Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, 2 (2015)

“The second issue of Rab-Rab is in two volumes, all together in 500 pages. The focus of the second issue is ‘noise against culture.’ The contributions deal with the formal theory of noise, politics of contradictions, the device of estrangement, materialist film, music and violence, Futurism, Russian avant-garde, improvisation, void, heterophonies, swearwords, communism, ideologies of marriage, class wars and electricity.

Departing from our programme based on the understanding of art practice as a confrontation between formal and political inquiries, our aim in this issue is to use noise as the name for this difficult, disturbing, loud and coercive exploration. In many cases the formal and political aspects of noise are two separate things: the former is seen as an issue of information or perception, whereas the latter is usually reduced to a metaphor of spontaneity. But if we change these parameters of discussing the noise from measurable coefficients of failed communication, or from elusive metaphors of contingencies, towards the conceptual references related to ideology and class struggles, then what is understood as noise turns into something else. It can become a valid concept of inquiry, refusing to be pinpointed to conventional academic banalities silly phenomenological artistic fantasies immersed in.”

Contributors to volume A: Dror Feiler, Mazen Kerbaj, Ozren Pupovac, Ben Watson, Michel Chevalier, Jean-Claude Moineau, Taneli Viitahuhta, Henrik Heinonen, Grégoire Rousseau, Bruno Besana, Ivana Momčilović, and François Nicolas.

Contributors to volume B: Darko Suvin, Anthony Iles, Grupa za Konceptualnu Politiku, Mattin, Jyrki Siukonen, Rahel Puffert, Martin Krenn, Jaakko Karhunen, Max Ryynänen, Antti Eskelinen – Eze, Gert Raeithel, Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Milica Tomić, Christine Delphy, Peter Gidal, Giovanna Esposito-Yussif, Kari Yli-Annala and Sezgin Boynik.

Edited by Sezgin Boynik
Publisher Rab-Rab Press, Helsinki, Sep 2015
ISSN 2342-4885
278 & 278 pages

Publisher (Issue 2A)
Publisher (Issue 2B)

Issue 2A: PDF, PDF
Issue 2B: PDF, PDF

Joel Chadabe: Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (1997)

A classic of electronic music history based on 150 interviews by an active participant in the northeast American scene.

Publisher Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
ISBN 0133032310, 9780133032314
xiv+370 pages
via x

Reviews: Marc Battiq Ircam (Leonardo Music Journal, 1997), Anna Laura Arpel (Computer Music Journal, 1997), Warren Burt (Computer Music Journal, 1998), Rebecca Coyle (Convergence, 1999), Darwin Grosse (Cycling74, 2018), Jay Williston (Synthmuseum, n.d.).

Author
WorldCat

PDF (44 MB)

Christopher Dunn: Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (2001)

“In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicália dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.

Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of São Paulo, Brazil’s most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation’s idealized image as a peaceful tropical “garden” and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.”

Publisher University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2001
ISBN 0807849766, 9780807849767
276 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (82 MB)