Keith Rowe

At a time of increased interest and renewed shock over the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Acres of Skin sheds light on yet another dark episode of American medical history. In this disturbing expose, Allen M. Hornblum tells the story of Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison.

"For someone interested in going 'beyond' with music and with guitar, this essential history will help you set your sights on places no musician has gone." -Henry Kaiser for Guitar Moderne The first and only authorized biography about Keith Rowe, his solo career, and his influence as the guitarist in the cult British improvised music band AMM, a group who counted Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, Sonic Youth, and composer Christian Wolff as admirers. In London, in the fall of 1965, a group of four musicians, dissatisfied with the confines they had encountered in the British jazz scene, came together with a highly thought-out agenda to revolutionize the way music was created:no repertoire, no solos, no regular rhythms, no melodies, no fear of silence, 100% improvised.This rejected rules firmly in place then, as now, among even the most forward-looking of musicians. Keith Rowe was one of the founding membersof this collective. They called themselves AMM and soon added the composer Cornelius Cardew, an associate of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was seeking to escape what he thought were equivalent strictures in the avant-garde classical world. As a quintet, AMM created music unlike anything else being done at the time and, being immersed in the London scene of the mid-60s in which musical boundaries were amorphous, found themselves on the one hand sharing bills with nascent bands like Pink Floyd, The Who, and Cream while on the other working with and alongside Yoko Ono and Christian Wolff. Rowe, a guitarist trained as a painter, adapted to his guitar the lessons he'd learned in the visual arts, placing it flat on a table or the ground as Jackson Pollock had done with his canvases, using it as a sound source to be approached with all manner of implements, opening up a vast new territory of exploration, one which would be enormously influential in rock and contemporary classical, as well as the field of free improvisation. Over 12 years in the making and via exhaustive research and exclusive interviews Brian Olewnick has traced Rowe's life from childhood through the present, with focuses on London's mid-60s experimental music scene, the political unrest of the late 60s, the radical politics of the early 70s, the ongoing saga of AMM through the 90s and the accompanying advance of creative music over that time period, centered around Rowe's participation in those events and his major contributions to the contemporary avant-garde environment. Through the many ups and downs of AMM and beyond, Rowe has become an eminence grise to generations of musicians and is still today continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of sound.

This is Volume 1 of a 2-part genealogy of the Harris family, tracing the lineage of Robert Harris Sr. (1702-1788). This work is part of The Families of Old Harrisburg Series, compiled and published by The Harris Depot Project.

Steve Beresford's polymathic activities have formed a prism for the UK improv scene since the 1970s. He is internationally known as a free improviser on piano, toy piano and electronics, composer for film and TV, and raconteur and Dadaist visionary. His résumé is filled with collaborations with hundreds of musicians and other artists, including such leading improvisers as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and John Zorn, and he has given performances of works by John Cage and Christian Marclay. In this book, Beresford is heard in his own words through first-hand interviews with the author. Beresford provides compelling insight into an extensive range of topics, displaying the broad cultural context in which music is embedded. The volume combines chronological and thematic chapters, with topics covering improvisation and composition in jazz and free music; the connections between art, entertainment and popular culture; the audience for free improvisation; writing music for films; recording improvised music in the studio; and teaching improvisation. It places Beresford in the context of improvised and related musics – jazz, free jazz, free improvisation – in which there is growing interest. The linear narrative is broken up by 'interventions' or short pieces by collaborators and commentators.

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born 6 Feb 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, to John Edward Reagan and Nellie Wilson. He married first Jane Wyman (nee Sarah Jane Fulks), daughter of Richard D. Fulks and Emma Reise, 24 Jan 1940 in Glendale, California. He married Nancy Davis (nee Anne Frances Robbins), daughter of Kenneth Robbins and Edith Luckett, 4 Mar 1952 in North Hollywood, California. Ancestors and relatives lived mainly in Scotland and Illinois.

Shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize 2017. In this first installment of acclaimed music writer David Toop's interdisciplinary and sweeping overview of free improvisation, Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970 introduces the philosophy and practice of improvisation (both musical and otherwise) within the historical context of the post-World War II era. Neither strictly chronological, or exclusively a history, Into the Maelstrom investigates a wide range of improvisational tendencies: from surrealist automatism to stream-of-consciousness in literature and vocalization; from the free music of Percy Grainger to the free improvising groups emerging out of the early 1960s (Group Ongaku, Nuova Consonanza, MEV, AMM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble); and from free jazz to the strands of free improvisation that sought to distance itself from jazz. In exploring the diverse ways in which spontaneity became a core value in the early twentieth century as well as free improvisation's connection to both 1960s rock (The Beatles, Cream, Pink Floyd) and the era of post-Cagean indeterminacy in composition, Toop provides a definitive and all-encompassing exploration of free improvisation up to 1970, ending with the late 1960s international developments of free music from Roscoe Mitchell in Chicago, Peter Brötzmann in Berlin and Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg in Amsterdam.

The first scholarly examination of underground music in the digital age

Syd Barrett and British Psychedelia is an intimate snapshot of the years 1966-7, when the underground's house band, Pink Floyd, were cast blinking into the light of mainstream success. Nurtured in the progressive Cambridge scene and the bohemian hangouts of the Notting Hill Free School and UFO club, Pink Floyd pioneered a distinctly British mix of Victoriana, LSD-inflected mysticism, the avant-garde and pop. And at their heart was the gifted and complex songwriter, singer and guitarist Syd Barrett, who personified the psychedelic revolution in both its exoticism and its tragic impermanence.