A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.

In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.

Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.

Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop’s essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

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In her long poem “The Text”, Nora Amin uses a surrealistic form of poetic writing to deconstruct gender roles, sexual trauma and patriarchal authority, while composing a humane story of creation.

This book is the result of a collaboration between Amin, the visual artist Katharina Marszewski, and the graphic design studio Eps51. Marszewski responded to “The Text” by creating cryptic drawings that reveal the movements central to Amin’s choreographic poetry. Bilingual script and artwork interpenetrate in Eps51’s unique design, which allows readers to determine the reading direction of the book, depending on their preferred language (Arabic / English).

“The Text” is accompanied by an afterword by Christian Junge, scholar of Arabic literature.

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Earth Café is an interactive culinary flipbook for all ages. The book invites the reader to scramble and rearrange dishes from around the world, revealing an expansive* glossary of invented culinary creations. It offers a new knowledge of food: its locality, substances, accidents and boundaries are suddenly as fluid as the imagination itself.

The 35 dishes that make up the book– chimichurri, hamburger, chorizo, spumoni, etc.– are sourced from around the world and defined (using words and images) in very simple terms. Most typically, an adjective or flavor + a predominant ingredient + a category of dish.

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Frequent readers of zweikommasieben will know that the creative processes we highlight in our magazine are an eclectic gathering of influences that result in varied creative practices. This plurality informs a question we have repeatedly asked ourselves: what might be the common denominator connecting all the dots? For this issue, we would like to make the case for the discursive potential of personal experiences.

Once the personal is taken seriously, anecdotes provide major insights into an artist’s practice. A portrait on producer Malibu taps into memories of popular culture and traces musical experiences from her childhood to highlight the dedication she brings towards composing melodies and using samples. In their essay, the duo Space Afrika assembles recollections of their daily lives in north-west England to frame their artistic output over the years.

Highlighting subjective perspectives allows for the differentiation of what might appear similar at first. Both the collaboration of Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter featured in “Soundtexte” and the interview with Tygapaw refer to the use of poetry. The former condense language to its most basic units and present them as rhythmic building blocks for DJs. Taking a different approach, Tygapaw asked a poet to be the narrator of their album, expanding the tracks by embedding an additional layer of meaning.

zweikommasieben #23 also wishes to make visible the full range of its contributors. Annotations in the margins gesture towards the intuitive processes characteristic of this magazine: from an initial interest in an artist and their work, to the experience of exploring it in the context of a conversation, and to collaboratively reflect on text and photography with various people.

Full content:
-interviews with Bass Clef, Crystalmess, Flora Yin-Wong, Grand River, Ikonika, Jabu & Daniela Dyson, Meemo Comma, and Tygapaw
-portrait on Malibu
-essay by Space Afrika
-Contributes by Jessika Khazrik and Sara Berts
-columns: Soundtexte (poetry), “Art Review” (art review), and We are Time (photography)

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