World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1993, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15 x 22.6 cm
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
Derek Bailey's Improvisation, originally published in 1980, and here updated and extended with new interviews and photographs, is the first book to deal with the nature of improvisation in all its forms: Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and "free" music. By drawing on conversations with some of today's seminal improvisers, including John Zorn, Jerry Garcia, Steve Howe, Steve Lacy, Lionel Salter, Earle Brown, Paco Pena, Max Roach, Evan Parker, and Ronnie Scott, Bailey offers a clear-eyed view of the breathtaking spectrum of possibilities inherent in improvisational practice, while underpinning its importance as the basis for all music-making.
Derek Bailey (1930—2005) was an English avant-garde guitarist and an important figure in the free improvisation movement. Bailey abandoned conventional performance techniques found in jazz, exploring atonality, noise, and whatever unusual sounds he could produce with the guitar. Much of his work was released on his own label Incus Records. With other musicians, Bailey was a co-founder in 1975 of Musics magazine, described as "an impromental experivisation arts magazine". In addition to solo work, Bailey collaborated frequently with other musicians and recorded with collectives such as Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Company, which at various times included Han Bennink, Steve Beresford, Anthony Braxton, Buckethead, Eugene Chadbourne, Lol Coxhill, Johnny Dyani, Fred Frith, Tristan Honsinger, Henry Kaiser, Steve Lacy, Keshavan Maslak, Misha Mengelberg, Wadada Leo Smith, and John Zorn.
2005, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
iUniverse / US
$34.00 - Out of stock
Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment.
Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.
Oliveros is recognized as a pioneer in electronic music and a leader in contemporary music as composer, performer, educator and author. Her works are performed internationally and her improvisational performances are documented extensively on recordings, in the literature and on the worldwide web.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 14 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
A vivid account of life on the margins and Tokyo's 1970s underground culture from a Japanese folk legend.
Tokyo in the 1970s was a magnet for young musicians, poets and painters. Among them was Kazuki Tomokawa, a prolific singer-songwriter from Japan's northern provinces, whose guttural vocals and incisive lyrics earned him the unofficial title of "screaming philosopher."
The stories in this memoir—originally published in 2015 in Japan and now appearing as the first English translation of Tomokawa's writing—are told with a rambler's wit and wisdom, bringing together his memorable reflections on six decades of day labor, drinking, gambling, acting, singing and writing. Figures such as Kan Mikami, Nobuyoshi Araki and Shūji Terayama drift through this down-and-out vagabond's memoir, which observes the turbulence of postwar countercultures and the explosion of Tokyo's underground film and music scenes.
Translated by Daniel Joseph, Introduction by Damon Krukowski
Kazuki Tomokawa (born 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his debut in 1974, he has released more than 30 albums. He is additionally known as a poet, painter, keirin enthusiast and inimitable drinker. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning 40 years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.
Damon Krukowski is a musician and writer based in Cambridge, MA. His most recent book is Ways of Hearing (MIT Press, 2019) and his latest album is Damon & Naomi's A Sky Record (202020, 2021).
Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor and musician. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University in medieval Japanese literature, and recently contributed translations to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki.
2020, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 17 x 21 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The republication in print form of the poems of Art Ensemble of Chicago's founding member breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement. With a new preface by Thulani Davis and an introduction by Brent Hayes Edwards. Edition of 2000.
Joseph Jarman (1937 – 2019) was a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist best known as a founding member of trailblazing avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jarman was responsible for the Art Ensemble’s signature face paint and elaborate costumes as well as the pioneering theatrical and multimedia elements of their shamanistic performances, which could include dance, comedy, performance art, surreal pranks, and—notably—the recitation of Jarman’s poetry.
In 1977, Art Ensemble of Chicago Publishing Co. published Jarman’s Black Case Volume I and II: Return From Exile, a collection of writing conceived across America and Europe between 1960 and 1975. Comprised largely of Jarman’s flowing, fiery free verse—influenced by Amus Mor, Henry Dumas, Thulani Davis, and Amiri Baraka—the book also features a manifesto for “GREAT BLACK MUSIC,” notated songs, concert program notes, Jarman’s photos, and impressions of a play by Muhal Richard Abrams, the founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians of which Jarman was also an original member. Jarman writes poetry of personal revolutionary intent, aimed at routing his audience’s consciousness towards growth and communication. He speaks with compassionate urgency of the struggles of growing up on Chicago’s South Side, of racist police brutality and profound urban alienation, and of the responsibility he feels as a creative artist to nurture beauty and community through the heliocentric music that he considers the healing force of the universe. A practicing Buddhist and proponent of Aikido since a 1958 awakening saved him from the traumatic mental isolation of his time dropped by the US army into southeast Asia, Jarman sings praise for the self-awareness realization possible through the martial arts. With cosmic breath as its leitmotif, his poetry both encourages and embodies a complete relinquishing of ego. While some of the poems contained within Black Case have already been immortalized via performances on classic records by Jarman and Art Ensemble of Chicago, its republication in print form breathes new life into a forgotten document of the Black Arts Movement.
