WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

This is quite a long-running series, now! 

Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which there are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. 

Matthew Ingram has done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness; and then The "S" Word,  a collection of writings about spirituality in alternative music. Not forgetting the graphic novel TPM.

And now here's the sequel-not-sequel to Retreat  -  a book about  the nexus of counterculture and horticulture - that comes out in the first week of April:

The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

The Garden explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today.

Countercultural Roots: Chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT sparked a deep interest in sustainable farming.

In-depth Exploration of Influences: Covers movements like the organic food revolution, Permaculture, back-to-the-land initiatives, radical ecology, and the impact of thinkers like Rudolph Steiner on 1970s communities.

Impact on Today’s Agriculture: Through interviews with key figures, The Garden reveals how these visionary growers, often without farming backgrounds, pioneered alternative agriculture and influenced modern sustainable practices. 

A Legacy for the 2020s: Highlights the enduring impact of these farmers, providing inspiration for today’s efforts to reconnect with nature and rethink sustainable living.

Perfect for readers interested in organic farming, environmental history, or the cultural legacy of the 1970s, The Garden tells the untold story of how counterculture reimagined food and our relationship to the earth.

Endorsements:

"I admired Retreat. Fluid and intelligent and... I could go on! The new Matt Ingram is even better... With The Garden, Ingram recuperates an even more transgressive gesture: the counterculture's attempted rethinking of our first culture, agriculture." - Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven

"The idea of gardening and farming as acts of revolution and dissent may be unfamiliar to many of us, so it’s great to have Matthew Ingram’s brilliantly readable book celebrating the unexpected ways that individuals, communities, and movements have, simply by growing their own food, found green-fingered ways to stick it to the man.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage

"Matthew Ingram has not only investigated a huge amount of material and talked to many people, he also has an ability to bring it all together in a way that makes sense and is fun to read." - Charles Dowding, No Dig

“Matthew Ingram has done all of us who care about ecological growing and a better world a big favour in this compendious but highly readable history of the gardening counterculture and its personalities. His in-depth, warts-and-all account of these past efforts will be endlessly informative for new generations wrestling with the demons of agricultural change, cultural change and climate change in our present, sobering times.” - Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

"A fascinating and detailed account of the extraordinary people prepared to counter the march of depletive systems. Matthew Ingram beautifully describes the alarm bell ringing for hippies and far-sighted visionaries prepared to stand up for soils and sustainable practices. The Garden sheds light on the characters and events that have shaped the use of our land. For those of us searching for sustainable solutions to complex and overlapping problems, this book provides forgotten information and lessons from the past for the dilemmas of the present and the future." - Ian Wilkinson, FarmEd

"Matthew Ingram has preserved and enlarged a corner of history which few have visited or are even aware of. He narrates, with the page-turning excitement of a mystery novel and the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, a pivot point that had enormous implications. If we get through the converging crises of this decade, our future will be profoundly better as a result of the shift he describes." - Albert Bates, The Farm

Buy it here

There's a book launch  - open to the public, just register at the link - taking place at the Onion Garden in SW1 on Tuesday April 8 6.30pm

I've not had a chance to give it a proper peruse yet but I do know that Matt's gone at the subject with his usual deep-diving passion. 

Here’s a piece in tandem with the book that Matt wrote for The Quietus in the subject of compost https://thequietus.com/interviews/things-i-have-learned/great-compost-tips/

And another on getting back to the land

Here's a mix Matt made of thematically attuned music and here are liner notes for the mix at Sick Veg. As he notes: 

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Sick Veg is a think tank and grow lab that he's started, whose areas of investigation include  Agriculture, Community, Ecology, Food, Growing, Health, Nutrition, Organic, Practice, Regenerative, Soil, Spirituality, Therapy, the Urban, and Wilderness.

It's also a blog. And crikey, he's been posting there for a while now - images, videos and micro-essays. I had no idea. 

Here's a nice one on the gardens of his childhood. 

There's a YouTube channel as well! Flashback to the days of woebot.tv

As of now there's just the one video up there, about Stewart Home's book Fascist Yoga. 

And here's a new one, "Imaginary Landscapes", on the paintings of Charles Pryor

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

 

It's out! Matthew Ingram's new book The "S" Word: spirituality in alternative music, is ready to order. 

Self-deprecatingly, Matt describes the tome as "very geeky" and "for music geeks only". But in fact anyone who is interested in music's capacity to engender higher states of consciousness and its  association with the devotional, the transcendent, the sacred, enlightenment, mysticism, magic, trance, etc, will find this a fascinating read. 

I was pleased to offer up this morsel of endorsement:  

“Intensely researched, latticed with surprising connections and correspondences, these essays expand and deepen our awareness of the links between music and the numinous. The "S" Word is an illuminating book about illumination.” 

Contents-wise, there's several epic essays already aired on Matt's blog but now only to be found within these covers (meditations on Eastern Philosophy and The Cosmic Sound, Psychic Pop Relics, Dub... paeans to Neil Young and Mark E. Smith) plus a previously published profile of Chris Blackwell. But more than half the book consists of new writing: a staggering 18,000-word exploration of New Age music (very expansively understood here), a paean to Prince, a whole chapter dedicated to Roedelius of Cluster / Harmonia renown, and a treatise on Tibetan recordings.  

The "S" Word is available universally as an eBook but residents of the United Kingdom can also purchase it in the gorgeous solid form of a 255-page book copiously illustrated with colour photographs.  Terms, conditions, and prices are be found here at the Woebot site long with more information about the contents.  

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

When Mates Make Books Xmas stocking-filler round-up: 1984 x 2; transnational club culture; hauntology; postcapitalist desire; Hawkwind and the Underground.

                                                          

The only proper (living - there's one RIP) mate in this round-up - the rest are more like internet acquaintances -  Michaelangelo Matos has a new book: a long-fermented and richly researched appreciation of the year 1984. Like similar year-focused tomes by other, older writers (Jon Savage's 1966, David Hepworth's 1971), pop's annus mirabilis just so happens to coincide with the author's youthful peak point in terms of excitement-capacity and impressionability / ability to be impressed.  (So if I was to do one, the title would be 1979, or 1981 - when I was sixteen and eighteen respectively... but then again I was also blessed improbably with a second adolescence at the cusp of late twenties into early thirties, a proper one in which I actually went out and had wild fun rather than stayed in reading -  so 1992, or 1993, or 1994, would also be strong contenders). But back to Matos's wonder year.. well of course, from the Brit perspective, '84 was the year the bloom went right off New Pop, although we did have the whole Frankie commotion... but it was definitely slipping into the Bad Music Era...   but from a young American's perspective it must have indeed been a supremely exciting year,  especially on the MTV and mainstream radio front, with the Brit invaders still coming through but starting to get out-done by Americans who'd cottoned on to the power of video (Prince, ZZ Top, Springsteen, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, M. Jackson et al). But as Matos amply demonstrates, there was a whole lot more going on.  Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year is out in a couple of weeks. 

Release rationale: 

Everybody knows the hits of 1984 - pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," these iconic songs continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now. Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the stars of the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music. Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid journey to the very moment when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large - one hit at a time.

More information about the book here. 

update 11/24/2020 - I forgot, there's another book about 1984 as pop wonderyear coming out, at almost the same time bizarrely  -  but this one is from the UK perspective: David Elliott's 1984: British Pop's Dividing Year.  Read Elliott's piece on it at The Quietus. Information about the book and its scope here. 

                                                 

Ten Cities tells a transnational tale of club culture across six decades, 1960-2020, focusing on five European and five African cities: Lagos, Luanda, Berlin, Bristol, Johannesburg, Kiyv, Nairobi, Lisbon, Naples, and Cairo.  Edited by Johannes Hossfeld, Joyce Nyairo and Florian Sievers and published by the art book imprint Spector Books, it weaves together contributions from 20 writers and 19 photographers from those ten cities. 

Release rationale: 

In Africa as well as in Europe, club cultures create free spaces that can function as nocturnal laboratories for societies. Nightclubs are hubs in a complex global network – and at the same time they are manifestations of very local and specific practices. This book tells the story of club music and club cultures from 1960 to the present in ten cities in Africa and Europe: Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin,Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, Lisbon. It expands the focus beyond the usual North Atlantic narrative of centres and periphery and instead aims at a coeval narrative. In 21 essays, playlists and photo sequences the book draws intimate portraits of these cities’ subcultures, their transnational flows, as well as the societies from which they evolve and which they, in turn, influence. An urban and political rhythm-analysis from the viewpoint of sound and night. 

                                    

More information about Ten Cities here at the Spector Books website.  

An earlier blogpost of mine about Ten Cities and "xenotronica".  

