"Top of the Pops, December 1988. The world sat up as a young woman made her debut: gold bra, gold bomber jacket, and proudly, gloriously, seven months pregnant. This was no ordinary artist. This was Neneh Cherry.But navigating fame and family wasn't always simple. In this beautiful and deeply personal memoir, Cherry remembers the collaborations, the highs and lows, the friendships and loves, and the addictions and traumas that have shaped her as a woman and an artist. At the heart of it, always, is family: the extraordinary three generations of artists and musicians that are her inheritance and her legacy."

The eternal rhythm is the vital conduit that links music through breath to life itself. Don Cherry certainly lived music. And his music is alive.When he says that music is breath he talks of something much bigger than the blow needed to make the trumpets sound. From his prime instrument, the trumpet, to his beloved ‘ngoni via flutes, piano and melodica Don Cherry’s voice is unique; like the man from which it springs, it is instantly recognisable whatever instrument or angle it is coming from. THE DON CHERRY TAPES laid the foundation in 1979 of the Cherry Archives which preserve the memory of Don and his extended tribal family. The archive began with a series of taped autobiographical interviews and a box of ephemera and mementoes. Now, 30 years after his death, those transcribed conversations are finally being published, illuminated by Don’s own artworks and augmented by the author Graeme Ewens’ tour journals and contemporaneous notes made over three decades of collaboration. The material included here is previously unpublished and is a kind of top- and-tail treatment of one of the Jazz Great’s personal experience, combining autobiographical background alongside his mentor Ornette Coleman with objective reportage from some of his later tours and personal anecdotes that offer a unique perspective from the writer who had become Don’s confidant, travel companion, witness and friend. They hung out together in the 1970s and between 1979 and 1984 were collaborating, collecting and collating material for a multimedia extravaganza that Don called ‘The Project’, which was picked up again in 1994. This would tell his story from the inside and from alongside, aiming to glimpse the essence of a cosmic traveller and multicultural ‘organic’ musician, from the spiritual high spots to the low points of the jazz life. The pages on his later years include personal reflections on his contemporary musical travellers and reveals details of his collaboration with John Coltrane. Special Edition limited to 300 copies 

For 60 years, Cecil Taylor’s music marked the farthest boundary of avant-garde jazz. His volcanic piano improvisations, delivered with astonishing technical command and unrelenting power at marathon length, were regarded as the ultimate in free jazz. But Taylor was much more than that: He was one of jazz’s (and America’s) great composers and arrangers, developing a unique and instantly recognizable compositional voice and a radical method of transmitting his ideas that in effect taught the members of his ensembles to speak an entirely new musical language. In the Brewing Luminous is the first full-length biography of Cecil Taylor. In the Brewing Luminous takes the reader from his birth in 1929 to his death in 2018 and beyond. It provides detailed analysis of his extensive body of work, which encompassed solo performance and ensembles of every size from duos to big bands, and included work meant to accompany dancers and theatrical performances. It also explores his poetry and the broader milieu of which he was a part. Taylor was not an island; he was a fixture on the New York cultural scene and welcomed with open arms in Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere. And he did not work in isolation — his bands were crucial collaborators, and his music was impossible to imagine without the contributions of players like alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, bassist William Parker, and drummer Andrew Cyrille, all of whom and many more are discussed here as well.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes. The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Nour Mobarak’s Dafne Phono is an adaptation of the first opera, Dafne, composed and written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598. Drawing on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a story of unrequited love, patriarchal possession, conquest, and transformation—Mobarak’s multimedia and multispecies reimagining splinters the opera’s Italian libretto. Alongside English and Greek versions, it is translated into some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages—Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon—and Ovid’s original Latin. In this process, the narrative—and an artifact of Western culture—is dismantled, metabolized, and rendered into unruly utterances that shape the sensorium as much as they do the capacity for sense-making. These voices are given material form by a cast of mycelium sonic sculptures whose rhizomatic compositions and broadcasted recordings resemble the formation and mutation of language over time, reconstituting speech into a new, polyphonic body politic, composed of voices whose striking, poetic utterances transfix and transcend meaning.

A radio station is now a zine! It's the paper revolution. Here's the new quarterly zine from the minds behind freeform, progressive, non-profit Pacifica affiliate station Beware! The Radio. The 32 pages of Issue 1 are packed with articles, reviews, poetry, comic strips and fluff. Have a good scratch around.

Basta Now. Women,Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 2,371 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello) ‘Basta Now. Women, Trans & Non-Binary in Experimental Music’, Paperback book

