I said to Jimi, “Look man, neither of us is going to be around much longer, anyway: so while we’re here, we might as well do something together.” When I said that, whatever we were talking about, or what he was thinking about, just seemed to stop and I had his full attention. He really went into some deep thought as he looked at me from across the table. He was looking into my eyes and I knew he could only be thinking about our early deaths. – Arthur Lee in Rainbow in the Storm: The Book of Love (unpublished memoirs)

Between 2003 and 2006, Arthur Lee worked on his memoirs which he hoped to publish under the title of Rainbow in the Storm: The Book of Love. In the unpublished manuscript, Lee reminisces about his friendship with Jimi Hendrix. The two worked together on “The Everlasting First” which appeared on Love’s False Start. The album came out early in 1970 – just a few months before the young guitarist passed away. “It seemed to me, he didn’t know the party was over and it was time to go home,” Lee sadly notes in his memoirs.

Unlike Hendrix, Lee obstinately refused to tour and follow music industry rules. He spent most of the 1960s close to home and LA’s Sunset Strip. This might have saved him although it also contributed to Love never quite becoming the band it was destined to be. But Lee made it through years of hardship and drug abuse. He survived broken friendships and imprisonment. Yet he passed away too soon. Lee died of leukemia at the age of 61 – before he was able to surpass Forever Changes and before completing his much-anticipated memoirs.

John Einarson’s Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love fortunately salvages portions of Lee’s uncompleted manuscript. The latter, according to Einarson, was “a flawed diamond in need of polishing and editing.” The author of this new Jawbone Book publication benefits from the support of Lee’s widow, Diane, who authorized the use of the unpublished memoirs. In his book, Einarson skilfully interweaves Lee’s voice with the thoughts and recollections of 60 individuals who agreed to contribute to this robust 300-page Arthur Lee biography.

Einarson, using a standard biographical narrative, focuses on Lee who he rightfully sees as the driving force behind Love’s many incarnations. The author paints a fairly balanced picture of Lee and does not hesitate to expose the conflicting aspects of the songwriter’s troubled personality – Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love presents Love’s frontman as a mildly megalomaniac artist whose insecurities about art and relationships resulted in the constant sabotaging of opportunities.

There is enough in this impressive biographical work to please most Love aficionados – including those completely partial to Lee. Even audiophiles seeking details about sessions and technical aspects of song writing will find the book informative (Einarson’s description of the work performed by arranger David Angel is particularly insightful). But there is always a risk involved in covering too broad a territory.

Einarson occasionally gets lost in details and anecdotes which contribute little to the overall narrative. The author’s meticulous approach to research and organization is remarkable although it seems, at times, that his voice gets buried under the weight of the details amassed.

Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love might not be the definitive biography on Love or Arthur Lee but it certainly sets the bar high.

Visit Jawbone Press for more details (the book will be available in stores this week).

In the sublime dialectic of the kosmische, titanic and inhuman struggles are mysteriously pared with a serene acceptance of an underlying unity. This deeply psychedelic logic produces the peculiar fusion of drive and drift that characterizes the more mystical dimensions of Krautrock. – Erik Davis

These words are from the author of TechGnosis and it should come as no surprise that he, as a person deeply intrigued by the mystical dimensions of cyberculture, is an ardent believer in the transcending potential of kosmische musik. And Davis is not alone.

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy constitutes a new contribution to a growing body of literature that attempts to define and celebrate the music of a generation that came of age in Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thirteen writers – Davis, David Stubbs, Stephen Thrower, David Keenan and many others – contribute to this Black Dog Publishing book and the result is more than satisfactory.

This collective effort is a hybrid of some sort – it is both a reference guide to kosmische musik and the first available coffee table book on Krautrock. This is not meant to be derogatory in any way. Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy is the first book of its kind that combines engaging content with dozens of photos and full-color illustrations of album covers and posters. It is not the kind of book you want sitting on a shelf far out of reach.

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy focuses on the usual constellation of bands and solo artists (Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Can, The Cosmic Jockers, Faust, Neu, Popol Vuh, and Tangerine Dream to name but a few). Like Eric Deshayes’ Au delà du rock and Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler, the book consists mainly of band, record label and producer profiles. The presence of thirteen contributors, however, provides a rich (albeit uneven at times) range of perspectives and approaches which certainly contribute to making this book an enjoyable read.

