In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.  This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

What is the difference between hearing and listening? Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination? In response to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, pioneering musician and composer Pauline Oliveros began to expand the way she made music, experimenting with meditation, movement and activism in her compositions. Fascinated by the role that sound and consciousness play in our daily lives, Oliveros developed a series of Sonic Meditations that would eventually lead to the creation of Deep Listening – a practice for healing and transformation open to all, rooted in her musicianship.  Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world. This timely edition brings Oliveros’ futuristic vision – blending technology and spirituality – together with a new Foreword and Introduction by Laurie Anderson and IONE.  Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was a renowned American composer and performer known for conceiving a unique, meditative, improvisatory approach to music called ‘Deep Listening’®. A central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music, Oliveros was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and many awards, including the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, NY; The Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Germany and The John Cage Award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. During her lifetime, Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned – and daring – creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist and instrumentalist.IONE is an author, playwright, director and an improvising text-sound artist. In addition to multiple performances internationally, she has created numerous large music theater works with her creative partner and spouse, the composer Pauline Oliveros. IONE’s memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was a New York Times Notable Book on its publication. She was Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd for 15 years and is currently a Deep Listening Consultant at the Center for Deep Listening, Troy, NY. As Founding Director of The Ministry of Maåt, IONE received the 2019 Arts Mid Hudson Individual Artists Award and a Certificate of Merit from the General Assembly of the State of New York, and was a member of the Kingston Arts Commission for several years. IONE’s most recent opera TOUCH, with composer Karen Power, premiered at Irish National Opera in 2021.Aura Satz’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her work centres on the trope of ventriloquism in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. She has long-standing interest in compositional practices, in particular those of women in electronic and electroacoustic music, under the umbrella titles of ‘She Recalibrates’, manifesting as a series of film and sound portraits, as well as drawings. She has also made a body of work centred on various sound technologies in order to explore notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other.

A timely new book of ten essays stemming from the second edition of the Radical Sounds Latin America festival, which took place virtually in October 2020. Writers, academics and musicians discuss new perspectives on Latin American music, with essays tackling case studies and research in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Guajira peninsula.

This second volume of Border-Listening/Escucha-Liminal was published within the framework of the third edition of the festival Radical Sounds Latin America. The nine essays presented here articulate and explore soundscapes and sonic stories from Latin American, but also multispecies, intersectional approaches, indigenous ontologies and positions that contend with the Western vocabulary, while also engaging with the ethical dilemmas of our age.  -Daniela Avellar “An Amplified Echo, a Carbonated Resonance”-Vered Engelhard “Sonic Cartography in the Rímac Watershed: On the Contemporaneity of a Pre-Columbian Acoustic Ecology”-Ana Ruiz Valencia “Resounding Epistemologies of Conflict: Auralities in Colombia’s Historical Memory”-Nora Castrejón/Fabián Avila Elizalde “¿Un arte sonoro menor?: Dosis de escucha (2018) y El aula de los ruidos (2019)”-Alexandre Herbetta/Paulo Antonio Kalankó “Indigenous and Anticapitalist Sounds: Musical Practices to Pollinate the Brazilian Caatinga”-Rui Chaves “32 instrucciones para escuchar con/en una epidemia global”-Teresa Díaz de Cossio “Listening for Alida Vázquez: A Life in Electronic Music between Migration, Race and Gender”-Reiko Yamada “On Temperament and Tempering”-D’Andrade “Noise Vivarium: Spectral Radicalism”

A book of poems by Robert Mitchell   'Mitchell’s political and poetic eloquence, his words delivered in impeccably enunciated English, is comparable to that of Linton Kwesi Johnson, even though the style of delivery, both musically and vocally, is very different. More than forty years after Johnson’s landmark album “Forces of Victory” and the track “Sonny’s Lettah” has that much really changed? Musically “A Son of Windrush Reflects” is another performance for voice and cello only, with Smart delivering another brilliantly empathic response, making effective use of both plucking and bowing techniques. Both “A Son of Windrush Reflects” and the earlier “The First Note” are featured in Mitchell’s forthcoming second poetry collection “City Of Sanctuary”.' Ian Mann - The Jazzmann