“Joseph Jarman, a musician of rare poetic gifts, was also a remarkable poet. Black Case, a lost treasure of the Black Arts Movement, combines protest against injustice with heart-breaking introspection and fierce commitment to the Great Black Music tradition to which Jarman contributed with gentle yet mighty force.” —Adam Shatz
“Joseph’s recitation of ‘Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City’ (from Black Case) moved me to set the words of this poem for Baritone Voice and Orchestra and became part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s standard repertoire. Joseph had a bold and passionate creative spirit. I feel privileged to have shared the stage with him.” —Roscoe Mitchell
“‘Though in reality all the words are music themselves’ is the reality to which all poetry aspires, whether in verse or prose, theory or story, criticism or craft. Joseph Jarman always knew that for black musicians, which is to say black speakers, exile is our public holiday. We live through that. We live through that. Black Case is all and everything in this regard. ‘Whats to say,’ he says, is that ‘we sing because/we love you/because we/love you/because/we love/you.’ We are loved beyond judgment by the music, he says, and we say thanks.” —Fred Moten
2014, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Pm Press / Oakland
$46.00 - Out of stock
The Day the Country Died features author, historian, and musician Ian Glasper (Burning Britain) exploring in minute detail the influential, esoteric, UK anarcho punk scene of the early Eighties.
If the colorful '80s punk bands captured in Burning Britain were loud, political, and uncompromising, those examined in The Day the Country Died were even more so, totally prepared to risk their liberty to communicate the ideals they believed in so passionately.
With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands such as Zounds, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Subhumans, Chumbawamba, Amebix, Rudimentary Peni, Antisect, Omega Tribe, and Icons of Filth heralded a brand new age of honesty and integrity in underground music. With a backdrop of Thatcher's Britain, punk music became self-sufficient and considerably more aggressive, blending a DIY ethos with activism to create the perfectly bleak soundtrack to the zeitgeist of a discontented British youth.
It was a time when punk stopped being merely a radical fashion statement, and became a force for real social change; a genuine revolutionary movement, driven by some of the most challenging noises ever committed to tape. Anarchy, as regards punk rock, no longer meant "cash from chaos." It meant "freedom, peace, and unity." Anarcho punk took the rebellion inherent in punk from the beginning to a whole new level of personal awareness.
All the scene's biggest names, and most of the smaller ones, are comprehensively covered with new, exclusive interviews and hundreds of previously unseen photographs.
2020, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
'Meet girls. Take drugs. Listen to music.' In Rave, cult German novelist Rainald Goetz takes a headlong dive into nineties techno culture. From the cathartic release on the dance floor to the intense conversations in corners of nightclubs and the after-parties in the light of dawn, this exhilarating, fragmentary novel captures the feeling of debauchery from within. Dazzling and intimate, Rave is an unapologetic embrace of nightlife from an author unafraid to lose himself in the subject of his work.
Translated by Adrian Nathan West
Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.
1982 / 2018, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$45.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1982 and long out-of-print, in this iconic issue of the mighty RE/Search magazine, #4/5, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle talk about advanced ideas involving the social control process, creativity and the future. Interviews, scarce fiction, essays: this is a manual of prophetic ideas and insights. Strikingly designed and heavily illustrated with rare photos, bibliographies, discographies, chronologies and illustrations. A classic! Back in a limited edition print-run.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 17 x 13 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$54.00 - Out of stock
A compilation of house, techno, trance and jungle audio cassettes from the 90s rave era.
Limited edition.