Stubbs, the author of Fear of Music, contributes an opening chapter which serves as an introduction to Krautrock. In just a few pages, Stubbs can only scratch the surface yet he still manages to situate the movement within its historical context while highlighting the paradoxical relationship that bound the German and Anglo-American music scenes together.

Ken Hollings then offers an original and arresting piece titled “Background Radiation: The West German Republic Tunes in to the Cosmos.” This second chapter looks at the site where the cosmos, the static sound of radio and music intersect. Hollings takes us from Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany to Stockhausen, Fluxus and Kraftwerk in an effort to document Germany’s fascination with space and sound. This is a great piece and Hollings cannot go wrong by quoting Stockhausen who once said that “we are all transistors in the literal sense.”

Davis develops the topic of the kosmische further in the next chapter by focusing on semantics and philosophical conceptions of the cosmos. He writes, “the cosmic is never just the brute fact of the material universe, but the cluster of feelings, imaginings, and spiritual intuitions that arise when we try to wrap our minds and hearts around that immense fact – or to make art from such inevitably fragile wrappings.”Davis is necessarily mostly interested in the kosmische musik branch of Krautrock and this serves his argument well.

Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy, by focusing on the usual constellation of Krautrock bands, strictly adheres to its 1967 to 1975 timeline. It is true that 1975 is a landmark year with Faust disbanding, Tangerine Dream moving further away from its pink years and Ralf-Ulrich Kaiser disappearing into obscurity with his Kosmische Musik label. But the mid-1970s is also the birth of Sky Records and the continuation of a tradition of innovative music. The post-1975 Krautrock years will hopefully find their place in the literature sooner or later.

Until then, flip through the pages of Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and its Legacy. It is well worth your time.

No style of late twentieth-century music has provoked as much controversy as minimalism. To its supporters, its directness and accessibility restores the severed link between composer and audience. To its detractors, it is maddeningly simple-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. And to its creator, the term itself is burdened with pejorative connotations.

– K. Robert Schwarz (Minimalists)

Speak too loudly about minimalist music and you will risk becoming the object of derision. It does not matter that some of the genre’s key composers have achieved notoriety and a certain commercial success. Minimalism, as a musical genre, remains underappreciated and misunderstood.

Kyle Gann, in Audio Culture, proposes a framework with which to approach the genre by listing its dominant musical ideas, devices and techniques. His “family of character traits” includes static harmony, repetition, additive process, phase-shifting, permutational process, steady beat, static instrumentation, linear transformation, metamusic, pure tuning, non-Western influences and audible structure. Concerning the latter, Gann writes, “part of minimalism’s early mystique was to have no secrets, to hold the music’s structure right in the audience’s face, and have that be listened to.”

Minimalist music is indeed a brutally honest form of art. And there is probably no better definition of the genre than the one La Monte Young proposes: “That which is created with a minimum of means.”

Young is generally regarded as the first minimalist composer and his importance in late twentieth-century music is difficult to overstate. Much has been written about the American composer although most of it has only been published in the English language. This situation has now been remedied with the publication of Joseph Ghosn’s La Monte Young by Le mot et le reste.

Ghosn, a former Inrockuptibles, discovered Young after skimming the back of a Spacemen 3 album. The band had appropriated a short text from the composer and it is via their 1990 album that Ghosn first experienced the profound strangeness inherent to the name La Monte Young.

And thus begins the first chapter of Ghosn’s biography of the minimalist composer. This is a personal book borne out of a deep appreciation of minimalist music. In this book, Ghosn does not uncover new critical information, nor does he offer a radical reassessment of Young’s legacy on modern music. What he does offer is an accessible and informative survey of the composer’s key life experiences and pivotal relationships. The tone is friendly and generous and this makes La Monte Young an enjoyable read.

In this book, Ghosn adroitly discusses the ambivalent rapport Young has maintained with his former acolytes and collaborators. Sensitive questions concerning the ownership and authorship of early collaborative works (i.e. The Theatre of Eternal Music) are posed once again and Ghosn is insistent that answers should come from the creators of those recordings and performances.

Ghosn also pertinently allocates a considerable portion of the biography section of the book to discussing the symbiotic relationship that binds La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela together. “Dans l’art contemporain et la musique contemporaine, parmi cette avant-garde de la fin des années soixante, ils étaient indubitablement des mavericks, des outsiders, des punks avant l’heure. ” It is clear from these lines that this is a book that refuses to limit itself to Young.

