Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner (eds.): Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004/2017)

“Audio Culture maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, the book traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture.

Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno. Instead of focusing on the putative “crossover” between “high art” and “popular culture,” Audio Culture takes all of these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another.

Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction.”

Publisher Continuum, September 2004
Second, revised edition, Bloomsbury, 2017
ISBN 9781501318351, 1501318357
xviii+646 pages

Reviews: Ian Whalley (Computer Music Journal, 2005), Christopher DeLaurenti (eContact!, 2006), Dene Grigar (Leonardo, 2005), Clemens Gresser (Tempo, 2005), Gregory Taylor (Cycling74, 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2021-2-6)
EPUB, EPUB (updated on 2021-2-6)

Lydgalleriet Retrospective 2005–2020 (2020)

“The Lydgalleriet Retrospective presents a series of conversations, accounts, reflections and responses to the activity of the gallery since it’s first emergence in 2005.

Appearing for the first time in English language translation, the texts and images chart the growth of Lydgalleriet from the early years up until the present day. The book presents an important survey of Nordic sound art and reflects upon wider themes within sonic culture, with contributions from multiple notable voices within the field. This book, first launched at Bergen Art Book Fair 2020, coincides with the gallery’s move to its own purpose built space in Strandgaten, Bergen.”

Edited by Sissel Lillebostad, Julie Lillelien Porter and Samuel Brzeski
Publisher Lydgalleriet, Bergen, November 2020
Open access
ISBN 9788269118421
235 pages

Publisher

Book reader
PDF, PDF (28 MB)
EPUB, EPUB (47 MB)

Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 (2020)

“By way of a selection of hundreds of sound works, Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 looks to cover an historical and cultural void in terms of the recognition, exhibition and analysis of a key part of the recent changes that have taken place in the artistic conception of sound creation.

In the following catalogue, the curatorial discourse that articulates the exhibition is displayed along with some texts that affect the relevance of sound art in contemporary art and, with it, in the social field.”

Contributors: Francisco López, Thomas Bey William Bailey, Margie Borschke, Victor Nubla, Luis Alvarado, Guy Marc Hinant, Salomé Voegelin, Caleb Kelly, Paul Hegarty, Greg Hainge, Christoph Cox, John Oswald.

Introduction by Francisco López
Edited by the Publications Department of MNCARS
Publisher Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 2020
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0
NIPO 828200055
194 pages
HT xgz

Exhibition
Publisher

English: PDF, PDF
Spanish: PDF, PDF