The first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency.

A collection of Dan Graham’s interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines. Includes “The Museum in Evolution,” an essay he finished just before his death.

In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, writer and musician Jörg Heiser argues that context switching between art and pop music is an attempt to solve the contradictions faced in one field of cultural production by moving to another. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop music and art from the early 1960s on, Heiser shows that those leading double lives are often best equipped to detect such contradictions while pointing toward radical alternatives. 

In Hecker’s multichannel installation Resynthese FAVN, the auditory stimuli produced from the objects within the exhibition space and the synthetic sounds he composed were designed to subliminally override the mechanical processes of human sense. The result was an intervention into the psychoacoustics of the audience, dramatizing their subjective experience through auditory hallucinations.

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966.

In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer’s comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog, follows the artist’s work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist’s novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances.

Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.

Charlemagne Palestine works from a highly personal universe of ritual, intoxication, and shamanism. Over the last four decades the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual artworks inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls “divinities.”

“I Have Left You the Mountain” presents ten new texts written by contemporary writers and thinkers on the architecture of displacement. These texts have been set to music and sung by some of the last remaining groups of Albanian iso-polyphonic singers, an art form now protected as “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.

Kamran Sadeghi, New York-based musician and member of the Soundwalk Collective, contributed the musical score for Mario Pfeifer’s video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear (2014). For his digital compositions Sadeghi, in dialogue with Pfeifer, took the field recordings made by missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in 1923 of Yaghan chants in Bahia Mejillones as point of departure and reference.

Tony Conrad, who can be described as an artist, composer, musician, filmmaker, and performer, might be considered the first true “crossover artist.” Two Degrees of Separation accompanies the eponymous exhibition by Tony Conrad at Kunsthalle Wien.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time.

Conceived while in residency at the library of the Goethe-Institut New York, this issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library used the context of the hosting institution as a thematic starting point. Germany, and often the author’s specific relationship to the German language, is the unifying thread that unites these diverse pieces.

Writer, DJ, and sound artist Jean-Yves Leloup has followed the evolution of electronic music from its first appearance in Europe at the end of the eighties. A fortunate witness to the electronic scene, he is also interested in all questions relative to contemporary art and digital technologies.