Books

Visual guide to the history of modern music and discovery of the stories of the people behind, with archive photographs, rare artwork and newspaper clippings (190 pages, paperback, black & white/colour)

Review: Now the world's foremost blues, rockabilly, soul and rock n roll reissue label, Ace Records has been responsible for unearthing lost classics and neglected pioneers for over three decades and provided some of the finest and most influential records of the post-war era. The first comprehensive history of this fascinating label, Ace Records takes in some of the finest and most enduring modern music, rock n roll, soul, funk, blues, jazz, R&B, garage rock and punk.

To read the Ace Records: Labels Unlimited is to explore the history of modern music and to discover the stories of the people that made it. The book chronicles this fascinating label and profiles a diverse range of artists including BB King, John Fahey, Lee Hazlewood and Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Riff Raff, Johnny & the Self Abusers, Drug Addix and Rocky Sharpe & The Replays. Illustrated with many unseen archive photographs dating back to the 1920s, rare artwork and newspaper clippings and written by established music journalist and author David Stubbs, the Ace Records: Labels Unlimited is a highly entertaining and visually stunning guide to a pioneering alternative to the mainstream UK music scene.

Wax Poetics presents Album Cover Art, featuring 240 classic, obscure and weird record covers.

Review: This is a groovy little guide to all things disco - a Japanese discography that focuses on key club records from a number of different generations. As you'd guess from the title, the core focus here is the seventies - and possibly the early eighties - represented by listings of a variety of albums and other releases. The book sets out a few artist-based sections for folks like Chic, Jellybean, Jocelyn Brown, Earth Wind & Fire, and others, and also features some DJ's Choice sections, and Essential Disc Guides throughout. There's plenty here to wet your appetite, including a full colour section of rarities at the beginning, plus lots of other text and interviews in Japanese.

Behind-the-scenes story of Casablanca Records. From the daring first signing of KISS, through the discovery and superstardom of Donna Summer, the Village People, and funk master George Clinton and his circus of freaks, Parliament Funkadelic.

Review: Sanctuary Publishing present the Basic Sampling by Paul White.

Smpling is the most pervasive of music production techniques and has redefined how songs are written & made. This easy-to-follow guide covers all aspects of the sampling process, including choosing hardware equipment and software programs, setting up a smaple-capable recording system, sourcing and editing samples and integrating them into your music.

In short, the Basic Sampling provides a comprehensive and ready-to-go smapling solution.

Review: This deluxe hard-back book features hundreds of stunning full size record cover designs of Bossa Nova and Brazilian music from the 1960s. The book also comes complete with full accompanying text, essays and interviews on the historical, political and social context of this Brazilian music as well as features on all the important artists and musicians of the era such as Sergio Mendes, Tom Jobim, Jorge Ben, Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso and many more.

Bossa Nova, born in Rio de Janeiro, became a worldwide musical phenomenon, quickly spreading to the USA and the rest of the world. Subsequent musical styles such as the rise of MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) and Tropicalia are also featured in the book. Bossa Nova emerged at the end of the 1950s, the music (and glorious designs) reflecting a new period of great optimism in the country. Brazil had just elected a new president, a new five-year plan for prosperity had been laid down and the architect Oscar Niemeyer had drawn up his plans for the city of Brasilia. By 1964, as Bossa Nova was taking the world by storm, tanks rode through Rio as Brazil came under a violent military dictatorship that would oppress the lives of Brazilians for the next twenty years.

Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks, including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube.

