals of 1956–61, and the improvisational music making of the 1960s and 1970s, McKay reveals the connections of the music, its players, and its subcultures to black and antiracist activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, feminism, and the New Left. In the process, he provides the first detailed cultural history of jazz in Britain.  McKay explores the music in relation to issues of whiteness, blackness, and masculinity—all against a backdrop of shifting imperial identities, postcolonialism, and the Cold War. He considers objections to the music’s spread by the “anti-jazzers” alongside the ambivalence felt by many leftist musicians about playing an “all-American” musical form. At the same time, McKay highlights the extraordinary cultural mixing that has defined British jazz since the 1950s, as musicians from Britain’s former colonies—particularly from the Caribbean and South Africa—have transformed the genre. Circular Breathing is enriched by McKay’s original interviews with activists, musicians, and fans and by fascinating images, including works by the renowned English jazz photographer Val Wilmer. It is an invaluable look at not only the history of jazz but also the Left and race relations in Great Britain.

The 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

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.  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

Musical Echoes tells the life story of the South African jazz vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin. Born in Cape Town in the 1930s, Benjamin came to know American jazz and popular music through the radio, movies, records, and live stage and dance band performances. She was especially moved by the voice of Billie Holiday. In 1962 she and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) left South Africa together for Europe, where they met and recorded with Duke Ellington. Benjamin and Ibrahim spent their lives on the move between Europe, the United States, and South Africa until 1977, when they left Africa for New York City and declared their support for the African National Congress. In New York, Benjamin established her own record company and recorded her music independently from Ibrahim. Musical Echoes reflects twenty years of archival research and conversation between this extraordinary jazz singer and the South African musicologist Carol Ann Muller. The narrative of Benjamin’s life and times is interspersed with Muller’s reflections on the vocalist’s story and its implications for jazz history. --- “Musical Echoes is a wide reaching and important missing link in the development of late twentieth-century jazz. This book needed to be written and deserves to be read with the same patient attention to detail as was poured into it by the author.” — Gregg Akkerman, Journal of Jazz Studies “We get frank and rich recollections by Benjamin of her early life. . . . The sections on Benjamin’s childhood and early adulthood double as something of a social history of coloured cultural and social life in Cape Town before the National Party came to power in 1948. The book contains a rich description of talent concerts, dance bands, jazz clubs, and the impact of radio, records, and cinema on Benjamin’s imagination and musical education. It also deals with Benjamin’s complex racial politics.” — Sean Jacobs, International Journal of African Historical Studies “[A] fascinating biography. . . .” — Bobbi Booker, Philadelphia Tribune “Ibrahim has cited the loss of information as one legacy of apartheid, and the broader context—filling in those gaps—is also key to the appeal of Muller’s meticulously researched book.” — Marcus O'Dair, Jazzwise “Muller . . . does a remarkable job in piecing together Benjamin’s life, work, and significance within the context of post-apartheid history.” — Brian Morton, The Wire “Muller examines Benjamin's experiences with apartheid, her exile from South Africa, and how these experiences helped form her career as a jazz musician. Benjamin's life story is quite colorful, and Muller effectively captures the essence of that story with this call-and-response nature of the presentation and with a writing style that is both engaging and highly descriptive. Recommended. All readers.” — D. J. Schmalenberger, Choice “Muller's biography-plus, of and with Sathima Bea Benjamin, is welcome for many reasons; first and foremost because it spotlights a brilliant architect of song who is far less well known than she should be. But Muller goes further. She challenges still dominant androcentric and Amerocentric jazz discourses, offering alternative frameworks that allow us to consider the dynamics of race, class and gender within whose maelstrom Benjamin shaped her sound.” — Gwen Ansell, Mail & Guardian “Musical Echoes not only introduces a very important vocalist, Sathima Bea Benjamin, to audiences who may not know of her. It also makes a great contribution to scholarship on jazz, world music, cultural theory, and the African diaspora. It challenges us to reconsider and revise the nationalist narratives that characterize much writing on jazz, and it provides a new framework for discussing the production, circulation, and transformation of musical cultures.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday “Sathima Bea Benjamin ought to share company with the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter. . . . [She] never compromis[es] her own musical vision, refusing to either remake herself into an ‘American’ jazz singer or into what the world imagines to be authentically ‘African.’ She is who she is, Sathima Bea Benjamin, South Africa’s greatest jazz singer and one of the best the world has ever known.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, JazzTimes

2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by its incantatory repetitiveness, its flamboyance, and its mysticism, but also by its violence. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad, Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work, which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video, and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols, as well as Tintin creator Hergé. Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles, and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Sacred Bordello is a flexi-cover sewn, full color, 192-page, 11" x 9" book that includes essays, scores, and original photos of performances and installations, providing the most complete documentation of Charlemagne Palestine's art. The included CD features an hour-long recording of a lecture that Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at the ArtNow Centre in Canada. Following the performance of a strumming music concert, Palestine freely speaks about his music and philosophy, involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question-and-answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The CD also includes a previously unreleased multi-layer voice study from the early 1960s.

Through extensive interviews, and his own knowledge as a first-hand observer, KD Hopkins provides a roadmap for heretofore totally uncharted territory in the history of extreme sonic exploration. Featuring the likes of Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Hanatarash alongside a bevy of lesser known freaks, Rumors Of Noizu compiles anecdotes and memories alongside flyers and photographs from the time, in an attempt to contextualize what is perhaps the most bewildering music scene in the history of the modern underground. Many critics have discussed the genre of noizu as a strange subculture arising in a strange place, Japan. In this book, Noizu is discussed as a natural organic expression arising in a country full of experimental culture. Tracing the earliest stirrings of noizu in various places, this micro-history, based on extensive interviews with participants and witnesses, will provide context to make sense of something that intentionally has no meaning.