Ventoline #4 – mai 2022

Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book.
I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future.

Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.

Askia Touré is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.

From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith—English experimental composer and musician, figure of the British minimalist scene, explorer of Javanese and Albanian musical traditions with the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria which he co-founded, and a member of The Scratch Orchestra (with Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, etc.)—, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians.

Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians' interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith's music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK. The book introduces new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew. 

Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.

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.

Two Intersecting Loops of Silence is a 10-inch experimental vinyl that turns silence into rhythm and time into matter. Side A features two silent grooves that create a mechanical ticking when played, while Side B animates a clock-like etched drawing as the record spins. Numbered edition of 200 with hand-printed, unique etching covers. Each copy a one-of-a-kind artwork.