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 English monograph 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.

Flexicover, 19 x 26.7 cm, 406 pages

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Ripped  &  Torn: The UK’s Loudest Punk Fanzine is an anthology of one of the first punk zines. Tony Drayton began producing Ripped & Torn in Glasgow in 1976 and carried it into the next wave of punk. All of his seventeen issues are reproduced in this bound volume.

Softcover, 19.6 x 2.6 x 29.6 cm, 326 pages

ISBN 10: 178760151X | ISBN 13:

 

PRAISE for RIPPED & TORN:

“The mystery was: who was buying them?” ponders Ripped & Torn mastermind Tony Drayton about the quickly sold-out first issue of this legendary punk fanzine. If it helps, this writer bought one, from Bruce’s Record Shop in Glasgow in December 1976, along with New Rose by The Damned and, ah, All Aboard by Roogalator (immortalised thusly herein: “to think I paid a £1 for this shit”).

Issues 1-17 of Ripped & Torn, spanning 1976-79 and all completed under Drayton’s stewardship, are faithfully reproduced here, tracing Drayton’s odyssey from Cumbernauld to a squatted pub in West London, and effectively chronicling the morphing punk narrative in real time. It’s a thing of unruly beauty, conveying the excitement, urgency and zealotry of the era. Typed and handwritten copy leaks in several directions at once, opinions are hosed onto every page with gleeful ferocity, and uneven turf wars break out with rival zines (Jamming) and even the NME’s Tony Parsons, whose letter is a “come-and-have-a-go” ur-text.

Commendably, besides a brief interview between Drayton and Thurston Moore (whose imprint is publishing the book), it’s all presented without contextualising or revisionism – a defiant, defining punk stance. Modern scholars might blanche at some of the record reviews, but however much you may disagree with certain assessments, they’re always exhilarating. All Around The World by The Jam is “indescribably repulsive”, Sleeping Gas by The Teardrop Explodes is “more art students playing at being Magazine… fuck off”, Ian Dury is “some old geezer droning on”, and Bowie’s Low merits the observation: “The Man Who Fell To Earth musta landed on his head.”

So who comes out ahead? Among those upon whom fortune smiles are Adam & The Ants, Levi & The Rockats (!) and Generation X, whose debut album warrants “TEN OUT OF TEN EASILY.” A glorious read.

Record Collector Magazine 

 

 

 

 

 

MUSICS was published from 1975 to 1979, by musicians and artists on the London scene of free improvisation, focusing on the most innovative participants of their generation. Steve Beresford, David Toop, Annabel Nicholson, Evan Parker, David Cunningham, Lindsay Cooper, Eddie Prevost, John Russell, Derek Bailey, Val Wilmer, Hugh Davies, Peter Riley and many, many others contributed to the writing, graphics and photography.

MUSICS was a blueprint for the interdisciplinary activities of sound art, field recording, free improvisation, live electronics, 20th century composition & audio culture. It came out six times a year and ran for twenty-three hand-assembled issues. The journal covered improvised and non-western music alongside performance art, reflecting the broad interests of the so-called “second generation” of London’s improvisers, and provided a convivial focus point. Overlapping with the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC), the publication first launched in Spring of 1975, with the tagline: “an impromental experivisation arts magazine” and a manifesto that proposed the destruction of artificial boundaries and linked Free Jazz, the academic ministrations of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and K. Stockhausen and indigenous and non-European music. MUSICS was significant in the discussion of traditional Asian instruments as paths of equal value for the performance of musics.

Produced by what was effectively a ‘communitarian’ collective with few publishing skills and no support, the magazine’s roughness, marginality and scarcity has kept it from those who are active, even prominent in the field. Musics is an entree to the arcane world of the 1970s London improviser’s scene and presents scores, dialogues, debates, positioning, arguments, accolades, critiques, absurdist/dada notions, and a bit of pranksterism – all with collective enthusiasm.