                                                 

I don't know if this is the very first book wholly dedicated to hauntology (there's been a couple of tomes from A Year in the Country that cover that terrain where it particularly overlaps with the pastoral horror / rural uncanny). But Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past is a notably thorough and probing survey of the field from the marvelously monikered Merlin Coverley (and that's his birthname, not an assumed alias), whose prior works include the adjacently-themed Psychogeography  and Occult London. Mark Fisher comes up rather often (and yours truly makes the odd appearance too) along with expected suspects like Derrida and M.R. James. 

Release rationale:

"Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day... Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artefacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free."

More information about Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past can be found at the Oldcastle Books website. You can check out the introduction in pdf form here. 

The front cover photograph of long shadows gave me a little haunty shiver as it recalled "Ghosts of NYC": a family self-portrait we took in the golden hour of the day before we left Manhattan and moved to Los Angeles, about ten and a half years ago now. 

                                     

                                                  

Talking of Mark Fisher (and of ghosts of my life), I've been remiss in not mentioning here a new Repeater collection, edited and introduced by Matt Colquhoun aka xenogothic (whose own contribution to Fisher Studies, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy, and Mark Fisher nestles at the top of the pile of books awaiting my attention, which has been at its most attenuated and eroded this past year). This new Fishertome, available now in digital form but you'll have wait until January for the analogue object itself, collates Mark's lectures from his final year of teaching at Goldsmiths. I assumed that meant written or mostly-written texts that he delivered, but the book consists of transcripts of the actual classes themselves and rather movingly captures the back-and-forth between Mark and his students. 

Release rationale: 

Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.  For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think…

More information at Repeater Books.

                                                  

Talking of remissness (and obliquely acid communism) I have been culpably remiss in not earlier bigging up this tome from Joe Banks about Hawkwind and the UK Underground, an era that I am most fascinated by and indeed may one day take a pass at. This makes a good case for Hawkwind as a revolutionary band and a precursor to both punk and rave, or perhaps more accurately, a bridge between the original counterculture and these later assaults on  commonsensical reality. For a taste of Banks's approach,  check out his Guardian feature  and this musical tour of reasons why Hawkwind musically matter for The Quietus. 

More information about Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia at the Strange Attractor website.

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

                                     


In a couple of weeks, an old and very good mate is publishing a book that has been a passion project for the last several years, involving an astonishing amount of research and trips to far corners of the world. 

That mate is Matthew Ingram, a.k.a Woebot - and although he's put out a pair of compendiums of brilliant bloggage, and a tasty monograph, it would be fair to describe Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness as Matt's first book proper. Published by Repeater on July 14, the debut does not disappoint. Here is my blurb: 

“This richly researched archaeology of the counterculture places health at its core, showing how ideas of healing and therapy were inextricably bound up with the era’s spiritual longings and erotic politics. Each chapter scintillates with surprising revelations, unexpected connections and startling insights”

More info about Retreat and further endorsements can be found at the Repeater website. 

As part of the build-up to publication, Matt has broken out of blog retirement to post a long and probing essay on Woebot, not so much a preview of the book as a side-bar to it - on the relationship between music, Eastern philosophy, spiritual equilibrium, cosmic vibrations, "bliss consciousness" etc. 

Read it here while also listening to this fabulous 2-hour mix of astral sounds Matt has especially prepared for your elevation. Tracklist here. 

Lots of revelations in the mix, here's a couple of that particularly glisked my third eye: 





Not on the mix, but the tune-writer's own version:




Met Mr. Budd a year or two ago, on the streets of South Pasadena (Geeta knows everybody)


                                         

                                                                   The author holds forth...

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

The present flickers on a knife edge between the dystopian and the utopian - and here's Carl Neville with a new novel for Repeater that hurls the reader into a counterfactual world circa now that in some ways is close-to-utopian, but also contains within it dystopian aspects - or regions - far worse even than the worst that last week momentarily seemed to herald.

Here's how I blurbed it:

“Alternative history usually involves dystopian scenarios – counterfactual realities in which the Nazis conquered the world, the South won the Civil War, the Reformation never happened. Eminent Domain is that rare thing — a near-utopian version of the present more advanced and progressive than our own, rendered with a level of vivid and intricate detail comparable with William Gibson at his most disorienting. But where speculative fiction typically presents a warped mirror image of our own era, Carl Neville’s enthralling and immersive novel does something different – it makes you aware of the radical potentials, the different way things could be, that lurk latent in the world as it stands. Eminent Domain makes this present in which we currently languish feel like the impostor reality.”