1997, English
Softcover (foiled faux leather w. CD), 374 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Post Punk Diary, 1980-1982, by George Gimarc; a day-by-day, eyewitness account of the underground music scene. A brilliant reference that documents the record releases from the major to the obscure and other events that shaped this often misunderstood rock music era — over three years/900 bands/3,300 recordings. Millions of Dead Cops, Orange Juice, The Fall, Nurse with Wound, Marine Girls, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Discharge, Go Go's, D.A.F., Iggy Pop, G.B.H., Death in June, Legendary Pink Dots, Crass, S.P.K., Psychic TV, Xmal Deutchland, Public Image Limited, Durutti Column, The Germs, Anti-Pasti, Pere Ubu, Cocteau Twins, XTC, Bow Wow Wow, Exploited, Swell Maps, Tuxedomoon, Adam Ant, Gang of Four, The Bush Tetras, The Saints, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Black Flag, Minutemen, Flying Lizards, The Go-Betweens, Hüsker Dü, Cabaret Voltaire, The Damned, Family Fodder, Alien Sex Fiend, Killing Joke, Raincoats, Lydia Lunch, Minor Threat....... you get the idea, plus hundreds more...
This copy with original accompanying compilation CD present, featuring music by many of the groups in the book: The Bangles, Psychedelic Furs, Gang Of Four, Exploited, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Oingo Boingo, Eyeless In Gaza, U2, Stray Cats, Meteors, Go Gos, Ramones, Squeeze, Comsat Angels, Devo, O.M.D., Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, 4 Skins, The Alarm, Pete Shelley, The Buzzcocks, Peter & The Test Tube Babies, The Church, Lords Of The New Church, Attila The Stockbroker, XTC, The Damned, Everything But The Girl, Birthday Party, R.E.M., Paul Weller, The Cure, Chameleons, Southern Death Cult, Elvis Costello, The Teardrop Explodes....
George Douglas Gimarc is an American disc jockey, record and radio program producer and author based in Texas and is in the Texas Radio Hall of Fame. He is known for his extensive and authoritative knowledge about the classic rock radio format, recorded music in general, and specifically the era of punk rock.
Very Good with some light wear/creasing. Includes the often missing CD, this copy unplayed and still sealed.
1977, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1977 edition of this essential masterpiece of jazz history by renowned photographer and music historian, Val Wilmer.
In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture.
Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra in their broader political and social context, Wilmer evokes an era of extraordinary innovation and experimentation that continues to inspire musicians today.
As vital now as when it was first published in 1977, As Serious As Your Life is the essential story of one of the most dynamic musical movements of the twentieth century.
About the author
Val Wilmer is an internationally acclaimed photographer, journalist, author and black music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. In that time she has interviewed and photographed almost every significant figure in post-war jazz, blues and R&B, from Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler via Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin. As a photographer, her work features in the permanent collections of the British Library, the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery; as a writer and historian, she has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography and the New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz. She lives in London.
Good copy, solid binding.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 830 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
documenta / Kassel
$80.00 - Out of stock
First English edition of this monumental 830 page book for documenta X, the last documenta of the twentieth century and the first directed by a woman, the French curator Catherine David, brings together the work of more than 100 of the world's foremost thinkers, writers, and artists in an extraordinary anthology of seminal texts and images of, on, and about the development of Western cultural and critical theory since 1945.
The book "seeks to indicate a political context for the interpretation of artistic activities at the close of the twentieth century, through a montage of images and documents from the immediate post-war period to the present. The range of material treated here is not encyclopaedic; it represents a polemical attempt to isolate specific strands of artistic production and political endeavour which can be taken as references in the contemporary debate over the evolution of our societies. Drawing from distinct yet interrelated territorial and linguistic domains, the book singles out complex cultural responses to the unifying processes of global modernity."—from the book jacket.
A comprehensive work in itself, rich with enmeshed texts and illustrations of artworks, film stills, historical documents throughout in colour and in black and white.
Writers include: Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Celan, Amílcar Cabral, Masao Miyoshi, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, Tadao Sato, Youssef Ishaghpour, Josef Beuys, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rem Koolhaas, Sandra Álvarez de Toledo, Witold Gombrowicz, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Jean-François Chevrier, Marguerite Duras, Edward Said, Henri Alleg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Uwe Johnson, Jerzy Grotowski, James Clifford, Primo Levi, Pierre Clastres, Andrea Branzi, Fabrizio Gallanti, Gérard Chaliand, Stig Björkman, Daniel Defert, Saskia Sassen, Catherine David, Benjamin Buchloh, Paul Virilio, Serge Daney, Étienne Balibar, Nadia Tazi, and many others.....
