Sound American #29 – The Roscoe Mitchell Issue

This book is for people who love electronic music, people who probably have a synthesizer or two at home. It’s for people who tell themselves that they should find some time for their passion, who blame themselves for not making enough music. This book is for them.

For decades, I thought that I could be a music producer. But over the years, I have discovered that my contribution to the electronic scene wasn’t exactly the music itself. Although I was lucky enough to produce a few successful tracks in Lithuania, back in the ‘90s, my actual achievement turned out to be raising interest in electronic music, for other young people. I’m still surprised when someone remembers my old tracks, but I’m very proud when someone tells me that listening to me speak on the radio about Berlin techno changed their dreams back in the day. Later, in the 2000s, I was part of the early SoundCloud team. The code we wrote has touched hundreds of millions people around the world. No track or song I would have ever produced would have had such an effect. There is a reason that Brian Eno says the evolution of music is moved by technology as much as it is by artists. The people who created Logic and Ableton, those who code SoundCloud and Spotify, design Korg and Roland synths, they influence the course of music on a massive scale. The development of music technology is the work of many people and I’m happy to call myself one of that gang.

This book is a natural extension of those ideas. It’s not based on scientific or journalistic research, but it’s not a biography, either. I imagine this book sitting on a studio desk, or in a gig bag. In the process, I hope that some young music creators will find answers here, and inspirations, to the questions they’ve been wrestling with for a long time.

Basta Now - Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. 

Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 3867 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. 

Now in its expanded edition, the book includes 80 more pages and an additional 1496 names than the first edition, extended lists and discographies, and updated chapters – especially Wild Things, All-Stars and Madame Bricolage. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)

Mountains of Poetry is a new 8-track studio album produced and developed by interdisciplinary artist Muyassar Kurdi. The album traces the entwined relations between one’s body and land, driven by a sense of urgency. Embedded in the earth, Kurdi imagines her body as a site for sonic excavation of memory and longing. The artist’s voice paired with electronic sound honors the ancient and the futuristic that together form a ritualistic reflection to navigate the tender space of remembering, forgetting and mourning. Departing from her usual emphasis on vocal abstraction, Kurdi turns to concrete words that punctuate the sonic landscape, gathering them into mountains of poetry.

DUCTUS is the latest solo project by Paul Abbott, featuring 51 minutes of audio, across 12 tracks, and a 42 page booklet featuring new writing. DUCTUS was written and recorded in Edinburgh and Porto in 2019. 

DUCTUS presents a playful weave of collapsing time through a number of speculative elements and fictional characters. Abbott feels his way through learning drums, rhythm and writing as fleshy research technologies. DUCTUS is the latest stage in a process considering sound, the body, imagination, and language through music. This features as part of ongoing investigations using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.

The second issue of Spectres is devoted to the concept of resonances, with contributions by Maryanne Amacher, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, Pali Meursault, Jean-Luc Nancy, David Rosenboom, Tomoko Sauvage, The Caretaker, David Toop, and Christian Zanési.

To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again—with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals.