Praise for Rob Young’s Electric Eden

Congratulations to Rob Young, whose latest book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, has been getting excellent reviews of late (see here, here and here).

Fans of Young’s work, as well as of The Wire magazine more generally, will be interested in The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music, which surveys the musical universe of several artists, groups and genres by way of contextualizing introductions and thumbnail guides to the most essential recordings.

Read Full Post »

New issue of Loops out now – whither the musical avant garde?

Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and, forthcoming with Verso this Autumn, The New Ruins of Great Britain (watch this space for details), discusses the Situationists, psychogeography and Manchester in the new issue of Loops.

See our new collection of key Situationist texts, The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough.

Also, Mark Fisher asks ‘Why Don’t Groups Split Up Any More?’ and discusses Timothy Brennan’s Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz and an avant garde (such as the Fall and Sonic Youth) that just keeps chugging on (except with little of the ‘avant’).

See also great pieces by Simon Reynolds on science fiction and music and Dan Franklin on the extraordinary Napalm Death.

To guide yourself round the complexities of avant garde music (including the Fall and Sonic Youth) see The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music.

Read Full Post »

New non-Verso books on politics, theory and music

Some recently published and forthcoming, non-Verso, politics, theory and music books that have us excited:

• Mark Fisher’s (aka K-Punk) Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? now has an ISBN so is available for pre-order – due end of November.
• Another from Zer0books is Dominic Fox‘s Cold World where he develops a concept of ‘militant dysphoria‘. There is an event to launch the book at Goldsmiths on September 30th and Mark Fisher will be speaking as well.
• We’re delighted to discover that Michael Peel’s A Swampful of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.
• Steve Goodman (aka Kode 9) has got a book coming out Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear on acoustic force – sound as a weapon. (In 0ur Wire Primers there’s an article on dubstep that covers Kode 9’s music.)
• Have just started reading Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials ‘the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East’ – already filled with dark foreboding…
• It mentions Pierre Guyotat’s avant-garde novel Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers which has just been re-published by Solar Books, along with his classic Eden Eden Eden. Lauded by Barthes and Foucault, they look terrifying.

Read Full Post »

Simon Reynolds on Fredric Jameson

In the first issue of Loops, Faber’s new music magazine, Simon Reynolds, the renowned blogger and author of Energy Flash, Rip it Up and Start Again, Bring the Noise and Totally Wired, looks at the attempts to imagine the music of the future in science fiction films, and finds they often can’t escape the past:

As theorised in his masterwork Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson’s ‘nostalgia mode’ is not to be confused with either the nostalgia felt by an individual for his own past or veneration and longing inspired by a remote-in-time antiquity that seems superior to the present. Rather it’s a symptom of artistic and cultural malaise, an inability to innovate forms of narrative and modes of expression capable of representing the present let alone projecting the future.

Talking of nostalgia, remember when the broadsheets reviewed serious cultural theory? See Simon Reynolds’ review of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism from the Observer in 1991.

Simon Reynolds is contributing an article on Grime to the forthcoming The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music.

Read Full Post »