Artists include : Archigram, Martin Kippenberger, Archizoom Associati, Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Oyvind Fahlström, Samuel Beckett, Franz West, Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig, Nancy Spero, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Jörg Herold, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Robert Adams, Peter Friedl, Paweł Althamer, Liam Gillick, Mike Kelley & Tony Oursler & Diedrich Diederichsen, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ed van der Elsken, Walker Evans, Aldo van Eyck, Heiner Goebbels, William Kentridge, Ulrike Grossarth, Richard Hamilton, Vito Acconci, Raymond Hains, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Siobhán Hapaska, Ecke Bonk, Carsten Höller & Rosemarie Trockel, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Lois Weinberger, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Olaf Nicolai, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Marc Pataut, Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Philipp Müller, Matt Mullican, Antoni Muntadas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Reinhard Mucha, Álvaro Siza, Toyo Ito, John C. Portman Jr., Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Mariella Mosler, Josef Beuys, Steve McQueen, Chris Marker, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean Dubuffet, Kerry James Marshall, Maria Lassnig, Rem Koolhaas, Joachim Koester, Suzanne Lafont, Sigalit Landau, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Brassaï, Le Corbusier, Antonin Artaud, and so many more...
Very Good coy, light wear. Good dust jacket with some creasing and edge wear.
1983, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 22 pages, 26.6 x 18.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
George Paton Gallery / Melbourne
$180.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, exceptionally rare catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Comic Stripping at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, May 31—June 24 1983. Features the work of Howard Arkley, Julie Cunningham, Juliet Darling, Juan Davila, Linda Marrinon, Raymond X, Peter Tyndall, Christopher Van Der Craats, → ↑ →. Illustrated throughout with work and texts by the artists and an introduction by Denise McGrath.
Very Good copy with ex-libris 200 Gertrude St. archive stamps to contents and final page of catalogue. Small mark, soft surface tear from old sticker to bottom-left of cover, otherwise a lovely copy with only light wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$35.00 - In stock -
An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs—historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses.
Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorations from the sonic to the social, amplifying alienation and playing with psychic noise, artist and performer Mattin finally lights the fuse.
In what is a handbook for practical transformation as much as a theoretical treatise, Mattin sets out the thinking behind his score Social Dissonance, in which the audience is the instrument.
The noise is here to stay. Alienation is a constitutive part of subjectivity and an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance—the territory upon which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit today.
2022, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 240 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Kawade Shobo Shinsha / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
As the title suggests, this new volume edited by Koji Wakui and published in Japan in 2022, is entirely dedicated to the phenomenon of Canterbury Rock, something very close to the heart of World Food Books. Beginning with the "Canterbury Story", the book is broken into chapters around prominent pivotal artists, namely; Soft Machine; Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt; Caravan; Daevid Allen, Gong; Slapp Happy, Henry Cow; weaving together the tight-knit, over-lapping legacies of The Canterbury scene (or Canterbury sound), a musical scene centred around the city of Canterbury, Kent, England during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The term describes a loosely-defined, improvisational, avant-garde style that blended elements of jazz, rock, and psychedelia, and has come to be associated with progressive rock, art rock and British jazz-fusion. These musicians played together in numerous bands, with ever-changing and overlapping personnel. Illustrated throughout with a comprehensive discography of the artists involved, the extensive Japanese texts by Isao Inubushi, Noboru Umemura, Tetsuto Koyama, Yoshio Tachikawa, Midori Mashita, Takumi Matsui, Jiro Morijiro Junichi Yamada, Akira Yamanaka, Koji Wakui are accompanied by band photos and album art. Includes: The Wilde Flowers, Caravan, Gong, Daevid Allen, Gilli Smyth, Soft Machine, Henry Cow, Slapp Happy, Hatfield and The North, National Health, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge, Pip Pyle, Lol Coxhill, Mike Westbrook, Centipede, Anthony Moore, Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad, Fred Frith, Art Bears, Skeleton Crew, Massacre, The Work, Chris Cutler, Charles Hayward, John Greaves, Lisa Herman, Kevin Coyne, Lindsay Cooper, Here and Now, Alan Gowen, Elton Dean, Karl Jenkins, Arzachel, Egg, Dave Stewart, Steve Hillage, Camel, Bill Bruford, Gilgamesh, Richard Sinclair, Camel, Mother Gong, Banana Moon band.... and more!