A talented pianist and composer in his own right, Sun Ra (1914 - 1993) founded and conducted one of jazz's last great big bands from the 1950s until he left planet Earth. Few only know that he also was a gifted thinker and poet. Sun Ra's poetry leaves everything behind what's called contemporary, and flings out pictures of infinity into the outer space. These poems are for tomorrow. This is the only edition of Sun Ra's complete poetry and prose in one volume. The Contributors James L. Wolf Earned a music degree from Carleton College, and studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Now works at the Library of Congress in the Music Division. Active musician in various bands in the DC area. Many contributions to Sun Ra scholarship. Hartmut Geerken Oriental studies, philosophy and comparative religion at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Writer, filmmaker, musician, composer. Since the 1970s, close relationships to Sun Ra and his works, setting up the world's most comprehensive Waitawhile Sun Ra Archive Sigrid Hauff Studied oriental languages and arts, philosophy, and romance studies at the universities of Tübingen and Istanbul. Free lance writer on literary and philosophical subjects. Klaus Detlef Thiel Studied philosophy and history at Trier University, Ph.D. Philosophical author, focussing on theory and history of writing. Brent Hayes Edwards Teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Author and Co-Editor of works on jazz and literature.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method. With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought. Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play…. Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves. Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Huggy Bear was a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-1994. Outcast and outraged, they made a howling, squalling mess of punk, all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Huggy Bear was a group that let things be complicated, that considered themselves complicit, but never took that as a reason to surrender. There’s no band more important. Killed (of Kids) is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear. It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers and ephemera from their three year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, encouragement. Throughout Huggy Bear’s lifespan, they rejected major label advances and shunned contact with the music press. Following the band’s final concert, the members largely withdrew from public life. The subsequent 30 years has seen their legend bloom. And just as the warnings and incitements of their music continue to grow in relevance, the curiosity and distortion has also grown. Killed (of Kids) documents the chances taken, the psychic drains, the unique connections and the aftermaths of Huggy Bear. The book is a real reflection of the sharp edges and dissatisfaction and love that has always lived in the songs and the words. It is not a “rock biography.” There’s no swagger or grand narrative. It’s all small delight and protective energy. Drastic liberation. A reiteration of Huggy Bear’s propositions: It is always possible for people to trust their collaborators. It is always possible to make a song (book/painting/poem/dance/etc) about something that you’ve never heard anyone make a song about before. It is always possible to refuse to answer their questions.

The soundtrack to Murnau's Nosferatu composed / improvised / played by the trioof Emmanuelle Parrenin, Quentin Rollet and Jérôme Lorichon. The book accompanying the CD contains four versions of the Nosferatu story by four French artists: Marie-Pierre Brunel, Foolz, Caroline Sury and Alexios Tjoyas. The trio formed by Jérôme Lorichon (Buchla, trumpet, electronics, percussions), Emmanuelle Parrenin (hurry-gurdy, harp, voice, percussions) and Quentin Rollet (alto and sopranino saxophones, electronics) performed Nosferatu for the first time at La Cinémathèque Française on February 18, 2021.In 2022, Potemkine Films asked the trio to record the music for the DVD/BluRay released to mark the film's 100th anniversary, but ultimately they were not allowed to modify the soundtrack.This album, inserted in a 60-page illustrated book, is an edited version of the music so that it can be listened to as a complete musical journey.  

Peter Brötzmann explores the heroic life and revolutionary music of the pioneering German saxophonist, and the radical social and political convictions that informed them. Peter Brötzmann is the first ever, full-length, English-language biography of one of the most fascinating and inspiring personalities in the history of Western improvised music – and one of the key artistic figures to emerge from the socio-cultural tumult of the 1960s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brötzmann and key associates, it traces the German saxophonist’s crucial role as a pioneer of European free jazz, his restless travels and collaborations and his eventual superstardom, examining the life and work of a fiercely uncompromising artist with a reputation for gruff intensity and total commitment. Digging deep into the history and aesthetics of free jazz in Europe and beyond, it provides detailed analysis of music by Brötzmann and other major figures, while positioning Brötzmann’s work – and the wider free jazz milieu – in the context of the revolutionary left-wing, humanist and utopian ideals that inspired and underpinned it. Both intimate and wide-ranging, it tells the story of a man and a music that changed the world.

A major work by one of the great public intellectuals of the twentieth century, The Question of Palestine was the first book to narrate the modern Palestinian experience in English. Edward Said’s project to ‘bring Palestine into history’ was unquestionably a success – there is no longer a question of whether Palestine had a history before colonization – and yet Palestinian self-determination is as distant as ever. With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and shaped by his own life in exile in New York, Said’s account of the traumatic national encounter of the Palestinian people with Zionism is still as pertinent and incisive today as it was on first publication in 1979.

Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm Mac Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.

  "This book, the only history of free jazz in Japan, has been reprinted many times in Japan and is finally available to readers overseas in English translation. From its earliest stirrings in the 1960s until it reached international recognition in the 1970s and after, free jazz in Japan is a unique music that has found its perfect scribe. Teruto Soejima was a writer who fell in love with a music and devoted his life to it as promoter, critic, label owner, tour organiser, and much more. "If you like jazz at all, if you like the unique voices of Japan at all, this book will open your ears to many sounds you haven't heard, or heard of, before. "Introduction by Otomo Yoshihide. All new photos in this edition, none used from the original Japanese volume." - Publisher Public Bath "Soejima Teruta was a legend on the scene of jazz and improvised music in Japan ... Much more than a critical observer, Soejima-san was a tireless supporter of music and musicians, and will always be remembered for his brilliant mind and gentle soul."- John Zorn 

Is it the computerization of the planetOr a loosening of my fidelity to sufferingI don’t understand the intensityI’ve hidden here but I know I despairedOf finding a physical place to keepMy tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoiseWhen you stop looking at them . . .   Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

"Dear Miss Maxfeld . . . What I’m really afraid of is that I am a homosexual human being. I wish you were one too but I don’t think it’s possible there could be so many in one school, do you? Probably there is only one person who is homosexual in one place at one time and that one person (I am afraid) is me . . .   After sixteen-year-old Lynn writes her thirty-seven-year-old English teacher a letter they embark on one of the funniest and saddest love affairs in fiction, shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Set in the year Kennedy was shot, all Lynn knows about “lezbos” is that they wear their hair in crew cuts, buy suits like her father’s, and sprout mustaches over their upper lips. Trying to pass, Lynn continues to neck with her boyfriend and make bigoted jokes with her friends. Feigning innocence with her parents, each night she checks the mirror for tell-tale signs of perversion. Profound, witty, poignant, and highly charged, In Thrall is the first in Jane DeLynn’s trilogy of novels on sexuality and authority. It is as believable in its depiction of a closeted teen as it is heartbreaking.With an introduction by Colm Tóibín