Femenine (2 vinyl LP)

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Là is an immersive, politically charged sound journey – a lament for the Al Naqab desert in Palestine. It is the result of a collaboration between Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat, Laszlo Umbreit, and Ot Lemmens. The album combines acoustic instruments like flute and cymbals with processed electronics and mechanical sounds. 

The track Ensemble is made from sound recordings of eleven 16mm film projectors, playing simultaneously and in intervals, creating a texture centered around a single pitch – La/A. 

The tracks For Her, There, and No are recordings of live sessions played by Laszlo Umbreit and Eitan Efrat.  

The album also features an extended text by Rose Higham-Stainton titled Strategies for Survival, spread across a 12-page booklet.

STW, your favourite station! functioneert als een radioprogramma. Een boek dat lyrisch proza uitzendt van We make stuff up for a living (een CV medley) tot COMPUTER_SONG, een ceremoniële quiz met Adult Hood & Young als protagonisten, een grillige anekdote van iemand die zich ergert aan een Call Service, en meer! Thanks for tuning in!

Mark Fisher taught a generation to hear the future's disappearance in contemporary music, as if the rhythm of the world was synchronised to the periodic flowering of new creative forms. His diagnosis was devastating: stagnation in music was akin to a venous insufficiency, or worse, some kind of nuclear winter that would ward off the spring for endless generations to come. 

Drawing on musicians like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink declares that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music. If Fisher’s Hauntology — dwelling on ghosts of the past — is the logic of depression, then Bluemink’s Anti-Hauntology posits a logic of hope where voices from the future continue to guide the development of the present. 

Island-hopping through Stiegler's philosophy of technics, Simondon's theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink builds a theoretical framework equal to the times — one that takes seriously our capacity to, not only diagnose the world, but remake it. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible. 

Matt Bluemink is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths online magazine. His research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture. 

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. 

When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?