Shrink (W)rap (Book With CD)

Description

Book with CD. The accompanying CD features 126 short pieces by artists including Gavin Bryars, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, John Paul Jones, Michael Nyman, The Residents, John Oswald and Billy Bragg. SHRINK (W)RAP - a contextualised history of very short tracks, from the birth of the LP to the present day. 160pp, 23 x 17 cm, coffee table-style, lavishly illustrated with full-length CD Early recordings demanded brevity: after two minutes a cylinder was full, so pop songs evolved to be short. But the idea of really short recordings (a minute, less; seconds; fractions of a second) paradoxically emerged only when the arrival of the 33-rpm LP gave musicians the possibility to work with longer timespans. This book analyses the many roles that miniature tracks have played across a wide variety of genres, documents their formalisation through a strange obsession with the arbitrary duration of sixty seconds, and tracks their inevitable descent into madness - situating these developments broadly in the context of precedent musical forms, the contingent miniaturisations of memory space, and both physical and virtual media. Discursive but brisk, wryly opinionated and gently analytical and with a CD of 67 highly diverse but amazingly complete very short tracks created by artists famous, unfamous and infamous. Shrink (W)rap is the first book to address this extremely fringe, but fascinating, topic; a compendium of strange facts, obscurities and eye-opening research intermixed with alongside wider cultural and aesthetic reflections. CHRIS CUTLER. After 10 years in Henry Cow he founded or co-founded Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, p53, The Bad Boys and The Science Group; was a permanent member of The Peter Blegvad Trio & Pere Ubu; dallied with The Residents, Gong & Faust; worked with dance, film, hoerspiel, radio, theatre and symphony orchestras; toured the world with his electrified kit and was a regular on the international improvising communit. He founded and runs the independent label ReR Megacorp; edited the ReR Quarterly; authored File Under Popular, Not as we Choose and numerous academic papers; was on faculty at the Museum School in Boston; lectures irregularly on music related topics and currently produces the podcast lecture series Probes for the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona. LUCA CHINO FERRARI is an Italian writer and poet. He is the author of several books on rock and jazz musicians such as Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, The Third Ear Band, Tim Buckley and Robyn Hitchcock. His latest books include the biography of British jazz pianist Mike Taylor, Out of Nowhere (Gonzo Multimedia, 2015), the collection of materials on the Third Ear Band, Glen Sweeney's Book of Alchemies (November Books, 2022), and the collection of writings on Syd Barrett, Scritto sui Rovi (Editrice Zona, 2024). With Francesco Paolo Paladino and Dorothy Moskowitz, he released the CD Under An Endless Sky (Tompkins Square Records, 2023) for which he wrote all the lyrics. dopachino@tiscali.it