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TALK_LONDON

What to Let Go?

Delfina Foundation is hosting a double book launch for What to Let Go? and Ten Thousand Suns. Cosmin Costinaş and Inti Guerrero will be in conversation with historian and writer Samir Khatun, and cultural critic and curator, Marian Pastor Roces.

Thursday 21 November, 6.30pm to 8pm (doors open and refreshments from 6.15pm).

Delfina Foundation

London

Further information about the event can be found here

Free access. Bookings essential. Please book your ticket here

 

BOOK LAUNCH—LONDON

Fusion!

A conversation between Alex Coles and Danalogue to celebrate the launch of the book Fusion! From Alice Coltrane to Moor Mother.

Followed by a live performance featuring Danalogue and Robyn’s Rocket, and a DJ set with the Vinyl Bunnies.

From music writer Alex Coles, Fusion! From Alice Coltrane to Moor Mother traces the origins and legacy of blended musical genres by focusing on twelve dynamic collaborations. From Alice Coltrane working with Carlos Santana in 1974 to Moor Mother sharing the mic with Wolf Weston in 2022, the collaborations-cum-chapters reveal how musicians pursue fusion as a process.

With sonic fusion always premised on cultural fusion, each of the collaborations find musicians using the mixing of genres to explore fusions of generations, eras, philosophies, sensibilities, idioms, histories, and even continents. When the musicians hail from contrasting musical genres their collaboration leads to a dynamic tension, typified by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry recording with Lou Reed, Kendrick Lamar cutting tracks with saxophonist Kamasi Washington, Miles Davis playing with electric guitarist John McLaughlin and synth player Danalogue joining Shabaka Hutchings and Max Hallett to form the Comet is Coming.

Fusion! pushes the music of overlooked musicians—such as post-punk singer and saxophone player Lora Logic—to the fore while emphasizing overlooked aspects of the oeuvres of better-known figures such as Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Neneh Cherry and FourTet. To characterize their unique approach to fusion, each of the examples Coles explores are driven by a dynamic sonic principle coined by the musicians themselves.

Tuesday 5 November, 6.30pm til’ late
The Library Lounge at The Standard
London

 

BOOK LAUNCH—EDINBURGH

Stinkhorn

Join author Siôn Parkinson for a special launch of Stinkhorn.

How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen

The stinkhorn mushroom is one of the weirdest wonders of the fungal world, certainly the smelliest. Ever since it was described by a Dutch doctor in a sixteenth-century pamphlet, the stinkhorn has been reported to emit odors resembling damp earth, dung, rotting cheese, decaying flesh, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In Stinkhorn, artist, musician, and writer Siôn Parkinson asks: What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and the droning noise of the flies compelled towards it reveal about how sounds and smells are combined in the imagination?

A heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness memoir, Parkinson uses examples of so-called bad smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind of “smelling sound.” Alongside images and insights from the author’s search for stinkhorn fungi in nature, the book expands upon the philosophy of listening to consider the role of the nose and the “nasal imaginary” in how we make sense of sound.

In this treatise on malodors and how they can transform the conditions for listening, Parkinson considers John Cage’s silent fungal forays, Brian Eno’s compositions with perfumes, the hum note of a vibrating bell, the “eggy” odor of space, and the author’s own hallucinated stench as the result of an epileptic seizure. What links these disparate ideas and sensory experiences can be found in a single encounter with a ripe stinkhorn mushroom.

Monday 4 November, 7.30pm. Doors open 7pm

Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh 

2 Blenheim Place

Edinburgh EH7 5JH

Tickets can be purchased here.

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