Books and Magazines


“In August 2016 I received an email from Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s majordomo. I had been getting occasional writing assignments from Bob through Jeff for years, and they were extremely various: speeches, press kits, prefaces, a Buick commercial. Now he explained that he and Bob had been discussing a film project, to focus on his ‘Gospel Years,’ 1979-1980. They had some great footage—not the rather stiff performances intended for an unmade TV special, but the rougher takes made for pick-ups. Bob had the thought that he’d like to interrupt the footage with sermons delivered by an actor. Would I consider writing the sermons?I gulped, but I said yes. What did I know about sermons? Barring the occasional funeral I hadn’t been to church since age thirteen, and what I could recall of the priests of my past was not exactly inspiring. I searched sermons online but found mostly dull plodding slabs of Midwestern mainstream-Protestant reasonableness. I searched my bookshelves for anything relevant and came up with Perry Miller's 1956 anthology The American Puritans, but their elegant plain seventeenth-century Dissenter prose did not suit the music. I also found Saved: The Gospel Speeches, transcriptions of the sermons Bob had actually issued from the stage in those years, edited by Clinton Heylin and published in Raymond Foye’s palm-sized Hanuman editions. They weren’t prose at all, but spontaneous exhortations and rambling homilies, full of doom and repentance, blood and thunder. I checked with Jeff, but no, Bob did not want those as a stylistic model. Finally I realized what I should have known in the first place if it weren’t for my print bias: my sources had to be recorded sermons. After all, I had dozens on my iPod (RIP): Rev. J. M. Gates, Rev. D. C. Rice, Rev. A. W. Nix. These were Black, mostly Southern preachers of the 1920s and ‘30s, whose recorded sermons, often unaccompanied, handily outsold the blues issued on the same labels. I had never seriously listened to them one after the other. I remembered some of the more sensational bits, such as Rev. Gates’s ‘Death Might Be Your Santa Claus,’ or his ‘Atlanta gets her styles from New York, and New York gets her styles from Paris, and Paris gets her styles from Hell!’But when I listened to the sermons one after another, the thing that struck me was their earnestness, their neighborliness. The secret of their success was that the preachers seemed to be addressing specific people, and that included you.”(From Sante’s foreword to these texts.)

lucy sante – six sermons for bob dylan

Originally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist critique of two of the more revered avant-garde composers of the post-war era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. A former assistant to Stockhausen and a champion of Cage in England, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers’ works and ideological positions, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting and serving the struggles of the working class. The author also provides constructive criticism of his contemporaries Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski for utilizing politically progressive content, yet failing to work in a musical form that would appeal to the proletariat. Cardew’s music does not escape his own scrutiny: the book contains critiques and repudiations of his canonical compositions from the 1960s and early 1970s, Treatise and The Great Learning. Complimenting Cardew’s essays are writings by Rod Eley, who contributes “A History of the Scratch Orchestra,” and John Tilbury, who contributes an “Introduction to Cage’s Music of Changes.” Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was initially published in a single edition by Latimer New Dimensions in 1974 and this edition is the first time the book has been published in its original form since. Cornelius Cardew was an English composer and musician. He became well known in the 1960s for his experimental music and as a proponent in the United Kingdom of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and La Monte Young. He was one of the founders of the Scratch Orchestra and an early member of the free improvisational group AMM. Several of his works from this period are considered hallmarks of post-war experimental music. In the early 1970s, Cardew abandoned avant-garde music and devoted his work to the people’s struggle, becoming more directly involved in left-wing activism. His music from this period took the form of class-conscious folksongs that prioritized drawing attention to social issues over formal innovation. Cardew maintained a critical cultural stance throughout his life, later going on to denounce David Bowie and punk rock as fascist. He took an active role in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Part of Britain. He was killed in a hit-and-run accident in 1981 under circumstances that many consider mysterious. 126 pgs, 22 × 14 cm, Softcover, 2020.

CORNELIUS CARDEW – Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself.

Dan Charnas – Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

Volcanic Tongue presents the first ever collection of multi-award-winning author David Keenan's music writings. Keenan has been writing about music since publishing his first fanzine, inspired by The Pastels and by Glasgow (and Airdrie's) DIY music scene, in 1988. Since then, he has written about music for Melody Maker, NME, Uncut, Mojo, The New York Times, Ugly Things, The Literary Review, The Social and, most consistently, The Wire. Volcanic Tongue was also the name of the record shop and mail order that Keenan ran with his partner, Heather Leigh, in Glasgow from 2005-2015.Volcanic Tongue features the best of his reviews, interviews and think pieces, with exclusive in-depth conversations between Keenan and Nick Cave, members of legendary industrial bands Coil and Throbbing Gristle, krautrock legends like Faust, Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, German auto-destructives Einstürzende Neubauten, as well as discographical analysis of the back catalogues of groups like Sonic Youth and musicians like John Fahey, extensive writings on free jazz and obsessive in-depth digs into favourites like Pere Ubu, Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd, Sun Ra, guitarist and vocalist John Martyn and many more. It is an essential addition to any music fan's bookshelf.This first collection of his legendary criticism functions as an extended love letter to the revolutionary music of the 20th century and the incredible culture that sustained it.