Cover Story Japan, covert art book selected by DJ Jin, Tatsuo Sunaga, Muro, Daisuke Kuroda, Masanori Ikeda, Mitsuru Ogawa etc (in Japanese text)

A comprehensive approach to music production, including knowledge of the tools, equipment and different dance genres. Techniques and practical examples to help you achieve professional results. Softback, Black & White, 522 pages

Review: 'Danehall', this heavyweight deluxe flexi-bound 200-plus book, is a definitive study and essential guide to the 1980s Jamaican dancehall scene, featuring hundreds of amazing, unique, never-before-seen photographs with accompanying text, interviews and biographies. Gregory Isaacs, Sugar Minott, Sister Nancy, Tenor Saw, Sly & Robbie, King Jammy, Eek A Mouse, Yellowman, Frankie Paul - This book is literally a who's who in stunning photos and text of dancehall's phenomenal rise. The book captures a vibrant, globally influential and yet rarely documented culture that has been mixing music, fashion and lifestyle with attitude since its inception. With unprecedented access to the incredibly rich music scene during this period, Beth Lesser's photographs and informed text are a unique way in to a previously hidden culture. Dancehall is at the centre of Jamaican musical and cultural life. From its roots in Kingston in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1980s, it has gone on to conquer the globe, spreading to the USA, UK, Canada, Japan, Europe and beyond. Dancehall is a culture that encompasses music, fashion, drugs, guns, art, community, technology and more. 'Dancehall' is an essential reference book for anyone interested in reggae, as well as a unique photographic and textual source book of all things musical, cultural and political in Jamaica. This jam-packed visual history of dancehall from its roots to its heights is told from that rare vantage point of the true, respected insider. In the early 1980s as Jamaica was in the throes of political and gang violence Beth Lesser ventured where few others dared and this book is a never before seen record of the exciting, vibrant and sometimes dangerous world of dancehall.

All the technical know-how needed as well as advice on how to create your own DJing style and how to make DJing work for you. Softback, Black & White, 398 pages.

Review: The Pixies have had a career unlike any other in alternative rock, disappearing as not-quite-the-next-big-things only to become gods in absentia. Doolittle is their knotty masterpiece, the embodiment of the Pixies abrasive, exuberant, enigmatic pop. Informed by exclusive interviews with the band, Sisario looks at the making of the album and its place in rock history, and studies its continued influence in light of the Pixies triumphant reunion.

Review: An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together portraits and interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that Dummy engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is it that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade - and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

Photographs 1985-1988 by Carl Abrahamsson with an introduction by Richard Kern (130 pages, paparback, black&white)

Review: 130 page book bound in soft cover.

A wild trip through memory lane to an era filled with sleazy films, loud garage rock and industrial music experiments. Between 1985 and 1988, Swedish writer and photographer Carl Abrahamsson published his own fanzine Lollipop. The FanzinEra book contains photos & text from some of the interviews. Included in the book: Iggy Pop, The Cramps, Gun Club, Sonic Youth, Joe Coleman, Lydia Lunch & much more.

Funk 45's, feature book containing reviews and scans of hundreds of funk 45's, also includes charts and in depth interviews with DJ Shadow and Keb Darge. Japanese text edition.

Book introduces 80000 listing of 7"45s, EPs and picture sleeves, with updated pricing, including 3 articles and bonus CD (780 pages, paperback, black&white)

Review: It's been 60 years since the little record with the big hole first arrived on the scene, changing the sound of music forever; and while these black gems have been around for a long time 45s are still red hot in the collecting market.

The Goldminer Price Guide to 45 RPM helps you stay in the loop and on the edge of the 45 RPM market with comprehensive coverage of the biggest little record ever made. In this one book you'll find updated pricing, a checklist format for easy inventorying and:

80,000 listings of 7" 45s, and EPs
Details on artists, labels, and variations
State-of-the-market report featuring an insider's look at hot trends
Three feature articles: 60 Years Of The 45: How It All Began, Why 45s Matter and The World's Rarest 45s
Bonus CD featuring: 20000 additional listings not included in the book, 1000 picture sleeves and label identification guide.

Book contains the collector's guide to post-World War II rhythm & blues records, including over 40000 entries in all record formats and 100 photographs (488 pages, paperback, black&white)

Review: The record collecting community has been clamouring for a book such as this for over 2 decades, and at last, it's here.

