Tony Martin arrived to San Francisco in 1962, promptly forging creative alliances and lifetime friendships with “new music” people Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. When the San Francisco Tape Music Center moved to its location at 321 Divisadero St., Martin was invited by co-directors Sender and Subotnick to become the Visual Director. With special attention paid to working in the tape music medium, as well as performing regularly, they joined with Mills Center for Contemporary Music in ‘67. During the SFTMC days Martin was responsible for numerous visual compositions, including Terry Riley’s In C performance, as well as Sender’s Desert Ambulance. Martin was deeply engaged in experimenting with light via overhead and slide projectors, mixing paint, oil, water, and objects to build his light compositions. His following grew as a culture of psychedelia pervaded the 1960s and his light shows became popular amongst bands such as Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. During this time he began to build “interactions” by engineering entire environments using sensors and mirrors. By the late ’60s he returned to New York City where he continued his focus for these types of installations; time and time again synthesizing his technological skills with painting as a moving image. A painter at heart, he continued with consideration of his experience working with his viewer-activated sculptures, as well as his devotion to the medium of light — maintaining a thread that binds all aspects of his work. His latest piece entitled Proximity Switched Installation (2012) is a clear culmination of a lifetime of experimentation/production. A video demonstration of this installation is available to view online and includes musical accompaniment by Compound Eye (Spring Press).

The Variable Place is the first book of its kind to tie together over 50 years of Tony Martin’s work. It includes an in-depth interview with Martin by Will Cameron, Albert Herter and the editors. As well as a special introduction by long-time friend/collaborator Pauline Oliveros.

Created as an audio extension to “The Electric Information Age Book” by Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, the LP was made in the spirit of the experimental 1967 “The Medium is the Massage LP”, the “first spoken arts record you can dance too” based on media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s groundbreaking book of the same name.

Produced by Schnapp, Michaels, and Daniel Perlin in a process paralleling the books production, the album incorporates new music drawing upon a wide range of genres (such as Post-Punk, Mutant Disco, Baile Funk, and Chicago Juke) with samples, quotations, and text from the Electric Information Age Book. Recorded and mixed at Perlin Studios; Mastered at Bonati Mastering; Pressed at Brooklyn Phono; Designed at Project Projects ; Letterpress Printed at Sheffield Product; Screenprinted at Haven Press.

A side: The Book of the Now; Involve US in Depth; Verbal-Visual Vernacular; In the World of Emotion; Mass Glass; Erasing Time; Page 82; Decisions; Page In.

B side: Drill Press (Dub); Page 122; Philosophical Works; Tomorrow Today; Printing Printing Printing Printing; Non-Tribal Placard; Pattern Recognition Pattern; T>E>I>A>B; Arts First Spoken Dance To; Page Out.

Digital download of 19-track album.

‘What’s the difference between this “second spoken arts record you can dance to” and its 1967 predecessor “The Medium is the Massage LP”? For all its pop fizz, the latter dangles its propositions and prepo­sitions, but seems to leave the body stumbling, fumbling for itself on the dance floor. In its labors of reworking, The Electric Information Age Album honors its predecessor while seeking to further advance its claims.’

— Jeffrey T. Schnapp

In Between Pictures. Photographs 1979-1986 documents Fin Serck-Hanssens work as a photographer for Norwegian music magazines. From the early years of Norwegian Punk and underground music scene to English bands playing in Derby and London. New Order, Bauhaus, and the Clash are captured in the very start of their career. Through more than 150 photographs essential music culture: the bands, the crowd and the scenes, are documented. The book features new essays by Ole Robert Sunde, Christian Refsum, Paola Cortes-Rocca and Peter J. Amdam

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.

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.

Artforum 500 Words.

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).

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.

A compilation of one and a half years of Art & art.