Spectres I: Composer l’écoute / Composing listening

Borderline Visible begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing-together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.

Borderline Visible is created by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. With a deep focus on liveness, his performance work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations using automated devices and a subtle use of instructions and narration.

As with all Time Based Editions, an audio track combines narration, soundscape, and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book.

An account of Spring Brakers, a project launched during the so-called First Wave. Spring Brakers was an online platform hosting video performances by a different artist each week alongside podcasts on various topics focusing on other labels or musical persuasions.

For this publication, all of the musicians who participated in the project are profiled, resulting in a grounded and oddly inspiring collection of testimonies of how artistic practices are shaped by an era that is still ongoing.

Artists include locals such as Bear Bones, Lay Low, Quanta Qualia, Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Orphan Fairytale, and more, as well as far-out friends like Ka Baird, MSHR, Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, and so on.

Each profile has a handy QR to redirect to each artist's video, and each copy includes a code to download a compilation made especially for the publication.

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 2,371 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been writ ten in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies.

“This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.