Collected here for the first time after forty years, Ecstatic Peace Library present a complete facsimile of the magazine, featuring a Foreword by Steve Beresford and an Introduction by David Toop.

Musics: A British Magazine of Improvised Music & Art 1975-79  edited by Steve Beresford, David Toop, et al., Afterword by Thurston Moore

Flexi-bound cover, Swiss-bound 340 x 240 mm, 800 pages

ISBN:

From The Wire  393 review: “…The journal explored bioacoustics and interspecies music, environmental music, echoes, music and food, ritual music, non-Western music, many of the urgent issues threading the teaching of music, music and feminism, and music and socialism…” “This reissue project is a colossal Rosetta Stone….”

[£125 + shipping/handling costs. To acquire this title please write us at dot com]

 

 

You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen by James Hamilton

Throughout the heady years of New York’s 1960s and ’70s music scenes, James Hamilton was on hand to observe and photograph some of the most significant bands, musicians and concerts of the twentieth century. Serving as staff photographer for the Village Voice and Crawdaddy!, Hamilton photographed such musicians as James Brown, Captain Beefheart, Ornette Coleman, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead, John Fahey, Mick Jagger, Jethro Tull, Elvin Jones, the Kinks, Madonna, Charlie Mingus, Joni Mitchell, the Ramones, Gil Scott-Heron, Patti Smith, Sun Ra, Tom Verlaine and Stevie Wonder.  In You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen, Hamilton opens up his archives for the first time, revealing across 300 pages a trove of previously unpublished black-and-white photographs–portraits, snapshots, sketches, contact sheets–of some of the most recognizable faces in music. Influential for several generations of budding photographers raised on his photographs, the work of James Hamilton is at last collected in this revelatory volume.

As a young man in the late 1960s, James Hamilton met the legendary photographers Diane Arbus and Eugene Smith, and was inspired by them to document the changing skyline of New York City. As staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and the Village Voice, Hamilton recorded the fashion shows, events, protests and riots, happenings, concerts, poetry readings and art openings of that era, and throughout the 1970s, his photographs of musicians and celebrities began to appear in the pages of Crawdaddy! magazine. Later Hamilton joined The New York Observer and began working with filmmakers George Romero, Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Anderson, Bill Paxton and Noah Baumbach as on-set photographer.

You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen by James Hamilton

Hardcover, 10.2 x 0.9 x 12 inches, 304 pages

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Death Archives: Mayhem 1984-94  by Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud

Mayhem are the most influential Black Metal band in the world, and obviously no strangers to controversy. Death Archives offer never before seen photographs and unique insight into one of music’s most extreme subcultures.

During the band’s ongoing career, now spanning thirty years, bass player and only surviving band member from the original line-up, Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud, has collected enormous amounts of photographs, video diaries and memorabilia. In this unique documentary book, Stubberud shares the first groundbreaking years of Mayhem’s existence including their first photo-sessions in full corpse regalia; recording sessions, and exclusive stills from live video footage of their earliest gigs. In Necrobutcher’s Death Archives he shares rarely seen photos of the band before death of singer Pelle “Dead” Ohlin and murder of guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth.

Once Mayhem established their unique sound, The Norwegian Black Metal scene grew ferociously and globally finding common ground in violent imagery, horror iconography, fierce anti-Christian views, which ultimately led to over fifty church fires, among them the iconic Fantoft Stavkirke in Bergen. The violent nature of the music also led to the brutal murder of Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth in 1993 by Varg “Count Grishnak” Vikernes internationally known as Burzum.

Today, Norwegian Black Metal is one of the most distinct and controversial subcultures in the music world, its popularity spanning globally from China to Mexico. The book is not only a documentation of a band – it is also a story about Norway, and a unique Norwegian subculture where a deep fascination for authentic Nordic culture and nature is deeply immersed.

Death Archives: Mayhem 1984-94  by Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud with Svein Strømmen & Christian Belgaux and an Afterword by Thurston Moore

Softcover, 191 x 266 mm, 255 pages

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