Deeply atmospheric set from Berlin-based, Egyptian musician Assyouti, reworking the score for Carl Theodor Dreyer's seminal 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Matching the heightened expressivity of Dreyer's masterpiece is no easy feat, but Assyouti's skilful adaptation manages it, becoming less an alternative soundtrack than a heartfelt evocation of the film's astonishingly memorably imagery. Voices and orchestral fragments are slowed, looped and eroded to the point of rupture, shifting from accompaniment to textural matter that flares and falls to ash as distortion and decay quietly overtake the image. Throughout, a richly expansive chorus teeters on the precipice between the spiritual and the sepulchral, the human and the synthetic. It's hard not to get swept away with it all; this is music to get lost in. The set's near 40-minute runtime stretches from featherlight, angelic tones to a coruscating density. At times we sense things straining at the limits of the speakers themselves - not so much a matter of volume as an abundance of scope. This is sound-craft on a very broad sonic canvas indeed. -- Recorded by Billy SteigerMixed and mastered by Oli Barrett

Softcover, 284pp University of California Press, 2011 In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by “experimental” in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time—New York City, 1964—Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt’s demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.

“The animating spirit is Poppy’s protean musical imagination, as light as wings beating one moment, thunderous and dark the next. … It’s not just an archive [but] otherwise unreleased works caught in live performance and gently transformed in the editing suite into the components of four well-shaped albums. … Poppy’s music is like Madagascar — you discover species there you don’t find anywhere else.” — Brian Morton, Wire magazine, on ARK HIVE OF A LIVE “Whatever the details, whatever the situation he finds himself in at any given moment, whatever his temporary function, whatever company he finds himself in, whether he is on his own or with others, commissioned, contracted and sponsored or left to his own devices, the music is as elusive and compelling as ever, expressing a mysterious state of being rather than merely a form, creating space and time for both performer and listener. Some of his pieces are intensely exciting and uplifting and cheerful, a melancholy razzle-dazzle; some are very austere and serious and sober, a freaky, bittersweet unease. Exactly as they were, exactly as they will be, the same, but different, taking advantage of the ambiguity in the world.” — Paul Morley, from the introduction to Ark Hive of A LiveArk Hive of A Live is a set of recordings by Andrew Poppy, along with a 128 page PDF, including writing by Andrew Poppy, an introduction by Paul Morley, other writing by Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English and archival photographs. Andrew Poppy developed Ark Hive of A Live as a place for unreleased music from the 80s 90s 00s and 10s. ‘Live’ in the title indicates these works originated in public performance as opposed to the recording studio — however, these live recordings have been processed, and while they remember their original acoustic vibration are now transformed, transplanted and almost the same. Ark Hive of A Live isn’t a box set ‘best of’ or mini series. Each disc has been ordered to play like an album, with an indelible ‘suite-like’ order, even if many of the pieces were written at different times and with different production details. Volumes 1 to 4 are focused respectively on: the orchestra with a soloist; a collection of vocal pieces, for ensemble or orchestra; music written for independent ensembles; and the contrast between acoustic music and music which creatively exploits electrical and electronic technology. The Ark Hive is an ironic meditation on the archive. It brings together element of biography and materials from a lifetime of creative endeavour in sonic, language and visual forms. Tracks, writings, performance photographs and scores: 1+1+1+1 = Ark Hive. The project holds it all together with some irony, because it is aware of the absurdity of the enterprise but plows ahead relentlessly anyway --- Performers include: 
Andrew Poppy, Sustaining Ensemble, Noszferatu, Crash Ensemble, CoMA Ensemble, Roger Heaton Group, John Harle, Simon Haram, Darragh Morgan, Tania Chen, Kädy Plaas, Margaret Cameron, Ashley Slater, Peter Sidholm, BBC Concert Orchestra, ROH Garden Venture Ensemble, Estonian Male Choir, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. The live recordings in Ark Hive of A Live are connected with various images and writings collected in the PDF, which contains the following:— An introduction by Paul Morley, who helped release Andrew’s first albums on ZTT Records in the 1980s.— Invited writing by Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose English, responding to different aspects of the Ark Hive collection.— Writing by Andrew: introducing and reflecting on the Ark Hive project; overviews of each of the four volumes of music; writing on each composition, including programme notes, lyrics, poems, prose poems, librettos, performing instructions; and thoughts on his life and work as a composer, performer and creative artist.— The Image Ark: 38 photographic images, with complementary text by Andrew and credits/captions.— Discography Backwards: writing by Andrew, reflecting on each of his album releases.— Discography Forwards: summarising compositions and musician credits. --- “Freely drawing from the sounds of contemporary classical, experimental, jazz and pop music, and moving confidently between forms and formats, from concert music to pop records, operas and oratorios, dance and film soundtracks, Andrew Poppy’s diverse oeuvre resists easy categorisation … An elegantly generous (or stubborn), genre-indifferent (or should that be style-inclusive?) approach that flies in the face of putrefying compositional tradition, and any rules or anxieties over low vs highbrow, tonal vs textural, serious vs popular, acoustic vs electroacoustic; artfully dodging conspicuous intellectualism and side-stepping the class-political airs of contemporary classicism. Poppy’s denial of boundaries not only frees his music to be what it wants to be, it gives his music freedom to explore the uncanny territories and tensions that live in the in-between. Replacing polarities with multiplicities.” — Leah Kardos, from the Ark Hive of A Live book --- Music by Andrew PoppyWriting by Andrew Poppy, Paul Morley, Leah Kardos, Nik Bärtsch and Rose EnglishMastered by Stephan MathieuDesign by David Caines

Softcover, 94pp Prototype, August 2026The collection orchestrates a mythic and historical collision between three formidable figures – the South African poet Ingrid Jonker, the mythical witch Medea, and a provocative poetic ‘I’ (evoking the trope of the ‘scorned woman’) – to interrogate the male gaze and the transformative potential of female rage. Vegter’s poems tease language to its limit, with a restless energy that is dynamic, vicious and vulgar, infused with humour and absurdist overtones, brought to life through Astrid Alben's virtuosic translation. Pig Data fearlessly rebuffs the comforts of traditional form, revelling in contradictions, moving between a luminous tenderness and vulgar, incoherent urgency.

Softcover, 384pp University of Chicago Press, 2026An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable of the dictionary definition of imprimer (to score, to print). Trawling the internet for cute videos of cats “playing” piano, an artist splices together a complete, note-perfect performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Half a century after the release of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue, a jazz quintet spends months of focused practice to reproduce the original exactly. These performances share a common denominator: absolute fidelity to the outcome of a system. From Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, Steve Reich to Sun Ra, The Sound of Thinking brings together a diverse array of musical or sonic works that are algorithmic, automatic, permutational, procedural, or otherwise structured in contrast to the creative expressivity typically associated with artistic production. In twenty-six short essays, each keyed to a term that begins with a different letter of the alphabet, Dworkin discusses work composed or performed according to a predetermined rule, transforming artistic creation into a system running its course. The pieces detailed here, drawn from more than a century of musical experimentation, offer a fresh perspective on the history of innovative music by decoupling music from expression and by shunting creativity from the level of organizing sounds to the level of devising a system that can do the organizing. Not only does this book spotlight the critical role of music in twentieth-century conceptual art, but it also identifies previously overlooked links among diverse artists and movements.

Softcover, 128 Pages, 20 x 12,5 cm, Print run: 500 Rab-Rab, August 2024  Larisa Reisner’s writings on the Decembrist rising. Originally written in 1925, these essays of Reisner will be for the first time collected in one volume. Translated and introduced by Cathy Porter.