2013, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip),
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rittor Music / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First, quickly out-of-print edition of Chee Shimuzu’s wonderful Obscure Sound book published in 2013. First edition with a special dust-jacket designed by musician/artist EYヨ (Yamantaka Eye of Boredoms, Hanatarashi, Puzzle Punks, etc). An indispensable, insightful look into Chee’s unique Organic Music sound and invaluable guide through many hand-picked records from all over the world by one of Japan’s legendary collectors. Contains 640 record reviews broken into specific categories – organic, ethnic, psychedelic, spiritual, experimental, cosmic, meditative and floating, all illustrated with record cover artwork and listed with discographical details. Includes an interview with Japanese composer Yasuaki Shimizu and other columns. So many WFB favourites in one book. Absolutely essential!
Chee Shimuzu is a Japanese music selector, writer, producer, and record shop / record label owner.
Very Good copy, with small closed tear to lower contents page, light wear, otherwise great, complete copy with dust jacket (essential as verso features book index of all artists featured, and illustrated obi-strip).
1981, English
Softcover, 89 pages, 20 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Hearts of Space / San Francisco
$190.00 - Out of stock
First, very rare edition of The Hearts of Space Guide to Cosmic, Transcendent and Innerspace Music: An Annotated Listing of the Music Heard Since 1973 on the Weekly Radio Program Music from the Hearts of Space, self-published by The Hearts of Space, San Fransisco. First produced in 1973 by presenter Stephen Hill with co-producer Anna Turner, Hearts of Space is a pioneering weekly syndicated public radio show in California featuring music of a contemplative nature drawn largely from the ambient, New Age and electronic genres, while also including classical, world, Celtic, experimental, and other music selections. For many years, Hill has applied the term "space music" to the music broadcast on the show, irrespective of genre. It is the longest-running radio program of its type in the world. It was first broadcast as Music from the Hearts of Space, a three-hour long late-night show on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Each episode ends with Hill gently saying, "Safe journeys, space fans ... wherever you are."
This annotated listening guide traverses the spectrum of space music presented on the radio throughout the 1970s-80s, with the editors providing introductions, glossary of genres, descriptions of each record, alongside interspersed reflections on sound by scholars, composers, artists, poets, architects — everyone from Cage to Inayat Khan, Steiner to Wagner. Includes a list of related material including reading, retail and mail-order sources, as well as a full index and record label contacts. An indispensable volume for anyone interested in ambient music, beautifully designed by Janaia Marisolle.
Good copy with light wear and creases.
2022, English
Softcover, 376 pages, 31 x 22 cm
Published by
Dashwood Books / New York
Cultural Traffic / UK
$160.00 - Out of stock
New Age: Stonehenge to Jungle is a comprehensive collection of iconic UK rave, jungle, sound system and warehouse party flyers dating from the early 1973s to 2000.
The book is sourced and curated from the Mott Collection – an extensive archive that gathers paper ephemera of British popular culture from punk to rave – curated by artist and collector Toby Mott.
Crammed full of 575 entries of flyers and other collectables, New Age is a visual feast that charts the origins and progress of a series of youth rebellions that were to last for a generation. The book looks beyond the music into the fantastical visual language that propelled this subculture, offering a global perspective on how British party culture shifted through the decades.
New Age opens with an extensive array of iconic flyers created for the early 1970s free festivals of Stonehenge and Windsor. It then moves into the 1980s, when the boom of illegal London warehouse parties gave birth to acid house – visually embodied by its iconic smiley face, then evolved into sound system and dub clashes. As rave culture takes over, the designs of the flyers become more complex, unveiling a craving for dystopian experiences and surrealistic universes forged by the vision of masters of flyer art, the likes of Pez and Junior Tomlin – also known as the Salvador Dalí of Rave.
The book traces the rise of jungle music and more widely the aesthetic of the 1990s, digging into its Jamaican roots and bringing together reggae, rave and sound system culture, giving insight into the profound, and yet often overlooked, impact of the Black British community on rave music.
Featuring interviews with influential flyer designers such as Pez, Kaos, Junior Tomlin, and Dave Little.