And that is why this affordable Le mot et le reste publication should appeal to both francophones and Anglophones. Ghosn’s La Monte Young includes a commented discography of the composer’s solo and collaborative works. But it also includes a 33-page selected discography of minimalist and post-minimalist music. The works of Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, Phillip Glass, John Cale and a few others are discussed in both the text and the selected discography section. The latter is further enriched by mentions of other composers and artists whose work has served to validate the importance of minimalism in the modern music landscape.

Ghosn’s radar covers an extensive territory that stretches across time and sub-genres – from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music to Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la mort or from Franco Battiato to Jim O’Rourke. Other artists mentioned include Charlemagne Palestine, Earth, Sunn O))), Keith Fullerton Whitman and Jeffrey Cantu-Ledesma of Root Strata to name but a few.

La Monte Young is, therefore, both a concise biography and a much welcomed guide to minimalist music. It is an opened door to a world that has only recently found its way to the surface thanks to the proliferation of online resources and the enthusiasm of audiophiles who have taken it upon themselves to reissue, or make available for the first time, recordings that appeared destined for obscurity.

Visit Le mot et le reste for more information.

Excerpt below :
La Monte Young – from Dream House 78′ 17″

In this book, Blache accords considerable importance to the symbiosis between chaos and order but only as a means to shed light on the sound sculptures Bianchi and other contemporary Italian artists defiantly insist on erecting. Blache’s preoccupations extend beyond music and into the realm of philosophy.

But The Art of Duration and Resonance is not about Deleuze and Guattari’s “chaosmos” or post-structural metaphysics. The strength of this book is in the author’s uncompromising desire to document the rich contributions of five musicians – Maurizio Bianchi, Guiseppe Verticchio, Luca Bergero, Matteo Uggeri, and Andrea Marutti.

Maurizio Bianchi (M.B)
Bianchi, the author tells us, has resolved “the conflict between concrete/abstract, consonance/dissonance, [and] acoustic/electronic facets of musical experimentalism.” It is tempting to challenge that assertion although there is no doubt that Bianchi, qualitatively and quantitatively, stands as one of the pillars of noise and drone music. Is he a post-modern or post-industrial artist? “I’m a pre-modern non artist with some pre-industrial attitudes,” says Bianchi. And his music is a form of “radiotherapeutic apocalypse.”

Maurizio Bianchi – emmhna
Maurizio Bianchi – niddah
Follow this link for more information.

Giuseppe Verticchio (NIMH)
The Art of Duration and Resonance then offers a succinct, yet insightful, introduction to the “dark visceral environmental electronic” sound of Verticchio (NIMH). Blache notes that NIMH “offers new challenges that mediate the mind and the body in a unique sensorial [and] metaphysical experience.” This is a music that effectively combines field research and ethnographic-like approaches with sound synthesis and manipulations.

NIMH – the unkept secret
Follow this link for more information.

Luca Bergero (FHIEVEL)
Luca Bergero (FHIEVEL), in an interview with Blache, insists on the importance to “consider common objects like potential music instruments. New possibilities are in this way available and in some cases the results are very important, from an aesthetic point of view or for a relational side in the music-therapy field.” Unfortunately, Blache does not further explore the music-therapy angle with FHIEVEL. But he succeeds nonetheless at introducing the reader to an artist whose contributions are both poetically cerebral and dense with sculptural qualities.

FHIEVEL – pipe
Follow this link for more information.

Matteo Uggeri (HUE / SPARKLE IN GREY)
The second to last chapter of the book deals with the work of Matteo Uggeri (HUE). The latter has released numerous recordings under different names and via multiple collaborations but Blache skillfully disentangles all of this. Uggeri’s music holds therapeutic qualities that are worth considering. Blache notes that listening to Uggeri’s works allows one to decode “what is veiled, muted and profoundly hidden in some parts of human existence.” See for yourself.

Alessandro Calbucci & Matteo Uggeri – there
Follow this link for more information.

Andrea Marutti (AMON / NEVER KNOWN)
Blache’s book on Italian industrial drone music closes with a discussion of Andrea Marutti’s work. Marutti, aside from releasing albums under the AMON and NEVER KNOWN pseudonyms, is also known as the founder of the Milan-based label AFE Records. His music his dense yet sufficiently open to allow one to drift through the soundscapes he carves out of stretched-out drones and mutable sound textures.