The idea of the performer of a written work as technical executor,or as a kind of curator (as Brendel puts it), precludes the possibility of free dialogue. If musical works could be perceived less as marketable or sacred objects, and more as possible views of the world on which to reflect, greater freedom might develop. Eddie Prévost'ss book, with great skill and imagination, provokes the readers into contemplating such questions. -  Piano Journal This is an inspiring, modest and (to use a word that Prévost is not ashamed to use) beautiful book. Nothing in it is more beautiful than his own cry of resistance: ˜I am something other than what you tell me I am' - The Wire One of the most successful attempts to illuminate the aesthetic, social and political aspects of the modus vivendi of improvised music.Dissonanz (Swiss)

An immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its fanzines. Zerox Machine is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its associated fanzines from 1976 to 1988. Drawing on an extensive range of previously unpublished materials sourced from private collections across the UK, Matthew Worley describes and analyses this transformative era, providing an intimate glimpse into the hopes and anxieties that shaped a generation.Far more than a showcase of covers, this book examines the fanzines themselves, offering a rich tapestry of first-hand accounts, personal stories and subcultural reflections. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, Matthew Worley captures the spirit and essence of British youth culture, not only shedding new light on a pivotal movement in music history but crafting a unique alternative history of Britain in the 1970s and ’80s.

The third compilation of Synth History interviews in tangible 'zine form! A 200+ page high quality 'zine featuring a curated compilation of interviews with legendary and modern day pioneers.

JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis’s 2021 essay “The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.

"I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here. As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess. OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks."—Eileen Myles  

In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory `in/tense/in/season

Translated from the French by the author. “From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation—at least for certain people, martyrs. But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the ‘apocalypse,’ the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypse’s primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptein to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and martyr’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: ‘a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their politcal or religious beliefs’… While the Arab ‘apocalypse’ as surpassing disaster leads to a withdrawal of Arabic tradition, the apocalypse as revelation leads to Arabic tradition’s vertiginous extension.”

A zine and exercise book about the applied art of questioning, by the writer Cordula Daus and the choreographer Charlotta Ruth.This is the age of the answering machine. Of infinite input fields, of prompts and problem solving, of algorithmic feeding frenzy. But wait. Who/what is behind this text? Have you been reading these lines for real? Are you here?Since 2019 the writer Cordula Daus and the choreographer Charlotta Ruth have explored and trained what might be the last genuinely human quality: how to question, how to make oneself response-able. Together they have created environments, performances, writing exercises and live situations where ideas become material to be touched and processed between people.Questionology – Are you here? is a zine and exercise book for all those who'd like to know more about the applied art of questioning. Unfolding across three conversations, the zine recombines tricks and moves from midwives, Socratic maieutics, witchcraft and malfunctioning technology. In the opening text an anonymous author-mechanism lures the reader into a series of questions trying to grasp what reading is. Secondly, Daus & Ruth meet the sound artist and editor Brandon LaBelle to reactivate elements of the participatory work Questionology – Program for Applied Questioning (co-produced by brut Vienna, 2021). Equipped with new vegetable names and a towel, the three try out different selves and stances including one of the most complicated ones: listening. Thirdly, the artist Erik Valentin Berg joins the conversation to examine the field of artistic research. Together they defend each others' titles, fight over 'useless art' and get caught in a failed thesis scandal. Hope to meet you there!

The glass as a listening device. When used as a listening instrument, a glass is no longer a mere container. By amplifying sounds and voices through a surface, it becomes a conduit between two seemingly distant environments. Like a glass, aquarium walls implement a material and ontological separation between human and marine creatures, highlighting the relationship we have established over time with these living beings, transformed into taxonomical units.In "The Aquarium is a Listening Glass", nine short, non-linear stories—set amid scientific archives, underwater research stations, natural history museums, national aquaria and oceanic infrastructure—evoke the glass as a listening device to present singular relationships between humans and fish that would otherwise go unheard. In this paradigm shift, design plays a fundamental role in conceiving the object (and the book) as a sensory device to glimpse new forms of mediation, to generate alliances, and also to promote the potential for a thriving and vital world.