Published by Corina Manu, Cultural Traffic and Dashwood Books 2022
Art and Design Direction: Jamie Reid Studio
1984, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Self-Published / UK
$120.00 - Out of stock
Amazing and extremely rare Siouxsie and The Banshees Scrapbook 1976-1980, the incredible labour of love fanzine/scrapbook published anonymously in 1984 in the UK. No author and no publisher is credited to this wonderful book, but what you get is "120 pages of vital information" — practically everything there is to know about the first four years of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Includes the band history, discography, a list of all known bootlegs to date with cover artwork, gig and tape guide, rare photos of the band, interviews, press releases, advertisements, and endless press clippings from 1976 to 1980, including gig reviews, album reviews, interviews, articles, announcements... A work of DIY fanzine art, the pre-internet care and attention that has gone into this document makes for a perfect fan book. If only such a book existed for more groups of the period! Apparently a Volume 2 (1981-1984) was hoped to be published in September 1984... It seems this first volume was the only to ever see the light of day. A must for any Banshees fan!
Ex-library copy of the late Anthony (Matters) D’Ettorre of Australian punk bands Warpspasm, Magnacite, Death Sentence, the Rumjacks, Bastard Squad, Blackbreaks, Diggers With Attitude and more. Name to inner front cover.
Average-Good copy, with decent wear and old sticker marking to covers and spine. Internally good with tight binding.
2022, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Lenz Press / Milan
$85.00 - In stock -
This major new catalogue is published to accompany Marco Fusinato’s DESASTRES presentation at the Venice Biennale 2022, curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, running from April 23 to November 27, 2022. DESASTRES is an experimental noise project that synchronises sound with image and takes the form of a durational solo performance as installation. The artist will be performing during the opening hours of the Biennale—a total of 200 days. The presentation will be the first time the Australian Pavilion, located in the historic Giardini della Biennale, has been the site for a live durational performance.
Originally from the Veneto region in Italy, Marco Fusinato’s parents migrated to Australia where he was born. He currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. Fusinato (b. 1964) is a contemporary artist and noise-musician whose work takes the form of installation, photographic reproduction, design, performance and recording. DESASTRES is a culmination of his interests in noise/experimental music, underground culture, mass media images and art history. He uses an electric guitar as a signal generator into mass amplification to improvise slabs of noise, saturated feedback and discordant intensities that trigger a deluge of images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms. There is no theme as such, rather the immersion of sound and image is open for the audience to interpret and make sense of. The intent is to create some kind of hallucination, elation in disorientation and exhaustion from confusion. The work is an invitation for audiences to come together within a high-intensity concentration of energy. What can’t be seen, can be felt: sound as physical matter which creates a transformative experience.
This expansive publication features a new essay by Branden W. Joseph, professor of art history at Columbia University and an extensive interview by curator Alexie Glass-Kantor with Marco Fusinato. It also includes texts by critical theorist and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli, AI researcher and author Kate Crawford, writer and curator Chus Martínez, and musicians/outre-guitarists Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Stephen O’Malley (SUNN O)))) and Bruce Russell (Dead C).
Marco Fusinato (b. 1964) is an Australian contemporary artist and noise-musician based in Naarm/Melbourne whose work takes the form of installation, photographic reproduction, design, performance and recording.
As an artist, he conceives his work as a succession of interrelated projects, some of which continue across numerous iterations. Within these projects the works are almost always serial and use specific frameworks for experimentation, as if demonstrating a thesis. Working across disciplines and cultural fields, Fusinato explores the tensions and contradictions of opposing forces: underground culture/institutions, noise/silence, minimalism/maximalism, purity/contamination. He creates dynamic situations in which these energies are captured by combining allegorical appropriation with an interest in the intensity of a gesture or event.
Fusinato's work has been presented in many international exhibitions, including All the World's Futures, 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2015); The Imminence of Poetics, 30th Sao Paulo Biennale (2012); SUPERPOSITION: Art of Equilibrium and Engagement, 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); and Australia: Antipodean Stories, Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2019). His work was also included in Soundings: A Contemporary Score, the first ever exhibition of sound at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013) and Sonic Youth etc.: Sensational Fix (2008–10), a European travelling exhibition of artists who have collaborated with the New York rock band, Sonic Youth.
1993, German / English
Softcover, 32 pages, 29 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Stockhausen-Verlag / Kürten
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Texte der MOMENTE : für Solosopran, 4 Chorgrupppen und 13 Instrumentalisten (for solo soprano, 4 choir groups and 13 instrumentalists); Europa Version 1972, published in 1993 by Stockhausen Verlag, Kürten, Germany. Introduction in English and German, score and original manuscript primarily in German, with some English words. Long out of print.