Andrea Marutti – the pulsating silence
Follow this link for more information.

The Art of Duration and Resonance is composed of five chapters that serve to introduce and celebrate an equal number of independent artists. Like most of the music it describes, Blache’s book is the product of do-it-yourself practices. This is a self-published work made available through print-on-demand services. This, unfortunately, hurts the book at times. Yet Blache’s efforts to bypass mainstream publishing channels are deserving of support.

Most importantly, Blache’s enthusiasm for Italian industrial drone music is truly contagious and this should suffice to convince you to dig further and step into the “chaosmos.”

The history of noise is like a history of the avant-garde – while we can identify what looks like a linear succession of avant-gardes, if we consider the idea of an avant-garde, or of noise, then we should recognize that at any one moment, however briefly, when something is avant-garde, it is specifically outside of linear progression, and is a question posed about progression. – Paul Hegarty

Noise is a potent force that is both threatening and prevalent. It occasionally “dissipates” and ceases to be noise but as a historical and cultural construct, it has no choice but to resurface and continue its course against its silencer. It is the resulting intersecting trajectories of noise and power in music that Paul Hegarty explores in Noise/Music: A History. In thirteen engaging chapters, the author discusses a century of experimentation, beginning with the Futurists and ending somewhere near the sonic excesses of Merzbow and the incessant plunders of John Oswald.

FIRST
“Noise then is something we are forced to react to, and this reaction, certainly for humans, is a judgment, even if only physical,” writes Hegarty as he introduces the theoretical framework of the book. In this fist chapter, the author necessarily borrows from, but also engages with, Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music. He also relies on giants such as Kant, Hegel and Artaud as he situates noise within larger discourses of power. The order vs. disorder paradigm is a useful one here and Hegarty uses it effectively.

TECHNOLOGIES
Noise and technology have become nearly inseparable since the industrial revolution. Noise/Music thus focuses on developments in technology but without falling prey to technological determinism. Hegarty explores early landmark exchanges and approaches (Fluxus, musique brut and musique concrète) as he entrenches technology into human activities.

Noise may permeate all activities but this does not facilitate its acceptance (especially in music). Hegarty makes that clear when he notes that even Theodor Adorno was “caught in an incapacity to see new technologies, whether machinic, conceptual or performative, as ever being able to supersede the musical technology laid out in the form of orchestral music.”

FREE
Free jazz is neither orchestral music nor noise per se but it occupies a central place in Hegarty’s narrative. The author pertinently discusses the larger socio-political context within which free jazz exploded. He offers a balanced analysis, recognizing the paradoxes inherent in the process of delimiting music such as free jazz and improv into rigid genres. Fire music and other variants of free jazz represent “attacks on musical conventions” but also a forward surge toward Georges Bataille’s “miraculous realm of unknowing.” Noise is in the political but also in the “freeness” of the music, Hegarty tells us.

ELECTRIC / PROGRESS / INDUSTRY / INEPT
It is also present in rock, prog, industrial and punk music. “Freeness” and amplification create surplus sound and facilitate the expansion of conventional rock structures (i.e. Cream, The Grateful Dead and Hendrix). Noise is in the machinery rock and prog musicians use to indulge in excesses. It is in the transgressive potential of industrial music.

It is in punk music and efforts to destroy narratives of virtuosity. What Hegarty presents here, is “a repositioning of punk as a quantitative moment in noise, where the scale of ineptness made it audible noise.” Ineptness is presented not as criticism but as a means to reappropriate a term used to describe punk as a genre. Attali necessarily resurfaces in these pages since it is difficult to talk about power and control without considering the political economy of music.

JAPAN/MERZBOW
Noise/Music includes chapters that deal with various aspects of sound art, pluderphonics and listening. But clearly, the bulk of the book and culminating arguments reside in the chapters that deal with Japan and Merzbow. In those two chapters, Hegarty returns to the concept of excess which he sees as a predominant characteristic of Japanese noise music. He writes, “there is, if you like, more noise in Japanese noise music, whether in terms of volume, distortion, non-musicality, non-musical elements, music against music and meaning.” What Hegarty describes is a post-Japrock world where noise reigns supreme.

And then there is Merzbow. The latter, the author insists, best incarnates excess. “Merzbow music is all residue, all noise.”

Hegarty, therefore, makes a compelling argument when he writes that “noise music acquires a sense (whether wanted or not) in the wake of industrial music and Japanese noise music – i.e. from the late 1970s onwards.”

Noise/Music is dense with information and engaging insights. There is a chance that Hegarty’s insistence on saturating the pages of the book with uncertain, yet stimulating, connections (Bataille’s transgression & Throbbing Gristle / Gilles Deleuze’s repetition & Neu) will disorient readers unwilling to confront noise in the written form. They should know that Noise/Music is not a guide to modern music. It is not a history of noise music. But it is a great read if you don’t mind it when the meters are in the red.

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Paul Hegarty is Lecturer in Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork, Ireland, and he is author of books on Bataille and Baudrillard. He jointly runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic and occasionally performs in the noise band Safe.

Follow this link for a selection of talks and papers written by Paul Hegarty.

Excerpts from the Safe with Dennis Cooper release below:
SAFE WITH DENNIS COOPER – I

SAFE WITH DENNIS COOPER – III

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[With in-studio composition] you’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound – you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter – he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.” – Brian Eno

“Painting is an appealing analogy for Eno’s ambient explorations, but filmmaking is a better model for how Eno works with other people in practice,” Geeta Dayal pertinently writes in the introduction to her new book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World. This 67th addition to the 33 1/3 series is finally out after being delayed for months. The book is a welcomed addition to a series which continues to present engaging insights into the making of some of the greatest albums of the last few decades.

Dayal’s project was derailed on a few occasions. It is not clear in the preface whether or not the use of Oblique Strategies cards proved helpful or detrimental to the book writing process. Eno disconcerted more than one musician with cards such as “honour thy mistake as a hidden intention” and “twist the spine.” But within the context of collective experiments, the cards seemed to help.

Dayal, on the other hand, is not certain that her “overtly resist change” and “make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate” cards helped. The latter allowed her to explore new avenues but also caused her to spontaneously tear up entire sections of the book.

Dayal succeeds nonetheless in presenting a coherent narrative despite the destructive actions made necessary by the Oblique Strategies cards. The author’s economical prose takes the reader from Eno’s childhood years in Eastern England to his art school tape experiments. She provides a succinct overview of Eno’s musical career, not forgetting to mention collaborations and collective exercises such as the Scratch Orchestra and ACNE.

The transition from Eno’s earlier solo records (Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain) to Another Green World is, however, a little abrupt. Dayal spends considerable time discussing Eno’s ambient experiments/experiences but without effectively bridging the pop/experimental gap that is so characteristic of Eno. Dayal’s assertion that, in 1975, Another Green World was the “fullest realization of Eno’s artistic vision up to that point in his life” is certainly valid although it is a difficult point to make in such a short book.

Dayal focuses on processes and theoretical concepts but it is not always clear how much of what she presents is specific to Another Green World. Moreover, the few pages allocated to discussing the album’s 14 songs seem insufficient when compared to other 33 1/3 books.

It is also unfortunate that Dayal fails to challenge the widely held belief that lyrics did not interest Eno. She does discuss song titles and pauses to consider the words used in “Golden Hours” but that is hardly sufficient. David Sheppard, in On Some Faraway Beach, writes about the presence of Dadaist and automatist undertones in Eno’s earlier work. Eno himself, in an interview with Lester Bangs, says, “what often happens is that I get an idea of how the words will fall and what their function be rhythmically, so I start singing or placing the syllables in a certain way, and they’re just nonsense at the beginning. Then certain types of sounds will emerge, like a particular vowel sound will suit a particular song.” Eno adds, “and I know it sounds extremely perverse whenever I explain it, to finally at the end of it all sit down and read it and say, ‘Ah, so that’s what it’s about.’”

Where Dayal is most successful is in challenging the commonly accepted painter analogy. By focusing on processes, she ably demonstrates that Eno, during the productive years that preceded and followed Another Green World, became increasingly like a film director in full control of all creative aspects. Dayal goes as far as extending the cinematic analogy to No Pussyfooting and Evening Star.

“Eno and [Robert] Fripp were a bit like the David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti of early-to-mid 1970s experimental rock music,” she writes.

Dayal did not have the chance to meet with Eno but she still managed to let the celebrated “non-musician” speak through the pages of the book. She skillfully weaved material from early Eno interviews within the fabric of her story. It is worth noting that she was able to interview old friends and collaborators such as Fripp, Percy Jones and Judy Nylon, to name but a few – their contributions proved invaluable.

Dayal’s Another Green World is an  informative and concise introduction to an artist whose imprint on modern culture is incalculable. Eno found himself at a very specific juncture in the mid-1970s and it is that story that Dayal tells.

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Excerpts from Eno’s Another Green World:

IN DARK TREES

I’ll COME RUNNING

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Dayal has contributed other articles here and there about Eno.  Follow the links below if interested.

Brian Eno – Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks
The Album Covers of Brian Eno

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Other great reads in the 33 1/3 series:

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller
Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
Low by Hugo Wilcken
20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel
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Strange stuff, music; a lot of it is highly suspect, I should say.

- Derek Bailey, in an interview for The Wire

Verso Books recently teamed up with The Wire to put together what they hope will be the definitive guide to modern music. The Wire Primers consists mostly of articles which originally appeared in The Wire – 19 articles published between 1996 and 2007 as well as three new pieces to complement an already dense collection of thoughts on modern music.

The book is divided into four sections: Avant Rock; Funk, Hiphop & Beyond; Jazz & Improvisation; and Modern Composition. There are no introductions for the various sections and so the uninitiated might find it difficult at first to find commonalities between musicians such as Luciano Berio, John Lurie and Merzbow.

“The book’s searchlight ranges far and wide, both geographically and historically,” says Rob Young, editor of The Wire Primers. “It’s a Primer’s job to unpick and lay bare these tangled and occasionally esoteric histories and extend a friendly, critically engaged guiding hand.”

And that is where The Wire Primers is truly successful.

Mike Barnes opens the Avant Rock section with a critical analysis of Captain Beefheart’s discography (kudos for including the often underrated Clearspot). The second chapter celebrates the supposed genius of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith. Nick Cain then focuses on Noise Music whereas Alan Licht discusses the No Wave sound of Glenn Branca and James White, to name but a few. This section of the book also includes chapters on the avant-garde pop of Tropicalia, the dissonant rock of Sonic Youth and the mutating sound of Frank Zappa (this last chapter, despite its merits, feels like a filler piece here).

Peter Shapiro kicks off the Funk, Hiphop & Beyond section with an article on James Brown. Other chapters deal with Grime, Dubstep and Fela Kuti. Shapiro closes the section with a survey of turntablism. The author overlooks the contributions of early innovators (Hindemith, Toch and Varèse) but this is of minor importance. Shapiro cannot go wrong, especially when he brings together, under one umbrella, Grandmaster Flash, Herbie Hancock, Christian Marclay and Martin Tétreault.

The Wire Primers then takes the reader through the world of jazz and improvisation with succinct, yet informative, chapters on AMM, Derek Bailey, and Ornette Coleman. There is also a chapter on “Fire Music” which celebrates the politically and socially conscious jazz of Ayler, Shepp and others. The section ends with John Szwed’s excellent piece on Sun Ra (I did not expect otherwise from the author of Space is the Place).

The final portion of The Wire Primers focuses on Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen and Xenakis. A fifth chapter by Art Lange presents Musique Concrète & Early Electronic Music in a nutshell.

At that point in the book, the reader might succumb to information overload. That is why The Wire Primers should be used as it was meant to be: a guide on how to buy modern music.

Where The Wire Primers fails is in offering little to the people that make up the magazine’s readership and assuming that those new to the topic are equipped to synthesize the information presented by the 16 contributors. Adding opening and closing chapters for each of the four sections would have helped provide new perspectives on the Primers while furthering the aim of this book.

There are also considerable omissions (sub-genres and individual artists) but one must not forget that mapping the entirety of modern music in a few hundred pages is an impossible task.

In the end, The Wire Primers fulfills its main goal which is to help music enthusiasts navigate through today’s “aural wilderness.” Get your own copy and start filling those gaps in your record collection before another series of Primers hits the shelves.

AVANT ROCK
Captain Beefheart – dropout boogie
Merzbow – bardo song

FUNK, HIPHOP & BEYOND
Fela Kuti – no agreement
Tétreault, Lussier & Côté – leurs personnalités

JAZZ & IMPROVISATION
Sun Ra – there is a change in the air
AMM – later during a flaming riviera sunset

MODERN COMPOSITION
Iannis Xenakis – orient occident
Karlheinz Stockhausen – teil 1