Ken Seeno and Jeremy Sigler, Live
12-inch vinyl record, silkscreened 1/1, 12 x 12 inches [12.75 x 12.75 in poly sleeve]
Edition of 150, numbered
Published by The Kingsboro Press
A side: Ken Seeno, A Breezy Memory/Cool Hand, Shadow; Jeremy Sigler, excerpt from Plankticus Erectus
B side: Jeremy Sigler, excerpt from Plankticus Erectus; Ken Seeno, Spirit of 77
Recorded in Baltimore in May 2011, Live marks not only the first ever vinyl release from The Kingsboro Press, but also the first officially released project from longtime friends, colleagues, and schemers Seeno and Sigler. 3 tracks from Seeno (ex-Ponytail) highlight his uniquely ambient and immersive new age-tingled solo work, alongside 2 poems read from New York-based poet Sigler. L.L. Being, an accompanying text (a dialogue between Sigler and Seeno that covers everything from 2 Fat Ladies and Being There, to Windham Hill and khakis) is available here .
Founded in 2007 in Brooklyn, Kingsboro is a critical and engaged look at young art, design, literature, and approach every new issue as an artists print or unique edition, an entirely self-produced object with its own inherent visual language.
Mono.Kultur 26, Manfred Eicher — Recording ECM
Softcover, 42 pp., offset 1/1, 200 x 150 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur
$9.00 · out of stock
Born in 1943 in southern Germany, Manfred Eicher dedicated his life early on to music, learning violin as a child, and studying double bass and classical music at the Academy in Berlin. On parallel tracks, he pursued an equally traditional self-education in jazz: through relatives in America, records bought in G.I. stores, The Voice of America, listening to Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard, playing double bass in German jazz bands and with visiting musicians including Marion Brown, Leo Smith and Paul Bley.
In 1969, a meeting with the American jazz pianist and composer Mal Waldron led to Eicher’s first impromptu production and official release, Free at Last. The immediate success of the record beckoned for more, encouraging Eicher to move backstage and from then on to dedicate his life to finding and producing new music rather than performing. On the outskirts of Munich, with little financial backing, less strategy and no experience in production or managing a record label, Manfred Eicher launched ECM Records as a platform for jazz, a primarily American phenomenon on its wane.
The inaugural volume from Oslo Editions, Contra Mundum I-VII, documents a series of talks held at the Mandrake in Los Angeles on the theme of “contra mundum” or “against the world.” Taking its cue from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, Contra Mundum posits the world-making potential of (anti)sociality as a subject position and the value of a notion of collectivity grounded in “association without relation.” So doing, the book considers a diverse range of topics, including the furniture of Donald Judd, Private Issue New Age music, animal subjectivity, misanthropy and the trope of self-banishment in Shakespeare, apocalypticism and the zombie film, pirates from Blackbeard to Somalia, and the post-punk vocalist Mark E. Smith. Featuring contributions from artists Rupert Deese, Elad Lassry, Anthony Pearson, and Frances Stark, and critics Aaron Kunin, Matthew Taylor Raffety, and Evan Calder Williams.
Cranfield and Slade, 12 Sun Songs
Hardboard/sleeve, yellow vinyl record + poster, offset 2/1, 315 x 315 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3-03764-063-0
Published by JRP|Ringier, CK editions
Cranfield and Slade: 12 Sun Songs is a yellow vinyl album made up of covers of pop songs about the sun. Aping a 1970s concept album, Cranfield and Slade present twelve songs arranged to represent a day, beginning with songs about sunrise and winding down with songs about sunsets. Tracks range from classics such as George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun and The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, to the lesser-known Sun by singer-songwriter Margot Guryan or Where Evil Grows by Vancouver’s The Poppy Family. The album combines field recordings made in various Vancouver locations with electronic sound and acoustic and electric instruments. The liner notes for “12 Sun Songs” were written by celebrated Canadian poet and critic Peter Culley.
Based in rainy Vancouver, Cranfield and Slade is made up of visual artist Kathy Slade and artist/musician Brady Cranfield, working with musicians including Larissa Loyva (Piano, Kellarissa), Johnny Payne (Victoria Victoria, The Shilos), and Chris Harris (Piano, Parks and Rec, The Secret Three, Womankind); and special guests John Collins (The New Pornographers, The Evaporators) and artist Rodney Graham (The Rodney Graham Band, UJ3RK5).
Dan Graham, Rock/Music Writings
Softcover, 224 pp., offset 4/1, 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Edition of 3000
ISBN 978-0978869-73-1
Published by Primary Information
As admired for his writing as for his work in art, photography and architecture, Dan Graham was one of the first contemporary artists to embrace Punk, Postpunk and No Wave, becoming a figurehead for those movements, and an early supporter of (and friend to) Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth among many others. Rock/Music Writings collects 13 of Graham’s most influential writings, on bands ranging from The Kinks to Bow Wow Wow, first published in art journals such as Real Life, Open Letter and ZG between 1968 and 1988, and in the now rare volume Rock My Religion. It includes such landmark essays as “Punk as Propaganda,” which explicates the self-packaging and media critique of The Ramones, Devo, the Sex Pistols, the Desperate Bicycles and others; “Rock My Religion,” in which Graham traces themes of ecstatic reverie in rock performance (with a focus on Patti Smith), through a beautiful composite of quotation, commentary and photography; and “New Wave Rock and the Feminine,” which discusses the onstage personae of Lydia Lunch, Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux, and the gender politics of all-female groups such as The Slits, The Raincoats, Bush Tetras and others. Throughout Rock/Music Writings, Graham’s appraisals are clear-eyed, sophisticated and poetically constructed, a genre of their own within artists’ writings.