The most comprehensive collector's guide to post-World War II rhythm & blues records ever. Focusing on classic R&B from 1946-71, this guide contains over 40000 entries in all record formats: 78s, 45s, extended plays, albums, and 12" singles. More recent releases are also featured. Pricing is included for each listing in up to 3 grades of condition. Over 100 photographs of rarely seen and popular R&B records adorn the pages of this groundbreaking volume.

Groove Presents 45 Cover Museum book, featuring rare 7" picture sleeve images all in a full-color, 7" package that's just the size of a vintage 45

The never-before-told stories of the most successful of the rap elite and, through extensive interviews, the advice flowing from the millionaires themselves.

Book introduces soundtracks and spotlights the work of precursors James Brown and Isaac Hayes, Donna Summer, the women of Labelle and Sylvester (338 pages, hardback, black & white/colour)

Review: Disco thumps back to life in this pulsating exploration of the culture and politics of the glitterball world.

In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the once-innocent question, Do you wanna dance? became divisive, even explosive. What was it about this much-maligned music that made it such hot stuff? In this incisive history, Alice Echols captures the felt experience of the Disco Yearsion dance floors both fabulous and tacky, at the movies, in the streets, and beneath the sheets.

Disco may have presented itself as shallow and disposableithe platforms, polyester, and plastic vibe of it allibut Echols shows that it was inseparable from the emergence of gay macho, a rising black middle class and a growing, if equivocal, openness about female sexuality. The disco scene carved out a haven for gay men who reclaimed their sexuality on dance floors where they had once been surveilled and harassed; it thrust black women onto center stage as some of the genre's most prominent stars; and it paved the way for the opening of Studio 54 and the viral popularity of the shoestring-budget Saturday Night Fever, a movie that challenged traditional notions of masculinity, even for heterosexuals.

As it provides a window onto the cultural milieu of the times, the Hot Stuff never loses sight of the era's defining soundtrack, which propelled popular music into new sonic territory, influencing everything from rap and rock to techno and trance. Throughout, Echols spotlights the work of precursors James Brown and Isaac Hayes, dazzling divas Donna Summer and the women of Labelle and some of disco's lesser known but no less illustrious performers such as Sylvester. After turning the final page of this fascinating account of the music, you thought you hated but can't stop dancing to, you can rest assured that you'll never say disco sucks again.

334 pages, hardback, black & white/colour

Review: The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

In How To Wreck A Nice Beach, from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase, the How To Recognize Speech, music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin's gulags, from the 1939 World's Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.

Dave Tompkins saw the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on the morning before V-E Day, We Must Go Off! And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How To Wreck A Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music's most provocative innovators.

A 76 page color catalog focused on the music of Destroy All Monsters, featuring essays from Byron Coley & Burnanivdeorns iWty. Joseph, an illustrated discography with personla notes compiled by cary Loran

Review: A 76 page color catalog focused on the music of Destroy All Monsters. Features essays from Byron Coley & Burnanivdeorns iWty. Joseph, an illustrated discography with
personal notes compiled by Cary Loran. Flyers, posters, journals, & photographs. Includes a 30 track, 47 minute CD of previously unreleased DAM music. 76pp.
6" x 9". Ltd to 1000

Hard bound lyric book containing the full scope of Sheff's vision for Okkervil River's album I Am Very Far (36 pages, hardback, black & white)

Review: Will Sheff of Okkervil River has long been recognized for his writing: a contributor to McSweeney's, Sheff was nominated for a Grammy for his liner notes for Roky Erickson's 2010 album True Love Cast Out All Evil, The New York Times declared that, Sheff writes like a novelist.

