Screaming Hole: Poetry, Sound and Action as Intermedia Practice in the Work of Katalin Ladik
Published by acb ResearchLab, Budapest, 2017, 248 pp. (colour & b/w ill.), 19.5 × 29.5 cm, English
Price: €45

Language is at the heart of Katalin Ladik’s practice. Her expansive attitude to poetry materializes on the pages of her books, in music scores, on the wall, through concrete poems, and visual collages, almost all of them accompanied by sonic interpretations that show the artist’s extraordinary vocal range.

All these works speak to Ladik’s process of “logopoiesis”: to bring into existence new registers of language through acts of poetry, utterance, and visualization. Or, to follow the title of her eponymous 1976-album, a process of “phonopoetica”, to understand poetry through the voice.

#2017 #concretepoetry #experimentalmusic #katalinladik #performance
Early Minimalism vol. 1
Tony Conrad
Published by Table of the Elements, New Haven, 2007, 4 CD box set & 96 pp. booklet (b/w ill.), 14.4 × 12.5 cm, English
Price: €75

Four CD box set with 96-page book and enhanced CD-ROM featuring interviews, performance footage and video scores. Includes the massive Four Violins (1964) — one of the world’s most important and space-inhaling pieces of music ever, which was only briefly available on LP. Mainline it as loud as you possibly can. Plus: Early Minimalism: April, 1965 (for solo violin and string quartet); Early Minimalism: May 1965 [performed here by Conrad, Alexandria Gelencser (cello) and Jim O’Rourke (violin)]; Early Minimalism: June 1965 (studio work for four multitracked violins with cello).

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

#2007 #experimentalmusic #music #tonyconrad
I–VI
John Cage
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Hanover & London, 1997, 454 pp. (b/w ill.), 17.8 × 25.4 cm, English
Price: €38

Delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

You can hear an audio recording of the lecture here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

#1997 #concretepoetry #experimentalmusic #johncage #music
Essay
John Cage
Published by Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen, 1998, 96 pp. (b/w ill.), 16.8 × 24 cm, English/German
Price: €10

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature.

Includes two texts by John Cage and the text On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

#1998 #concretepoetry #experimentalmusic #johncage #music
Fanal
Published by Neu Records, Berlin, 2004, vinyl record (colour & b/w ill.), 31 × 31 cm, English
Price: €42

Fanal – a recondite word for lighthouse or torch, and a cognate in German and English – began as Kai Althoff’s solo step outside of his long running and in certain spheres abundantly cherished (and in certain spheres perfectly uncomprehended) duo with Stephan Abry. The first Fanal album is a primarily instrumental collection bolstered and upholstered with muscular synthesizer arpeggiations and martial drum machines. After Workshop’s intimacies, Fanal’s relative coldness made the project seem as distant and magisterial as the secluded castle pictured on the album cover (not to mention the sublimity of the castle’s manicured grounds).

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

#2004 #experimentalmusic #fanal #kaialthoff #lprecord #music #workshop
One Million Years (Box set) #69-70
On Kawara
Published by Mathieu Copeland editions, London, 2010, wood boxed set of 4 audio CDs, 15 × 13.5 cm, English
Price: €250

One Million Years is originally a 20-volume collection, each volume contains 200 pages and each page holds 500 typed years. Created in 1969, One Million Years [Past] contains the years 998,031 B.C. through 1969 A.D., and One Million Years [Future], created in 1981, contains the years 1981 A.D. to 1,001,980 A.D. The first audio presentation of the reading of One Million Years occurred in 1993 during Kawara’s year-long solo exhibition One Thousand Days One Million Years at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York.

This edition of 4 audio CDs in a wooden case comprises the reading of On Kawara’s One Million Years [Past and Future], covering 969 611 BC to 967 811 BC & 33 411 AD to 34 450 AD.

#2010 #artistedition #experimentalmusic #mathieucopeland #onkawara