Dave Muller, I Like Your Music I Love Your Music
Hardcover, 168 pp., offset 4/4, 305 x 305 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 9783905829860
Published by JRP|Ringier
The exquisite paintings of record covers and spines by Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller give us a glimpse into his cultural identity. I Like Your Music I Love Your Music presents a selection of recent works dealing with the ways in which we construct our cultural identities through music — which he represents as a network of aesthetic, social and personal exchanges. Muller’s multifaceted practice includes curating, cultural agitating, DJing and record collecting — his collection tops out at 15,000 digital albums. He is particularly well known for his multitextured installations that blend his own sound tracks with his visual work. He is represented by Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This volume is published in collaboration with Spain’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), and includes an essay by artist and Director of New York’s White Columns, Matthew Higgs.
Charlie White, OMG BFF LOL
DVD, 9 min., 6 sec., NTSC, digital 4/4, 5.25 x 7.5 inches
Plays in a loop of the three scenes: A, B, A, C
Includes We Love to Shop *, the theme song from OMG BFF LOL
Published by Charlie White
By now, every bona fide Blackberry or iPhone owner probably knows that the abbreviations OMG, BFF, and LOL stand for “oh my God,” “best friends forever,” and “laughing out loud” in the world of Short Message Service (SMS), which has come to be known as texting.
Based on a two-year study of the behavior of an actual American teenage girl, the animation is part of a larger project called The Girl Studies that dissects the desires and social anxieties of our era. The animation is meant to perform as a viable cartoon for young girls, while simultaneously providing a platform from which viewers can critique them. White’s works in photography, film, and more recently animation, often offer fictitious narratives to help us understand and evaluate the underlying realities of contemporary life.
This particular project features Tara and Blakey, two American-girl cartoon characters with pink-glitter accessories, trendy clothing, and commercial desires. These archetypes of the American teen are used to examine their representation from different angles. Set in three looping scenes, OMG BFF LOL contains the cartoon’s capitalist manifesto, “having is so much better than wanting,” discussed by the girls in a crystal shopping mall scene. The second and third scenes, set in a bedroom and bathroom, open the door to the interior loneliness and isolation of the two main characters, as viewers observe them surfing TV channels and radio stations, snacking, posing in front of a full length mirror, and crying, as a digital clock marks the passage of time.
White wrote and directed OMG BFF LOL, working in collaboration with Chuck Gammage studios, a Canadian animation house, to create the intentionally dated quality of the scenes. He explains, “The three segments loop on a now obsolete 4:3 Sony Trinitron monitor, which conjures the television as both box and broadcast mechanism.”
—Mónica Ramírez-Montagut
* A free download (MP3) of the teen-dance remix of We Love to Shop is available here.
Excerpt from Charlie White’s cartoon OMG BFF LOL (Mall) from his project The Girl Studies, 2008. (Run Time: 3 min., 16 sec.)
Mark Leckey, 7 Windmill Street W1
Hardcover, 162 pp., offset 4/4, 160 x 230 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN: 978-2-940271-34-4
Published by JRP|Ringier/Walther König
out of print
condition: fine, minor shelf wear.
Mark Leckey’s best-known video, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), is a 15-minute journey into urban British youth culture from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. Leckey’s presentation of twenty years of dance hall material does not, however, result in a documentary work: the video is rather a visual essay with hedonistic promises of club culture, the birth of funky chic, and the cultural shift of the rise of Acid House. Active in music production through donAtella, a glam-trash duo formed by the artist and Ed Liq, Leckey also makes live performances, CDs, and sound installations. Plunged into the lowbrow of culture, Leckey is one of the most perceptive cultural readers of Western societies.
This publication is the first to be dedicated to his work. Conceived as a source book of his working methods and fields of interest, it has been edited by the artist and features images of his main productions, as well as a wealth of other visual materials he has gathered through the years. In addition to original contributions, it includes reprints of texts from Michel Leiris and the 19th century-writer Walter Pater, as well as song lyrics. Designed by NORM in close collaboration with the artist, this printed project takes the shape of a hardbound drawing book, accentuating the idea of a point of departure rather than arrival.
The book was realized on the occasion of Leckey’s solo exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Migros in Zurich, a co-edition with König Books London.
William E. Jones, Is It Really So Strange?
Softcover, 108 pp., offset 4/1, 9.5 x 12 inches
Edition of 1000
ISBN 0-9772347-1-1
Published by David Kordansky Gallery
out of print
Making the connection between The Smiths’ working-class, Manchester-raised, ethnic Irish experience and that of the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles, Is It Really So Strange? is the companion book to William Jones’ documentary of the same name.
This publication is an initial attempt to examine the trajectory of the X symbol in underground music culture. While the X is broadly associated with the punk scene—in particular, straight edge hardcore—the symbol contains a wide range of often-contradictory meanings. This document presents our ongoing research; we welcome comments, corrections, and criticism.