The I Am Very Far: The Lyrics is a hard bound lyric book containing the full scope of Sheff's vision for his latest and most refined album to date, Okkervil River's I Am Very Far. The I Am Very Far: The Lyrics is meant to function as a distinct entrance point into the content of the music. More than a complement to the albums themselves, Sheff's prose weaves tales both subtle and dynamic and enriches the content of his songs. Including the lyrics for Mermaid and other songs recorded during the I Am Very Far sessions, the book is a complete work in its own right.

Limited to only 50 copies for the UK and Eire.

Review: Christopher R Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing even occasionally stomping on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a room like a rock band to create a not quite right tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and sirens.

Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.

Krautrock charts the history of this influential music genre, from its roots in free jazz, psychedelia and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, to the groundbreaking experiments of Faust, Kraftwerk and Can.

14 colour pages A3 size

Book of full color screen shots illustrating the tools, functions and the look of Logic Pro 9, plus companion website with audio samples and loops (432 pages, paperback, black & white/colour)

Review: From initial track laying through to mixing, sound design and mastering, Mark Cousins and Russ Hepworth-Sawyer bring you the Logic Pro 9. By Highlighting the relevant parts of each application they take you through every step of the music creation and production process giving you all the tips, tutorials and tricks that pros use to create perfect recordings.

The book has full color screen shots illustrating the tools, functions and the new look of Logic Pro 9, and the companion website has audio samples and loops.

The Logic Pro 9 covers more than just the software, it will help you make the most out of every recording session and will Illuminate and inspire you creative and sonic endeavors.

Review: This epoch-making indie record of the early '90s effortlessly combines dense swathes of guitar noise and dance music. This turned out to be their last record, guitarist and studio maestro Kevin Shields having set their standards so high it was impossible to surpass them. Indeed such was the perfectionism that went towards this record, studio costs almost bankrupted Alan McGee's Creation Records - only bailed out by the success of Oasis! Shields is now playing with Primal Scream. Includes the classics Loomer, Soon and To Here Knows When.

A visual analogue to Moby's soundworld, of 60 phorographs and album CD (120 pages, hardback, black & white/colour)

Review: Like no other music of its era, Moby's oceanic, bluesy electronica has summed up the millennial turn's rootless melancholia, in massive worldwide hits like Porcelain, Natural Blues and Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? His 1999 album Play sold over ten million copies and converted a whole generation to electronic dance music. With Destroyed, Moby has created a visual analogue to his gorgeous soundworld.

The photographs in this volume record the sizeable portion of his life that is spent shuttling from plane to bus to venue to stage to party to hotel room to oblivion. I hope that somehow in these pictures, Moby writes, I'm able to convey the mundanity of touring, juxtaposed with those moments of the strange and/or sublime. One minute on tour you're by yourself in a soulless airport, the next minute you're flying over the most beautiful landscapes on the planet. One minute on tour you're by yourself in a soulless backstage area, the next minute you're on stage pouring your heart out to 75000 people. Touring is all contrasts and strangeness, and that's what I'm trying to convey in these pictures. The 60 photographs in Moby: Destroyed accordingly veer from crowdedness to isolation, capturing the extremes of a life lived on the road. Also included is Moby's new album of the same name.

Richard Hall, aka Moby, was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1965. Having studied classical guitar, piano and drums as a child, and after stints in various punk bands, he debuted in the early 1990s alongside Orbital, The Prodigy and Aphex Twin, as a representative of a new generation in electronica, emerging from Ambient House and Techno, and foreshadowing Trip Hop. Moby's bestselling 1999 album Play propelled him to worldwide fame; its successor, 18 (2002), earned gold and platinum awards in over 30 countries. Already famous for his veganism, Moby made his authorial debut in March 2010 as a contributor to Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety, a collection of essays on the dangers of eating meat.

Musica Loco Mundo 1, feature book about essential music releases from Brazil. Japanese text edition.

Musica Loco Mundo 2, feature book about all facets of Brazilian music. Japanese text edition.

Traces the story of the NYPD officer who solved the murders of Tupac Shakur and other famous hip-hop artists, describing the establishment of a hip-hop crime special force and the relationship between hip-hop culture, gangs, and drugs.

