The Sound Exploration

Гласс — композитор-минималист, сочиняет музыку, состоящих из простейших элементов (повторяющихся мелодических и гармонических паттернов). Его музыка кажется обманчиво простой: «Возьми один аккорд и повторяй его снова и снова», — цитата, которую Гласс постоянно опровергает. Отношение к его музыке в профессиональном сообществе очень противоречивое, кто-то считает его гением, а кто-то думает, что скважина минимализма, откуда капает музыка Гласса, иссякла еще в 70-х.

Вначале его карьеры у некоторых людей музыка Гласса вызывала непонимание, ощущение однообразности, а нередко даже физическое противостояние. Композитор вспоминал, о том, когда он был на гастролях в Париже, один мужчина подошел к его синтезатору и начал лупить по клавишам, чтобы закончить эту нескончаемую однообразную музыку. Глассу пришлось в прямом смысле ему врезать, чтобы продолжить концерт. И таких противостояний (как физических, таки и интеллектуальных) очень много, хотя сейчас его музыка имеет миллионы поклонников по всему миру.

Его биография вызывает какой-то невероятный восторг. Восторг от изучения его биографии схож с восторгом исследователя, который находит ключ к пониманию его произведений — после «слов без музыки», музыка начинает говорить сама за себя.

Книга написана очень понятным языком, композитор описывает свою жизнь так, как будто мы его давние друзья. Но за этой простотой языка чувствуется громадный опыт и уверенность в каждом своем поступке, что в жизни, что в музыке.

— Under the Universities

"Plain and direct-spoken and with an uncluttered prose style, Lucier easily blends analysis, anecdote and digression into a reader-friendly first-person account of some of the most interesting music to come out of the postwar period."
— Avant Music News

"Just three years after his first memoir, Porcelain, Moby is back with an even more revealing book, tracing his dark journey through fame."
― Entertainment Weekly

Porcelain vividly evokes a certain place and time – specifically, New York in the ’90s. It simultaneously presents a portrait of its author that’s withering in the extreme. At the same time, it offers a perfect freeze-frame of downtown New York in the Dinkins to early Giuliani years, when far more of the cherished stench of ’70s and ’80s city lingered than some may remember.”
— New York Observer

“A lovingly composed new memoir that tracks his journey from living in an abandoned factory in Connecticut to playing the hottest clubs in New York and Europe. … Porcelain reads like an intimate meditation on the various contradictions Moby has resolved over the course of his 50 years: his Christian faith vs. his hedonistic streak; his hunger for stardom vs. his retiring nature; his respect for ambition vs. his deep belief in luck. The book is also a tender ode to a vanished New York City.”
— Los Angeles Times

Joanna Demers is associate professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post-1945 popular and art music.

Drone and Apocalypse is a sprawling and inventive meditation on the nature of apocalypse in contemporary art and music. It takes the form of an ‘exhibit catalogue’ pertaining to an exhibition staged in 2213 on the essays and artistic ideas of Cynthia Wey.

Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky.

The book variously focuses on drone music, film, philosophy, cynicism, list making and the apocalypse, which Wey, Demers’ invention and interlocutor, believed was imminent and foreshadowed in contemporary culture.

Jordannah Elizabeth is a musician, entertainment journalist, author, model and the founder of nonprofit Publik / Private. Her work has appeared on VICE, Nerve.com, SF Weekly, MTV Iggy, ​Bitch Magazine, Ms. Magazine and more. Elizabeth is also a civil rights and feminist writer who often offers commentary on racial and gender issues in America. She has interviewed notable writers and musicians such as Talib Kweli, Saul Williams and Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces for SF Weekly, covering topics of race, class and cultural appropriation.

The majority of this book's "40 selected articles, essays, and Q&As" are reviews of albums or live shows, interviews of artists, best-of lists, or columns about whatever musical subject was on Elizabeth's mind that day. But there are also other topics and approaches, showcasing Elizabeth's versatility and her palpable, personal voice.

German acoustician and musicologist Fritz Winckel (1907–2000) was a founding member of the Studio of the Technical University of West Berlin. This translation of Phänomene des Musikalischen Hörens, first published in 1960, has, as its title implies, musical, physical and psychological ingredients.

Winckel was born in Bregenz and studied acoustics and natural sciences at Berlin Technical University. In the 1930s he worked as an engineer for a studio of experimental music in Berlin before going on to further studies at Berlin University, working on the neo-Bechstein (the first ‘electric’ piano, with radio and record player) and on the related structures of music and language. In 1950 he took a doctorate in engineering and that year joined the Technical University’s faculty, teaching communications science in music and language. In 1953 he founded the Studio for experimental music and composition with Boris Blacher, and in 1968 started a course in experimental music at the university.

O'Dell, one of the few foreigners who got involved in the early punk rock scene in Beijing in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, tells his story in his book Inseparable: The Memoirs of an American and The Story of Chinese Punk Rock.

The book revisits the world of punk rock at a time when the country was just opening up and seeing more clashes between East and West.

"This is a story book," O'Dell says while promoting his book in Beijing. "It is a true story, but it's a very personal story. If you get a chance to glance through it, it's kind of like every foreigner's story. It has a lot of those first experiences of landing in Beijing, taking that first breath. It's something that you tell your friend back home, something still in my lungs today."

Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.

Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.

Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat).