WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS: Anwen Crawford, Sean Nye, Hillegonda Rietveld, Kevin Dettmar, Tim Sommer

Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any other book this summer, but I feel obliged to draw your attention to a flurry of notable books, made by mates, that have come out recently or are about to come out...

For instance, here's the latest from an old friend from down under, Anwen Crawford -  a critical study of the film Morvern Callar  that comes in this daintily designed and pleasingly petite edition by Fireflies Press. 

I was glad to offer this endorsement: 

There is a film called Morvern Callar and a novel called Morvern Callar. Now a critical study called Morven Callar joins them as an equal. Anwen Crawford’s writing is as tactile, agile and alert as Lynne Ramsay's direction, Alwin H. Küchler’s camera, Samantha Morton's performance. She pushes always for the startling thought, the tartly troubling image. Great critics make compelling work even more compelling than it already is and this is what Crawford achieves here, as she always does."

Anwen’s monograph made me watch the film again. 

From the publisher: 

In the 2002 volume of the Decadent Editions, Anwen Crawford delves into Lynne Ramsay’s haunting second feature Morvern Callar, adapted from Alan Warner’s novel, to craft a fiercely lucid and poetic exploration of grief, class, women’s authorship and the place of art in our world today.

It's out on September 22 with pre-orders shipping earlier - indeed shipping now. 

Another mate of long vintage is Sean Nye, professor at USC Thornton School of Music and scholar of electronic dance music. 

Here is his long-time-a-comin' masterwork on the Teutonic / technotronic interface, The Music-Machines, via Oxford University Press.

 For which I was pleased to offer this blurb: 

“The Music-Machines works first as a richly researched and wide-ranging material history tracking the transmissions and transmigrations of German electronic innovations across American popular culture over the last half-century. But even more fascinating is Sean Nye’s exploration of how certain ideas about “Germany” and "the Germanic" have been a spur to the creative imagination. These myths and stereotypes about “Teutonic” traits (discipline, a talent for engineering, a steely and chilly posthuman precision) resulted in a kind of exoticism of Mittel Europa, a syndrome that has proved to be particularly seductive and generative for Black American musical subcultures. Teeming with sharp perceptions, fresh discoveries, surprising connections, and amusing details, The Music-Machines is as entertaining as it is intellectually probing.” 

Sprockets is actually written about in the book!

What the publisher says:

In The Music-Machines, author Sean Nye traces a fascinating and distinctly American interpretation of 20th century German electronic music . Covering a series of crucial historical moments, Nye provides both a new and alternate history of the extraordinary impact that electronic music from Germany had in the United States, including the receptions of elektronsische Musik, Krautrock, goth-industrial, Eurodance, techno, trance, and minimal.

This first comprehensive history of German-American exchanges in electronic music explores the political and social dimensions of American constructions of Germanness in electronic music. Nye interprets the music in relation to technology, art, and musical style, encouraging readers to delve into what that reveals about its relationship to nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Through such interpretations, The Music-Machines presents a cultural arc of these constructions of Germanness and electronic music. 

Nye sets this German-American exchange within larger questions of music and transnationalism, tracing key intersections between German and US cultures while also reflecting on other musical and cultural influences on German electronic music, The Music-Machines also places the evolution of electronic music in its broader historical context, demonstrating the ultimate intertwining of America's popular music with the Cold War history of West Germany and the post-1989 history of the Berlin Republic. In this way, The Music-Machinessets the frame not only for the study of German electronic music, but the ways in which this electronic turn emerged in American perceptions of German identity

From Oxford University Press to Cambridge University Press... And another dance-music scholar I've known for decades: Hillegonda C. Rietveld, whose friends call her Gonnie and who some will know as a former member of Quando Quango.

 Gonnie recently published a book  co-edited with Toby Young (no, not that Toby Young),  The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music.

I have not seen inside it but it looks to be a meaty and essential read - one I should really get hold of as I embark upon teaching a new course this coming semester, Studies in Electronic Music. 

What the publisher says:

Electronic dance music is increasingly the focus of a multitude of academic research projects around the world but has been drastically under-represented in accessible core published material. This innovative scholarly collection provides an important 'first stop' for researchers and students wishing to work in this area. It examines the key features of numerous electronic dance music scenes and (sub)genres alongside discussions of the musical, social and aesthetic experiences of participants to consider how these musical practices create purpose and cultural significance for millions around the world. At the same time, it introduces diverse theoretical approaches to the understanding of electronic dance music cultures and addresses the issues and debates in electronic dance music culture studies. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawn from both music and cultural studies – including music aesthetics, technologies, venues, and performativity – from a broad geographical perspective, the volume sheds fresh light on electronic dance music cultures. 

A more recently acquired friend is Kevin Dettmar, a professor at Pomona College and author of books like the fascinating Is Rock Dead? and his monograph on Gang of Four's Entertainment!, amongst others. 

Now Kev comes with a memoir-tinged celebration of punk and New Wave's greatest recordings, Punk In 50 Pieces.

For which I offered this endorsement: 

"You think you know all about punk? Kevin Dettmar shows how much there is still to discover about the music and its era. Crackling with startling ideas and unexpected insights, juiced with surprising stories and unknown connections, Punk in 50 Pieces is a sustained feat of zoomed-in listening and zoomed-out contextualizing. As fast and fun as a Buzzcocks singles compilation, this book vaults to the top shelf in the Punk Lit pantheon." 

This is a very entertaining read, breathing fresh life into  an overtold story.  You’ll reach out to imaginary-high-five the author when he strikes a righteous chord (NY Dolls, Adverts in my case) and relish even more squabbling with him in your head when he doesn't.

Come squabble with us on September 13, when Kevin and I will be chatting Punk In 50 Pieces at Book Soup in Los Angeles. The time is 3pm. 

The book is out now on HarperCollins

Finally,  someone I have known since he was in Hugo Largo, a band who figure in Still In A Dream just as they did in the late Eighties pages of Melody Maker (Joy in fact was the person who first introduced them to those pages).  

Before he formed Hugo Largo,  Tim Sommer was involved in various bands (including Swans, for just a moment, very early on) but he was primarily a champion of other people's music, via his roles as radio presenter (hosting Noise the Show, on WNYU) and as a prolific music journalist writing for Sounds, Village Voice and Trouser Press (the latter from the age of 16!). And it is Trouser Press Books who have just published his collection of music writings, drawn from 1979 right up to almost the present:  Dispatches from the Kingdom of Outsiders.

This is another book that's great to argue with - Tim will take a combative stance on some contentious issue or other (Sha Na Na as the most important band at Woodstock, Sandinista! as a worthless mess), often starting the piece with a throwdown first line ("R.E.M. were the American Sex Pistols". "There is only one Bob Dylan. And the other one is Mark E. Smith"). Along with the argumentation, there are memoiristic vignettes about his involvements with NYC figures like Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth, real-time eyewitness reports on things like the PiL-incited riot at the Ritz in 1981, interviews, and a lot of pieces about The Beatles. It's a fun book for dipping into it. 

Another string to Tim's bow - presenter on the alternative music show Post-Modern MTV

He then went on to work for VH1, and then A&R at Atlantic...

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS: Anwen Crawford's No Document

 

"Nothing we made was meant to last. Nothing we made has lasted for as long as what we made by making together."

Once upon a time a neighbour in this now dwindled constellation of blogs, Anwen Crawford is just about to publish No Document.  The core of this remarkable book is a fragmentary portrait of a beloved friend who died young and the commemoration of their partnership as visual artists mounting raids on Sydney's public places and abandoned buildings.  But in No Document the personal is political and the political is personal, so this private loss becomes a prism for all the injuries and injustices in the world. 

What results is not a meld or a genre-blend but a collage of modes and materials - latticed strips of memoir, art history, political protest, urban geography, colonial history, poetry, criticism, eulogy, diary, reverie. Appropriated scraps from newspapers, radio reports, children's reference books, photography manuals, and more. 

So it's a cut-up and it's cut up - even when writing coolly about slaughterhouses or refugee detention centres, the author's anger and anguish simmers beneath the preternaturally controlled surface. A short book, No Document is a dense read -  not in the sense of opacity (the prose is as lucid and elegant as Crawford's music criticism) but in the way a diamond is dense. So much ache and thought is compressed into these spare sentences. 

The look of the pages is as important as the text. There's a lot of blank white - many pages with only a few lines or a short paragraph. Sentences that break off unfinished. These voids seem to reflect an unwillingness to sew things up,  in both the resolution and healing a wound senses.  All that empty space evokes the absence around which the book is written - each patch of prose like a bandage that doesn't completely cover a laceration. The blanks suggests silence - points at which sorrow can no longer be verbalized, words are not enough.  

No Document has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize and is receiving warm responses from critics, including this detailed appreciation (which also incorporates sample pages from the book) at The Sydney Review of Books from Alix Beeston .

You can order No Document from Transit Books (in the USA) or from Giramondo (in Australia)

update Monday June 13 - the online US launch for No Document is this evening at 7pm Pacific Time / 10 pm East Coast, it's hosted by Point Reyes Books, attendance free or with donation (register here) and features Anwen Crawford in dialogue with Juliana Spahr

24 Hour Theory People

And here is the third and final installment of the joint remembrance and retrospect of the 2000s blogscene, K-punk, and Mark Fisher - convened by Anwen Crawford and featuring the voices and thoughts of Carl Neville, Owen Hatherley,  Rhian E. Jones, Ivor Southwood and yours truly, c/o Sydney Review of Books. 

writing free (oh those blogging days)

And here is the second part of the 3-part colloquy on the blogosphere of yore and its departed hubmeister k-punk - hosted by Sydney Review of Books, conversationally shepherded by Anwen Crawford and involving me, Owen Hatherley, Carl Neville, Rhian E. Jones, and Ivor Southwood

Où sont les blogs d'antan?

Here's the first installment of a three-part conversation convened by Anwen Crawford and hosted by Sydney Review of Books about Mark Fisher and K-Punk and the blogging circuit of the 2000s.
It was a stimulating and fun discussion, for all the sadness of the reason we -- Owen Hatherley, Carl Neville, Rhian E. Jones, Ivor Southwood, Anwen, and myself - were gathered, remotely, to remember and reassess.