The final issue of Sound American journal, as a tribute to the musical community. SA30: The Thirtieth Issue is the last issue in a ten-year run of the American publication on music and musicians edited by trumpet player and composer Nate Wooley. SA30 is a love letter to the creative humanity that the journal has tried to illuminate since its first issue. It is a celebration of work: how we do it, why we do it, and the doubts and triumphs we experience as it allows us to blunder toward some fuzzy creative resolution. To that end, the issue consists of interviews between artists from different milieus—all with a connection to the music that SA has championed over the years—and SA editor Nate Wooley about their working lives. Poet Eileen Myles, pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz, painter Albert Oehlen, and dancer/organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker share the issue's space with composer Nico Muhly, iconoclastic sound artist Ellen Fullman, and improvising bassist Brandon Lopez in talking about the personal ups and downs of living as an artist in America. It also features a long excerpt of an interview with iconic percussionist and composer Michael Ranta undertaken by American composer Sarah Hennies and Swiss writer and composer Vincent de Roguin. Percussionist and composer Lesley Mok contributes a conceptually stunning standalone Exquisite Corpse composition to close out this last issue.

The sounds of late ’70s and ’80s east coast avant-garde jazz, soul, and punk rock are well documented, but in Nothing but the Music Thulani Davis gives us something beyond, delivering a collection of synesthetic, transportive documentary poems that breathe anecdotal and impressionistic life into a sonic-social history about which most can only speculate. Davis’ verse takes free flight with its muses, scatting and leaping off the page and the shoulders of the musicians, nightclubs, and choreographers she chronicles in these poems. Her odes both to recorded music and its sacred spaces of spirited encounter are at once a paean to ephemeral flashes of embodied experience and a work of preservation. Davis remembers to remember the raw feelings, smoke, dawn drunks, and impulsive energy of her moment, without forgetting its inscription into a broader political urgency. Written between 1974 and 1992, these poems are the most anthologized pieces of Davis’ work, having appeared in numerous collections of writing on black music, here finally assembled for the first time. Nothing but the Music is further proof of Davis’ place as a crucial figure, alongside poets Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, in the cultural landscape surrounding the Black Arts Movement. Featured musicians and dancers include Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, The Revolutionary Ensemble, The Commodores, MFSB, Dianne McIntyre, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and many more in performances at historic venues such as The Five Spot, The Village Vanguard, The Apollo, Storyville, and Club Harlem. With a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn and an introduction by Tobi Haslett. Thulani Davis (b. 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work includes works of poetry, theater, journalism, history, and film. Her engagement with African American life, culture, and history is distinguished by poetic economy, passionate musicality, and an investigative concern for justice. While a student at Barnard College, the Virginia native was “schooled” for her first spoken word performance by Gylan Kain and Felipe Luciano of the Original Last Poets, jumpstarting a life of performance that would have her put words to music by Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarman, Juju, Arthur Blythe, Miya Masaoka, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Tania León, and others. Living in San Francisco in the ‘70s, she joined the Third World Artists Collective, collaborated with Ntozake Shange, and worked for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, reporting on stories such as the Soledad Brothers trial and the Angela Davis case before returning to New York and continuing to incite radical political thought as a reporter and critic for the Village Voice for over a decade. This experience as a journalist blazes through her historical fiction and her other writing, breathing anecdotal life into the experiences of actors of American history who have remained unnamed as a result of bondage and other unjust erasures. Davis has collaborated with her cousin, composer Anthony Davis, writing the libretti for the operas X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X and Amistad, and wrote the scripts for the films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints, as well as several award-winning PBS documentaries. In 1993, her writing for Aretha Franklin’s Queen of Soul – The Atlantic Recordings made her the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes, and her bibliography additionally includes My Confederate Kinfolk, novels 1959 and Maker of Saints, and several works of poetry. She is an ordained Buddhist priest in the Jodo Shinshu sect, founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association with her husband Joseph Jarman, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. Davis continues to explore the relationship between music and language as well as the ways we define being American and deal with race with her forthcoming book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press) and poetry collection Nothing but the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Lofts, Dance Halls & A Tailor’s Shop in Dakar (Blank Forms Editions). Poet, novelist, playwright, and performer Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. She is the editor of numerous anthologies and author of several books including Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. In the seventies and early eighties, she collaborated with Thulani Davis on multimedia performance pieces presented at downtown venues such as The Public Theater and The Kitchen. Critic and essayist Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, and literature for n+1, the New Yorker, Artforum, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.  

Focusing on several major collaborative performance-videos by a figure of the British Black Art movement, this illustrated monograph includes a series of essays which interpret Boyce's interdisciplinary practice in the light of art history, and analyse her interest in black feminism, cultural studies, film studies, art history and critical theory.

Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated. Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.