Review: In contrast with many of their punk peers, Wire were enigmatic and cerebral, always keeping a distance from the crowd. Although Pink Flag appeared before the end of 1977, it was already a meta-commentary on the punk scene and was far more revolutionary musically than the rest of the competition. Few punk bands moved beyond pared-down rock 'n' roll and garage rock, football-terrace sing-alongs or shambolic pub rock and, if we're honest, only a handful of punk records hold up today as anything other than increasingly quaint period pieces. While the majority of their peers flogged one idea to death and paid only lip service to punk's Year Zero credo, Wire took a genuinely radical approach, deconstructing song conventions, exploring new possibilities and consistently reinventing their sound. THIS IS A CHORD. THIS IS ANOTHER. THIS IS A THIRD. NOW FORM A BAND, proclaimed the caption to the famous diagram in a UK fanzine in 1976 and countless punk acts embodied that do-it-yourself spirit. Wire, however, showed more interesting ways of doing it once you'd formed that band and they found more compelling uses for those three mythical chords.

Review: Trent Reznor rode into music mythology on "Pretty Hate Machine", powered by Futurist industrial pistons and covered in ice-spiked synth hooks shined by new wave robots. Then there was his voice. Whispered verses and screamed hooks before Kurt Cobain patented the formula suggested things teens weren't supposed to be thinking, but were. Reznor's brooding prince in PVC persona became the goth archetype that still pervades America over a decade on. Daphne Carr interviews dozens of NIN fans and gets to the heart of Reznor's very personal appeal.

Book exploring the Radiohead's album from philosophical and cultural interpretations of time (160 pages, paperback, black & white)

Review: This is a brilliant exploration of Radiohead's game-changing album, looking at its place in the career of The World's Best Band with ten years of hindsight.

The Radiohead's Kid A never had a chance on paper. Not only did the band have the unenviable task of following up the near-universally lauded OK Computer, but Kid A didn't even have an official single or video. Neither did it help that the band largely abandoned rock-pop conventions for a sound that traversed glitch, free-jazz, modern composition and krautrock.

Rather than simply reinforcing Kid A's canonical status, Marvin Lin situates the album in the temporal, examining it from various philosophical and cultural interpretations of time in order to arrive at its political and social stakes. Why do you care how time is expressed through its aesthetic components like repetition, sampling and hybridization? Where does the album subvert our sense of time with songs like Treefingers? In which ways does it attempt to transcend time and with what implications? Time is perhaps art's biggest enemy, all human creations will be erased eventually, but it's through these various articulations that you are able to uncover some of the most interesting insights about Kid A.

Japanese language edition review of over 5000 Rare Groove records

Review: DJ History presents this unique book, 'Raving '89' which captures like never before the revolutionary atmosphere of the early rave scene. Acid house exploded in London and Manchester in 1988; then in 1989 the whole country 'got on one' and went raving. The second book from DJhistory.com is a collection of amazing photographs from this explosive year. 'Raving '89' takes you through a year of suburban raves, with 200 fantastic images collected together as if a single dramatic night: grimy warehouses, phones the size of bricks, smiles, hugs, lasers and dungarees; lives changed, faces lost in music, casualties, friends and general mayhem; with rogues and wrong'uns lurking in the corners, and more than a few crimes against fashion. As well as Gavin's unique pictures, the book is sprinkled with great stories from him and his brother Neville of the momentous year when British culture changed forever. 'Raving '89' puts you in the heart of the action. If you lived through acid house, Gavin Watson's photos will give you goose-bumps; if you didn't, they're the closest you'll get.

"I'd sit and watch people. You could tell the moment like THAT! Your life's not going to be the same ever again." - Gavin Watson.

Record Shop Map book 2008/9, featuring a detailed guide to the best record and CD shops in Japan and including thorough information on the shops and what types of music they stock.