Mixmag recently put out an article on the best books on dance music. i’ve read Sicko’s ‘TECHNO REBELS’, which is on the list and i definitely recommend it.
i’ve had ‘DISCOGRAPHIES: DANCE, MUSIC, CULTURE AND THE POLITICS OF SOUND’ on my list for a while.
it got me thinking about music books in general. i recently read ‘SOUND SYSTEM: THE POLITICAL POWER OF MUSIC’ by Dave Randall (Faithless band member), which again i would 100% recommend.
does anyone know of any other music books worth reading?
i quite enjoyed Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds. some chapters are better than others but overall its worth a read !
equally Retromania by Simon Reynolds was ace and still very timely
there’s some waffle in there but for me that was part of the pleasure, all these little nuggets of knowledge and anecdotes
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, by Will Hermes.
Covers '73 to '77 and punk, hip-hop, salsa, loft jazz, and more. Really well done. Truly captures my hometown at that time.
@nospace indeed. it’s pure, illicit fun. some of those stories are permanently etched into my memory and it’s been at least 15 years since I read it.
There was a thread on this a while back, but have actually been reading like four books at once lately that I was just looking for the other thread to suggest.
@deeseejay Discographies is so dope…very late 90s in that it’s heavily reliant on a Derridean reading of popular music (how we’ve traditionally give preference to the voice over the body) but it’s informed a lot of my writing as of late. It also got me to step back from all my nuum research and dig deeper into sound-system history.
I recommended this in the other thread but honestly can’t recommend it enough: Lloyd Bradley’s Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital. Imho, it’s something that should be sold alongside Energy Flash as it just gives one wayyyy more context with which to understand the cultural infrastructures and rituals that were in place to facilitate rave, jungle, UKG, grime, and dubstep (and all subsequent sound-system music).
I also mentioned this before, but seriously, Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun is not an easy read, but I would put it up there with any ‘essential’ book on music. He really writes more poetically than academically…though I’m just now re-reading it (on like chapter 3) and it’s making so much more sense to me than when I read it ten years ago.
The new edition has an intro by Steve Goodman (Kode9), who is the reason I started re-reading it–and why the research I thought was near an end got cracked wide open. Finally started reading Sonic Warfare and while it’s heavily academic, it’s also DOPE AS FUUUUCCCCCCK. __
It also got me reading Julien Henrique’s Sonic Bodies, which is essentially a sonic ontology…it’s heady but oh-so-dope. Don’t believe me? Here’s the intro that lays out his project and a book review from Dancecult (which you really should read as well for more academic papers on dance music…some of them make me want to pull out my eyes with a fork, but when they’re dank, they’re suuuuuuper dank.
Also in that issue on the dub diaspora is a review of the book that shares its title, Paul Sullivan’s Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora and while I’ve only read the intro so far, it’s super promising.
Continuing this train of thought, Michael Veal’s Dub seems to be hella well-revered as one of the most probing studies of the genre and I have to agree with what I’ve read.
Oh, and lastly, I wasn’t familiar with Fred Moten but he’s the shit and his book In The Breaks is an interesting one on black music in America (amongst other things).
So yeah, so many other books to recommend, but this is what I’ve been jamming on…hope you dig!
Oh, and going off of @mumbertoes’ suggestion, make sure you check out another of Tim Lawrence’s book, Hold On To Your Dreams which is an Arthur Russell bio. Read it 5+ years ago after my best friend died (it’s what he had just finished) and I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard reading a book’s conclusion.
I haven’t read this in 10 years as well, but was reminded of Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past while reading Sonic Warfare the other night and it’s a solid read on ‘the cultural origins of sound reproduction.’ Remember learning too many interesting factoids from this one.
OK, shutting up now;)
A great read, especially outlining the links between social displacement & creativity
both of Bill Brewsters books should be compulsary reading also
wicked, thank you @kavanator . adding to my ever-growing list!
also, massive thanks and big ups to @zurkonic for all of those amazing recommendations. so much to dig into.
peace!
Goddamnit @_surl! Guess I have to read this now too…
(Seriously, thanks for recommending this. Remembered it coming out but have much more of a reason to read it now and it looks like it will be super helpful.)
And yes @deeseejay, SO MUCH TO READ/LISTEN/SEE/EXPERIENCE. But would rather have a deluge of riches than an IV drip of mediocrity:) Thanks for getting this thread back up and going (or creating a V. 2.0;)
“Our Band Could Be Your Life” by Michael Azerrad - really lovingly compiled oral histories of various 80s-90s DIY-ish bands, namely:
black flag, minutemen, mission of burma, minor threat, husker du, the replacements, sonic youth, butthole surfers, big black, dinosaur jr, fugazi, mudhoney, beat happening
M. Nyman - experimental music: cage and beyond
very good description of cage, reich, glass and others experimental music creators. really nice written, it has many quotations and its consistent
books that i havent read yet:
J. Cage - Silence: lectures and writing
H. Helmholtz - on the sensations of tone
H. Cowell - New musical resources
D. Byrne - How music works
C. Cox, D. Warner - Audio culture
G. Born - Rationalizing culture
Feeding Back: Conversations with Alternative Guitarists from Proto-Punk to Post-Rock, by David Todd, has some really good interviews.
Nice to hear stuff straight from the musicians.
