Books and Magazines


Sofcover, 384pp.  Aum Fidelity/ Centering, New York, 2026 3rd edition, 100 copy runWilliam Parker's Observations presents the most expansive overview of his prolific, diverse, and illuminating writings yet. Drawn from over a 50+ year span (1967-2023), it collects an array of works that include liner notes, remembrances, essays, lyrics, concert programs, book forewords, plays, & transcriptions of recitations. Nearly 400 pages & over 100,000 words, it includes many pieces not previously published or anthologized. In its pages, one can trace the evolution & refinement of core philosophies that Parker came to conceive & embrace from first immersing himself in music, film, poetry, art, & grassroots movements. Liner notes often go far beyond descriptions of the music, providing an outlet to present the broader foundations of his art, visions for a better world, & evocative tales about old friends & colleagues, many of whom are unlikely to be documented in "official" history books. Observations is published on Parker's Centering imprint. The first edition of 50 copies was sold at the 2024 Vision Festival. This second edition, first print run of 100 copies (February 2025), adds a foreword by the late Dr. E. Pelikan Chalto, aka Carl Lombard, an important early influence on WP, who has described him as "a shaman, teacher, painter, poet, & musician ... one of the heaviest spirits on the scene."   William Parker was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1952. At a young age, he realized that art & community would guide his life's path. This led him to move to the Lower East Side of New York City, where he has lived since the early 1970s. Inspirations for his work include peace, compassion, self-determination, nature, freedom, music of Indigenous peoples, and the relationships between improvisation, composition, sound, & silence. These themes & others converge in his concept of Universal Tonality, which he explores as a musician, poet, visual artist, philosopher, historian, organizer, educator, & activist.

William Parker – Observations: Selected Works 1967 - 2023

Transmissions: Radio Essays on Edges, Crossings and Narrowcasting Borderlands gathers radio essays—created as part of Robida Collective’s project Radio drugega/The Other Radio—which reveal that to speak of “the border” is never to speak of a single line. There are political borders, conceptual borders, bodily borders; carnivalesque borders, where order collapses into play; linguistic and cultural borders, where words slip between languages and where accents become geographies; archival borders, separating memory from forgetting; borders of abandonment, where life and death enter into a dialectical ballet; economic borders, drawn by property, ownership, enclosure; borders of matter, space and time; acoustic borders, where the voice meets noise and incomprehensibility; cosmic borders, where meteors cross the thin edge of air; ecological borders, porous and breathing, where one species touches another. These are some of the borders this book speaks of – lines that do not divide but resonate, that hold together separation and proximity, distance and relation. Together, these essays form a cartography of friction but also affinity, reminding us that to erase all borders is to erase the very conditions of encounter – and that meaning often emerges not at the centre, but at the edges where worlds meet. With texts by:Agnes Cameron, Ajda Bračič, Aljaž Škrlep, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Giorgia Maurovich, Jack Bardwell, Kate Donovan, Kat Macdonald, Lijuan Klassen, Luca Vettori, Michael Marder, Moritz Gansen, Olya Korsun, Petra Filagrana, Urška Savič.Softcover, 120x170mm, 240pp Robida, 2025

transmission - radio essays on edges, crossings and narrowcasting borderlands

‘Sussex folk seem ever to have had a leaning towards snaky things.’ Sussex Coils and Loops is a work of parafolklore on the great serpents encountered in the land of south-east England. The book describes a series of ritual actions performed between the winter solstice of 2017 and the summer solstice of 2022 at sites with serpent or dragon legends associated with them. We explore hidden woods, secret pools and lonely churches, find clues in stained glass windows, graveyards, fading murals, tattered pamphlets and video games. There are hermits and saints, headless horsemen, mighty oaks and giant puddings. Shrines are constructed, encounters logged. Each generation is seen to have added to the recursive legend, and the sources range from Anglo-Saxon and medieval Latin accounts to contemporary storytellers. All seek to plumb the depthless knucker holes and reveal their great and terrifying wyrms. In Sussex Coils and Loops, Holman deploys a number of strategies to demonstrate and report on these workings. The writing is in turn experimental, documentary, and scholarly. This is unashamedly contemporary landscape magic. Holman resists any characterisation of folklore that privileges a notion of authenticity as inherently conservative. Rather, he sees it as a dynamic and unstable process which is constantly taking on provisional, dare we say, snaky, forms Through its careful scholarship, field investigations, and experiments with form, Sussex Coils and Loops offers a variety of entry points into this living tradition, honouring its unruly, indefatigable nature, and curious to see where it might go next.Illustrations by Harriet Holman Penney Softcover, 162pp Scarlet Imprint, 2026

paul holman – sussex coils & loops