David Keenan – Volcanic Tongue A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20th-Century Underground Music

On the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin. How do we build or make a voice together? Can we imagine the voices we make in the form of a skin, a multi-sensory interface that behaves both as a boundary and as a point of connection? What does such a voice capacitate in times of crises and uncertainties? In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, Zeynep Bulut explores these questions. She examines the multi-sensory and collective forms of voice making in experimental music, sound and media art in conversation with the use of voice in creative interventions for environmental crisis, experiences of voice hearing, and digital technologies of artificial and tactile speech. Through this conversation, she points to two key terms: plasticity of voice, and non-dialogue. Plasticity of voice indicates both malleable and resistant aspects of voice. Non-dialogue refers to cross-sensory, non-dyadic, and distributed modes of interaction across both humans and nonhumans. The plasticity of voice and the non-dialogue, Bulut argues, encourage us to think about voice in the form of a skin, a surface that both connects and differentiates, without being limited to human body or labels of verbal language. Voice-as-skin, in effect, prompts us to reflect on both individual and collective, concrete and emergent, and uncertain and shared aspects of voice and speech, as well as to pace and revisit our conceptions of communication, intersubjectivity, connectivity, understanding and empathy.

zeynep bulut – building a voice - sound, surface, skin

In July 2019, eleven years after Jay-Z became the first hip-hop artist to headline Glastonbury, Stormzy became the first English rapper to follow suit. Wearing a customised stab-proof vest designed by Banksy, the South London rapper delivered an explosive performance and finished by thanking the “legends for paving the way,” name-checking Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, and Giggs. Despite how unlikely it seemed for decades, UK rap was now firmly a part of pop music and the greater hip-hop canon. Rich, nuanced, and often misunderstood, the history of UK rap is a story of music that refused to stand still. Factoring in socioeconomics, gender, identity, music industry disruption, and innovation, What Do You Call It? charts the artform’s first four decades, beginning when rap landed on our island in the early 1980s. Shaped by sound system culture, inspired by punk, and accelerated by rave, it has evolved from Britcore, UK hip-hop, and trip-hop of the late twentieth century to garage, grime, and drill. Through cultural theory, historical research, and original interviews with key figures and collaborators in the UK rap scene, from pioneers like Malcolm McLaren, Soul II Soul, Tricky, Roots Manuva, and Roll Deep to modern artists like Dave, CASISDEAD, Little Simz, Loyle Carner, and Skengdo x AM, adds a rich human dimension to the UK rap story — one that helped change British music and culture forever.

David Kane – What do you call it?From Grass Roots To The Golden Era Of UK Rap

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future. ASKIA M. TOURÉ is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

askia muhammad toure – songhai

In this collection of poems and of five recent essays, his first to be published in the UK, Tongo Eisen-Martin reflects on poetry’s role in the tornado-like devastation of current political conjunctures: white supremacist street lynchings, the naked abuse of state power, the classed and racialised effects of a global pandemic. Eisen-Martin’s work crackles, investigates, worries, riffs, insists, explodes, presenting an empire in slow eclipse through the lenses of double consciousness, poems, poisons, prisons, “dry-Leninism”. This work is animated by the spark of individual phrases, turns of phrase, refrains: common sense and senses from the commons. Aphorisms, maxims, dispatches from “the hell / of where we are” (Joseph Jarman), Eisen Martin’s words are imbued with music which strains the edge of music and strains the edge of the poem; a chorus of voices filtered, refracted and remixed through the completely singular voice of its poet. Their architecture ranges across the page like that of the city—San Francisco—and its correlates whose interstices they rigorously trace, attentive to the spaces of daily life—tower blocks, vacant lots, streets, porches, bars, rooms, roads, cars—and the realities of power that cluster in and around them. With the nation collapsing around the corner, these texts inhabit “psychology of the mask”; “half distracted (half suicidal)”, they rest and rove by the “hard residing” of the porch, by the “kitchen table that likes to talk”, by “working class windows”, by walls with eyes and ears; then venture out in search of “socialist breakthroughs”, of revolution’s “amazing grace”. In this “cotton gothic society”, a “strange fruit theatre” where capitalism walks on water and people play dead “so they could be part of the miracle”, it can be hard to tell if you’re “alive” or “differently alive”. But Eisen-Martin knows that sometimes, it’s ghosts who write poems, and that there’s a criminality buried in art: “like introducing Gabriel Prosser to Thelonious Monk”. “World history has a proletariat when the lights come back on”.

tongo eisen-martin – waiting behind tornados for food