More information and how to purchase Eminent Domain at the Repeater Books site.

Carl has started a series of blog essays that detail his journey through life, art, writing and thought that led to where he is now and the work he is doing. Here is the first installment.  He's also just blogged a couple of Spotify playlists related to Eminent Domain and its precursor-sibling novel Resolution Way.

Carl will also be convening a series of discussions on the theme of utopia to take place live on YouTube -  including one next week on music and the utopian in which I will be participating. More details on that to come.

Music and the utopian, eh? It's such an open-ended term and if you're not careful you can start thinking of any music that is vaguely suggestive of paradise or heaven. But in terms of music that actually proposes or enacts a model society, for months now - since doing the memorial lecture in fact - I have been obsessed with this song.

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

Matthew Worley is an old mate who's now a professor of punk. He authored 2017's excellent No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (previously given the when-mates-make treatment here). Currently, he's working on a magnum opus about the history of fanzines. In the meantime, he's one of the collective behind The Subcultures Network anthology Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976.

Ripped is a ripping read, its contents ranging from trip-down-memory-lane pieces from old skool zine-makers like Tom Vague and Richard Cabut (a/k/a positive-punk genre-definer Richard North), to contributions from scholars of DIY culture like Pete Dale and Lucy Robinson. Goth, anarcho, industrial, C86 and Riot Grrrl are among the subsets of fanzine action historicized and celebrated.

One title particularly tickled me:  "'Pam ponders Paul Morley's cat': City Fun and the politics of post-punk" . That's David Wilkinson's essay about the legendary postpunk Manczine City Fun.

More information about the Ripped, Torn and Cut  can be found here. You can buy it via Rough Trade or direct from Manchester University Press.

WHEN YOUR MATE MAKES A BOOK

A very special edition of "When Mates Make Books"!

Because it's my best mate, my life-mate in fact - Joy Press - who has made a book. 

       

A book that's out in a couple of weeks on Atria/Simon & Schuster in America, and on Faber & Faber in the U.K. 

                                                   
It's a bloody good book too. 

But don't take my admittedly biased word for it. 

Here's some advance reviews for Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television from the American trade press - where Joy has pulled off the book-writing equivalent of a Grand Slam with three starred reviews.

"Women have run successful TV shows for decades, but they still routinely face bias and unreasonable obstacles in the industry, as Press details in this powerful narrative that expertly weaves reporting, analysis, and anecdotes. ...Press’s chronicle of a pop-culture movement should inspire a new generation of women creators"  
- Publishers Weekly, starred review. 

"Press draws from decades of interviews, research, and reporting to create a vibrant behind-the-scenes look at the some of the most prominent women creatives in the industry and the role they played in bringing women-focused narratives to the forefront of modern TV and culture... An urgent and entertaining history of the transformative powers of women in TV" 
- Kirkus, starred review. 

"The book is well-organized chronologically and is an absorbing read with some politics thrown in. There are fascinating interviews with female showrunners such as Roseanne Barr, Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls), Jenji Kohan (Weeds/Orange Is the New Black), and Shonda Rhimes (Scandal). ...Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about the entertainment industry, how their favorite TV shows are created, and women" - Library Journal, starred review

Joy has also received ringing endorsements from leading members of the punditocracy:

"Please read this book immediately. It is sharp, funny, and gorgeously researched, a satisfying blend of inside dirt and critical illumination. It also places female creativity on television exactly where it belongs: dead center in the cultural conversation." 
- Emily Nussbaum, television critic  at The New Yorker

"A roaring tour of women's professional, artistic and political impact on television and on popular culture. By turns invigorating and sobering, Stealing the Show maps the progress of the expanded voice, vision and reach of women on television and behind its scenes."
- Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of An Independent Nation

"Stealing the Show is essential reading for anyone interested in women gaining power, in how edgy storytelling comes to screens, and in brilliantly talented females taking the reins of a once-derided-as-secondary-to-movies medium.... I relished their stories--and was inspired by them, too." 
- Sheila Weller, author of The News Sorority and Girls Like Us

For further information about Stealing the Show, head over to Joy's website - where you can find details of book events in New York and Los Angeles and details about the book's scope and content.

To buy the US edition go here. 
To buy the UK edition go here.