Paperback, 120x210mm, 38 pp Veer2 Publication 006, June 2021. 'In Mudchute, the difficult structures of language are carefully treated. Infancy, attachment, ambivalence and loss are disassembled and reconfigured amidst gaunt hedgerows, fuel farm repositories, the bouncy castle and the DLR as Betteridge’s lyric voice navigates the edge of fragmentation. Deeply felt and experimental, apprehensive of and devoted to both the unbearable and the comic aspects of experience and memory, these poems perform the difficult bonds of social life even as they resist them: ‘you cannot live in the house that you are / with everyone’.'  (Helen Charman)'The poems assembled in Mudchute survive the disciplinary function of close reading in demanding and often beautiful ways. They are resistant objects, made to be held in the mouth and turned until the edges of the terms are worn. Across the collection, this Winnicottian regress to 'barest idiom' encounters a forensic vocabulary for ‘all the mute sparkplugs of accreted / emotional and physical violence’ that imprint our lived environments, developmental experiences, and the muddied recesses of generational memory. Torqued between the nuclear family, the experiential group, and the enervated provision of state institutions, the daily work of care becomes at once ‘the poverty of administered / atomized / gapping’ and the intimate horizon of a ‘grazed / lip- / stirred in the face of group kindness.’ It is a horizon we have called communism and reparative reading and family abolition. In Betteridge's work, it is the minimum.' (Fred Carter)     This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

Veer2 Publication 034, December 2023 Softcover, 13x26cm, 44 pages £1 from the sale of each copy of this book will be donated to Palestine Action's legal defence funds www.palestineaction.org‘Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.'- Sarah Hayden‘Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.'- James GoodwinThis is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.

with translations by Saskia Vogel Paperback; 130 x 210mm, 248pp; with black-and-white photographs throughout Prototype, London, July 2025In Diary of an Ending, internationally renowned photographer Lina Scheynius expands her artistic vision to prose, offering an unflinching and intimate exploration of heartbreak and self-recovery. Blurring the boundaries between diary and essay, Diary of an Ending explores the break-up of a relationship, combining extracts from Scheynius’s diary – written in Swedish and translated by Saskia Vogel – with reflective essays written in English five years on, exploring ideas about art and photography, sex and passion, the act of diary-making, destructive relationships, motherhood and home. Interspersed with black-and-white photographs, and written with the same unashamed and unfiltered honesty that defines Scheynius’s photography, Diary of an Ending is an intimate hybrid of memoir and autofiction, a meditation on the passage of time and the transformative power of creativity.

A5, 32 pp Veer Publication 101, April 2024  "Astrophil and Stella was published by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum press in 1999. Bonney had been attending the WF workshop for some time and had been impressed by Cobbing’s various energies. His later statement that he 'loved the way he would focus on the text as material, would blow up the words till they fell apart, become simply marks on the page . . .' illuminates this collection. Here the passionate frustrations of Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence are translated into feverishly-worked grids of improvised spattered charcoal markings. Bonney later moved to a more explicitly revolutionary rhetoric; this text—along with Baudelaire in English (Veer 012)— witnesses a strikingly original response to Cobbing’s practice."

Softcover, 335pp Wolke Verlag/ MusikTexte, Cologne, 2025Sven-Åke Johansson defies categorization. Oscillating between Free Music, Swing Jazz, composition, performance, music theater, vocal art, and visual experimentation, his work inhabits a space where genres dissolve and new forms emerge. This book is the most comprehensive collection of Johansson’s compositions, realized and unrealized concepts, alongside his distinctive drawings, sketches, and textual explorations. Just as his music shifts fluidly between acoustic ready-mades, bruitism, solo works, free ensembles, jazz combos, and theatrical experiments, his writing resists fixed identities. Texts explaining compositions double as poetic structures, aphorisms transform into song lyrics, and vocal declamations spill from Instant Composing into the realm of literature. Rather than imposing a historical framework, this book presents a vivid collage of materials, arranged in thematic constellations that reflect Johansson’s own artistic logic. At once an artist’s book and a curated volume, it offers deep insight into his creative practice. A series of interviews further illuminates his singular way of thinking and speaking, providing multiple entry points into the world of one of the most unclassifiable figures in contemporary music and art. Thomas Groetz and Bastian Zimmermann prepared the materials for this volume. Translated by Daniel Ryan Albertson.