Momente (Moments) is a work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, written between 1962 and 1969, scored for solo soprano, four mixed choirs, and thirteen instrumentalists (four trumpets, four trombones, three percussionists, and two electric keyboards). A "cantata with radiophonic and theatrical overtones", it is described by the composer as "practically an opera of Mother Earth surrounded by her chicks". It was Stockhausen's first piece composed on principles of modular transposability, and his first musical form to be determined from categories of sensation or perception rather than by numerical units of musical terminology, which marks a significant change in the composer's musical approach from the abstract forms of the 1950s.
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
Very Good-Fine copy.
1977, English / German / French
Softcover, 72 pages, 31 x 23.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Universal Edition / Vienna
$140.00 - Out of stock
Very rare original published score accompaniment to Karlheinz Stockhausen's (1928—2007) Hymnen : Elektronische und Konkrete Musik, "intended to be read while listening to the tape or the record"—Introduction. First edition, second issue, published in 1977 by Viennese Universal Edition, and printed in Vienna from Stockhausen's manuscript — the transcription of the tape was made by Stockhausen using earphones, piano and a stopwatch. Texts in English, German, and French, including programme notes from the world premiere in Cologne in 1967, disposition, supplementary commentary for the DGG record, August 1968, and the complete score. English translations by Australian musicologist and a former teaching assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Richard Toop. Long out of print.
Hymnen (German for "Anthems") is an electronic and concrete work, with optional live performers, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, composed in 1966–67, and elaborated in 1969. In the composer's catalog of works, it is No. 22. Hymnen is a massive tape soundscape based on samples of 40 national anthems, various field recordings of public events, a few dialogue "inserts", shortwave radio noise and synthesized sound (from sine and pulse generators) to create a kind of "portrait of humanity" as it melts together, bursts apart, and then is reborn as a new utopian entity.
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 406 pages, 26.7 x 19 cm
Published by
Ecstatic Peace Library / New York
$98.00 - In stock -
French composer Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was one of the progenitors of Musique concrète and a pioneer of and resolutely idiosyncratic voice within electroacoustic music. Ferrari was an early participant in the Groupe de Musique concrète and, with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche co-founded the Group de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958. Throughout his career, Ferrari worked in multiple forms: instrumental works, vocal music, text scores, electronic and electroacoustic music, Hörspiele, theatre and films.
This is the first monograph in English on Luc Ferrari and includes writings, original compositions, notes, text scores, artworks and interviews. Edited by Brunhild Ferrari. English translations by Catherine Marcangeli. Foreword by Thurston Moore. Introduction by Jim O’Rourke. Preface by Brunhild Ferrari. Afterword by David Grubbs.
2008, English
Softcover, 255 pages, 19.5 x 12.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Film and Video Umbrella / UK
$120.00 - In stock -
"1/ 210 possible first lines/openings to a book about the relationship between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century ..."
Produced in a limited edition in 2008 by New York artist Cory Arcangel in collaboration with leading design duo Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), this lovely, now very collectible artist's book was published as an accompaniment to Arcangel’s installation, A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould, commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.
The book was released in an edition of 1106 unique copies – this figure representing the total number of separate video clips that Arcangel used in putting together the double-channel video installation 'A couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould'. (A different image of one of the many musical instruments that feature in the piece appears on the first inside page).
Extemporising around the theme of that project, while highlighting the artist’s innovations with digital technology and his experiments with sound, the book features texts by writer and music critic Paul Morley, curator Steven Bode, and an interview/Q&A between Arcangel and curator Michael Connor.
Published by Film and Video Umbrella and funded by Arts Council England, with additional support from Max Wigram Gallery and London Newcastle.
Very Good copy with some light page edge tanning, and light shelf wear.
2022, English / German
Softcover, 148 pages, 20 x 12 cm
Published by
Lärm Publications / Berlin
$28.00 - Out of stock
The second issue of LÄRM fanzine! Once more, it’s a journey to the fringes. Recalling resistant and peculiar aesthetics, wondrous and forgotten outgrowths of music and cultural history of the last seventy years – a search for works with inherent value, often contrary to a semblance of seriosity. Among them are Vox Populi!, Takahisa Zeze, Antediluvian, Unica Zürn, Wolfgang Hilbig, Sergio Martino and others.
Lärm Fanzine focuses on things marginal, strange or excessive in music and film culture. Lärm Publications is based in Berlin.