Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century

Experimental film practice from an international and transdisciplinary perspective.

Karel Doing is an experimental filmmaker and researcher who has worked across the globe with fellow artists and filmmakers, creating a body of work that is difficult to pinpoint with a simple catchphrase. In Ruins and Resilience he weaves autobiographical elements and critical reviews together with his wide ranging interdisciplinary approach, reflecting on his own practice by positioning key works within the context of a vibrant experimental film scene in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Doing demonstrates how experimental filmmakers have continued to renew their practice despite the almost total demise of analog motion picture film and the constant neglect of this art form by institutions and critics. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the book looks into the connections between the work of groundbreaking artists within the field and subjects such as transgression, improvisation, collectivity, materiality, phenomenology, and perception. Specifically, intersections with music and sound are investigated, appealing to the idea of the cross-modal brain, the ability to perceive sounds and images in an integrated way. Instead of looking again at the "golden era" of experimental film, the book starts in the 1980s, showing how this art form has never ceased to surprise and inspire. The author's hands-on engagement with the medium is formational for his more theoretical approach and writing, making the book a highly original contribution in the field that is informative and inspiring for academic and practitioners alike.

A post-apocalyptic retelling of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Who will survive when the world is destroyed? Can stories from the distant past teach us how to change a dismal present? Merchant shifts perspective between three survivors of a flooded world as they try to navigate the threat of mass starvation; Jessica, a patrilineal Jew from Venice (named after the Italian city but located on the mountain K2) who has memorized the complete works of Shakespeare; Cem, an orphan of Venice; and Shinobu, an advisor to the empress Ama in Fuji. Ama has been gifting edible algae blocks to nations worldwide, but Jessica's arrival in Fuji to beg for more food for Venice upsets the delicate international balance Shinobu has been maintaining. As a series of buried secrets and miscommunications carry consequences of potential global destruction, everyone must determine what they are willing to do to survive in a hopeless world.

Alexandra Grunberg attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts earning a BFA in Theatre. She earned her MLitt and DFA in Creative Writing at The University of Glasgow. Grunberg presented her research at various academic conferences in the UK, including “Once and Future Fantasies” at the University of Glasgow, “CRSF 2021 10th Anniversary Conference—Speculative Futures & Survival” by the University of Liverpool, “Beast Modernisms Conference 2019” at The University of Glasgow, “Creative Writing: Processes, Theory, and Influences” at The University of Edinburgh, and “The Literary Self: From Antiquity to the Digital Age” at The University of Edinburgh.

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism.  

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.  

Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis. 

Translated by Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck

Afterword by Edwy Plenel

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.

DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s Assembling a Black Counter Culture presents a comprehensive account of techno with a focus on the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems—repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production.

Brown traces the genealogy and current developments in techno, locating its origins in the 1980s in the historically emblematic city of Detroit and the broader landscape of Black musical forms. Reaching back from the transatlantic slave trade to Emancipation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Migration from the rural South to the industrialized North, Brown details an extended history of techno rooted in the transformation of urban centers and the new forms of industrial capitalism that gave rise to the African American working class. Following the groundbreaking work of key early players like The Belleville Three, the multimedia output of Underground Resistance and the mythscience of Drexciya, Brown illuminates the networks of collaboration, production, and circulation of techno from Detroit to other cities around the world.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno from a Black theoretical perspective distinct from its cultural assimilation within predominantly white, European electronic music contexts and discourse. With references to Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, among others, Brown draws parallels between movements in Black electronic music and Afrofuturist, speculative, and Afrodiasporic practices to imagine a world-building sonic fiction and futurity embodied in techno.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and elsewhere. Assembling a Black Counter Culture is Brown’s debut book.

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Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Editorial Consultant: Ting Ding and Camille Crain Drummond
Designer: Scott Ponik
Copy Editor: Madeleine Compagnon

Clipping 2: Sum, Parts brings together transcripts, commissioned texts, studies, and personal reflections that explore how transformation is central to building archives that remain alive through time. Clipping, in sonic terms, signals distortion—moments when excess pushes beyond clarity and opens new spaces of possibility.

The issue features contributions by Monique Todd, Andrea Zarza Canova, Cleo Tsw, Zahra Malkani, meLê yamomo, Melisa Cenik, Golnoosh Heshmati, Voice as Landscape (Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade Llamas), Atiyyah Khan, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Femke Dekker, and Alice Twemlow. It is edited by Federica Notari and Cleo Tsw, designed by Catherine Hu and Cleo Tsw, and printed and bound by No Kiss.

Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as "one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field," saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the '80s, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and separated from his wife and kids. "I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year," Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin. "I would go to North Beach, and I'd sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out."

The resurrection of Simmons' career―upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994―has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, joining the pantheon of great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats.

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her inclusive work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She founded 'Deep Listening(R), ' which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. 'Deep Listening is my life practice, ' Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through Pauline Oliveros Publications and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc