Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco: Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2004)

Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new–an extraordinary rarity in musical culture–it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be–how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion–is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.

The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used–from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson–recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.

Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674016173, 9780674016170
368 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Matthew Fuller: Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (2003)

A far-reaching and strikingly original collection of essays on the “culture of software” by new-media critic Matthew Fuller. Behind the Blip looks at the many ways in which the ostensibly neutral userinterfaces, search engines, “intelligent agents,” and word processorsthat are now part of our everyday life are actively reshaping the waywe look at and interact with the world.

Publisher Autonomedia, 2003
Anti-copyright for non-commercial publication
ISBN 1570271399, 9781570271397
165 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-3-14)

Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993/1994)

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values.

In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, ‘Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, ‘Specters of Marx’, delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

Originally published as Spectres de Marx, Galilee, 1993

Translated by Peggy Kamuf
With an Introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg
Publisher Routledge, 1994
Routledge Classics
ISBN 0415389577, 9780415389570
198 pages

Wikipedia
Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)