Jean-Christophe Thomas (born 1959), trained at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMP) electroacoustic composition class, is research associate at the Ina-GRM with François Delalande (perceptive analysis in music), in particular in charge of studying approaches in composition. His musicological studies concern acousmatic repertoire. Maison ONA, September 2024 bilingual edition (English / French) Softcover, 184 ppJean-Christophe Thomas analyzes François Bayle's complete work in 52 recurring features (book augmented with 151 sound examples to download). Diabolus in musica offers a guided and commented listening experience through François Bayle's catalog. Augmented with 151 sound files (examples), it can be approached in a non-linear way, through the listening or the concept it illustrates. The 52 thematics are characteristic traits or recurrences in the way he creates, conceives or organizes his materials—making his art unique. One of the major contributors to acousmatic music, François Bayle (born 1932 in Tamatave, Madagascar) strives to promote the GRM and its values, as well as pursuing the development of the acousmonium, a multi-speaker apparatus designed for the performative projection of sounds. As far as his music is concerned, he is known for his vast compositional cycles whose style unites articulation and fluidity, color, and energetic creation.François Bayle studied with Stockhausen and Messiaen. He joined the ORTF Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1960. He later led the group when it became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1966. Most of his compositions are electronic, and his first important work, "Espaces inhabitables" (1967) is suggestive of an imaginary world in which nature is distorted in a dream-like fashion. He later utilized natural and synthetic sounds in his compositions, such as the recorded sounds made in a Lebanese cave. He has stated that his purpose as a composer is to enable the listener to feel the motion and vibration of energy in the universe.

Softcover, 128pp DisVoir, 1993 Peter Greenaway (born, 1942 in Newport, Wales, lives and works in Amsterdam) trained as a painter for four years, and started making his own films in 1966. He has continued to make cinema in a great variety of ways, which has also informed his curatorial work and the making of exhibitions and installations in Europe from the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice and the Joan Miro Gallery in Barcelona to the Boijmans van Beuningen Gallery in Rotterdam and the Louvre in Paris. He has made 12 feature films and some 50 short-films and documentaries, been regularly nominated for the Film Festival Competitions of Cannes, Venice and Berlin, published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Glen Branca, Wim Mertens, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik and David Lang. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman's Contract, completed in 1982, received great critical acclaim and established him internationally as an original film maker, a reputation consolidated by the films, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover, The Pillow Book, and The Tulse Luper Suitcases.       The libretto to the opera Rosa, with music by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Imagined as a “novel-opera”, Rosa introduces the reader into a new relationship with the narrative through the visual and auditive qualities of language, creating a kind of mental opera: an opera directed by Peter Greenaway but in which the reader must make his own music. This tale is the first of a series devoted to the violent murders of ten composers during the twentieth century. The first investigation surrounds the death of J-M. de Rosa, a Brazilian who became successful in the 1950's by writing music for Western films. This experience naturally led to the realization of a genuine opera (performed in Amsterdam in 1994).

Duke University press, 2003The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Fugitivity pervaded American slavery, propelling slaveholders into acts to prevent the self-liberation of enslaved people. The paradox of free and slave states simultaneously enabled the freedom of uncaptured runaways and criminalized the act of seeking freedom with sanctions and state laws that controlled slave travel. A central paradigm of this counteraction to freedom was runaway ads. Fugitive slave advertisements illuminated the flight of the absconder. Within the brevity of ad lines, lives of the enslaved were laid bare in descriptions of physical scars, character depictions, labor competences, and speculations about their destinations, which often revealed kinship ties. With no definitive way of knowing the plight of particular runaway slaves, the poems in Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound reimagine and reconstruct narratives through ekphrastic responses to runaway ads and other documented artifacts. Embodying the aesthetics of the poetic forms haiku and tanka, poems in this collection embark on an inquiry into the natural world experienced by the enslaved. This approach extends beyond the traditional Zen-inspired approach to haiku writing. For the enslaved, nature was captivity. Runagate is a cartographic exploration into those who found courage in bondage and who gave their lives to build our country.

