In his controversial essay on white jazz musician Burton Greene, Amiri Baraka asserted that jazz was exclusively an African American art form and explicitly fused the idea of a black aesthetic with radical political traditions of the African diaspora. In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation. For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other. Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectations, their sense of the world, their predispositions toward the way they think or use their language, and then to use these things perversely, politically, colorfully, “expressively.” —Tony Conrad, “Dolomite: Having No Trust in Readers”Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961 – 2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, Loose Connection, Four Violins, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, Early Minimalism, Yellow Movies, Slapping Pythagoras, and Music and the Mind of the World, as well as that of his peers: Tony Oursler, Jack Smith, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt, among others. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. He also writes on media activism, network communications, censorship, and the political and cultural implications of corporate and global media. No matter the topic or theme, Conrad always approaches his subjects with erudition, precision, and a healthy twist of humor. Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was a multidisciplinary artist known for his groundbreaking art, music, films, and videos, although his work doesn’t fit comfortably within any of these disciplines. He eschewed categorization and actively sought to challenge the constraints of media forms, their modes of production, and the relationships of power embedded within them. --- 576 pages5 x 7.4 inchesPaperbackEdition of 2000

Walking tours of Britain's nuclear power stations, exploring the history of the sites they occupy and their social, ecological, and cultural impact on the landscape.The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom? Atomic Albion is a journey around Britain's nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the impossible world of nuclear power and weapons.Hardcover, 488pp Strange Attractor Press, 2025

Live at the Junxxxxxion HallIn the depths of Geneva’s Fonderie Kugler red-lit-boudoir, stand four grand pianos surrounded by divinities. The two elder Erard brothers are tuneddown a quarter tone lower than their neighbours, a twin pair of gleaming and valiant Yamaha’s.Charlemagne and Seppe both sit facing each other, managing the 428Hz tuning from the tip of their left hand, while the right hand controls the conventional 440Hz machine.This four-piano fantasy was born a few years ago, when these two gentlemen met around a carillon, and realised they had a common “passion forunusual tunings and the playing of multiple pianos”. This microtonal duo first premiered at the Bijloke in Ghent (2019), and has since remained slightly concealed until Konnekt provided the little spark to reignite this mystical-keyboard-beast.When the two pianists swap places, during a short moment of inhabited silence, we get a chance to taste what seems to lie beyond the notes. Perhaps the key to appreciating and sharing beauty is magicallyyymysterioussss after all.

Amazing, Japanese only CD capturing Otomo and his Special big band live at Oto, in what, for some, remain some of the most thrilling live moments ever experienced in the cafe.

The focus is on new compositions, innovative performance formats, influential festivals, and aesthetic, social, and technological developments in 20th- and 21st-century music. Essays, interviews, analytical texts, and reviews offer different perspectives on contemporary music as a living practice—between artistic experimentation, critical reflection, and theoretical classification.Edited by Christopher Fox, Ed Cooper, and Celeste Oram Softcover Magazine, 144 pp.ISSN 0040-2982