Softcover, 256pp Duke University Press, 2001In Atmospheric Noise, Marina Peterson traces entanglements of environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through encounters with airport noise since the 1960s. Exploring spaces shaped by noise around Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), she shows how noise is a way of attuning toward the atmospheric: through noise we learn to listen to the sky and imagine the permeability of bodies and matter, sensing and conceiving that which is diffuse, indefinite, vague, and unformed. In her account, the “atmospheric” encompasses the physicality of the ephemeral, dynamic assemblages of matter as well as a logic of indeterminacy. It is audible as well as visible, heard as much as breathed. Peterson develops a theory of “indefinite urbanism” to refer to marginalized spaces of the city where concrete meets sky, windows resonate with the whine of departing planes, and endangered butterflies live under flight paths. Offering a conceptualization of sound as immanent and non-objectified, she demonstrates ways in which noise is central to how we know, feel, and think atmospherically.

Softcover, 448pp Duke University Press, 2001Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York's downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including "Is It All Over My Face?" and "Go Bang! #5", Russell's pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell's odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. "He lived in a world in which those walls weren't there." Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell's openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.

Volume 43, Number 3 Softcover, 288pp Duke University Press, November 2016The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the “heroic” or high-bourgeois era to late modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s Aktualität—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past.

Edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo paperback, 218pp Editions 1989, May 2025  Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound is the first publication devoted to Tom Wilson (1931–1978). Wilson started Transition Records in 1955, a pioneering label that painted a picture of vibrant jazz scenes from Boston to Memphis. Based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Transition came to prominence with releases featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Donald Byrd, among others, before running out of money in 1958. Wilson then moved to New York and began an extensive career as an “A&R; man” (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, crafting innovative productions at Columbia for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel before signing the Velvet Underground, Nico, and the Mothers of Invention at MGM Records. His work as a record producer is as expansive as it is little known. Through newly commissioned essays from music historians Wolfram Knauer and Richie Unterberger, journalist Ignacio Juliá, and essayist Pacôme Thiellement, this book explores Wilson’s role in documenting avant-garde jazz, producing some of the key folk-rock recordings of the 1960s, and his daring collaborations with influential US rock bands. It also includes a rare full-length interview with Wilson and a selection of unpublished photographs. Everybody’s Head is Open to Sound tells the untold story of a visionary record producer.

Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to “uncuration”: untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.

11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding, 48pp Varamo Press, November 2022, series Gestures  In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’ Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Tunes transcribed from recordings and annotated by Francis Collinson Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Paperback, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893. Volumes 2 and 3 are based on John Lorne Campbell's recordings of songs made between 1938 and 1965 in Barra, South Uist, Eriskay and Benbecula. The translations for all the songs in Volumes 2 and 3 and many of those in Volume 1 are by John Lorne Campbell, who also wrote detailed notes discussing the songs. Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

Made in Kilphedir in South Uist in the year 1983 Compiled & Edited by J.L Campbell  Softcover, 400pp Birlinn Ltd, 2018  The classic three volumes of Hebridean Folksongs, reissued simultaneously for the first time since their original publication (1969, 1977, 1981), contain 135 songs connected with the waulking of homespun tweed cloth in the Hebridean isles. Volume 1 is based on waulking songs collected by Donald MacCormick in South Uist in 1893.  Multiple versions of the same song are compared with each other and with versions drawn from unpublished manuscript sources. Francis Collinson's meticulous musical transcriptions of the songs, and musicological analyses, are invaluable. The songs are from the repertoires of some well-known singers of their generation, including Miss Annie Johnson, her brother Calum and Miss Mary Morrison, all of Barra, Mrs Neil Campbell of South Uist, and Miss Nan MacKinnon of Vatersay.

Softcover, 104pp Granta, 2024Fantasia hazards a listening walk through seashells, telecommunication networks, and cosmic vibrations, to learn something new about how we sound. Alice Coltrane’s experiments in jazz and spiritual community guide these poems that hum and glitch, that leap across space-time, landing in and reflecting the discordant music of life on earth.