Structure and synthesis the anatomy of practice

"In this extensive anthology, Mark Fell, a pioneering artist known for his sound installations and his musical work solo and as part of SND and Sensate Focus, assembles a collection of diverse materials charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music. An amalgam of workbook and manifesto, featuring a collection of interleaved statements, diagrammatic scores, and instructional texts, Structure and Synthesis is a direct engagement with Fell's original thinking and his continual provocations in regard to "experimental" music. Alongside reflections on theory and practice, the volume includes exercises for dismantling musical expertise, habits, and intuitions, documenting Fell's explorations of the peripheries of rhythm, shape, and time in perception and performance. Long-term collaborator designer Joe Gilmore provides a striking graphic context for Fell's evolving thinking and the methods and structures he has developed through his solo and collaborative work."--MIT Press

In and On Tools ; Tools ; Thought, Technology, Practice ; Excerpts From a Report to Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council ; Aesthetics as Critical Action ; Reverse Practice as Technologically Constituted Critical Aformalism in Fowler and Youngs’ ‘Strategies’ ; Take Care of Freedom/Technology and Truth/Aesthetics Will Take Care of Itself ; Statement for a Publication ; Sound — Thinking in Reverse ; Near the Sky: Music at/as/for/in/through/and the Crossfade ; On/Off Sequences ; Flat-Earth Creativity and the Borification of Creative Practice as an Ideological ; Construct ; DAWs of Perception ; Notes for Lectures on the History of Independent Electronic Music ; Collateral Damage ; How do Climbing Frames Malfunction? ; Structural Solutions to the Question of Being ; Pointless Spatial Sound: Excerpts from a Reply To Johannes Goebel, EMPAC ; Additions, in Reply to Johannes ; Negative Education ; Score for a Kaleidoscopic Now-Notes from a Proposal ; Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery as Diagram of Nonlinear Subjectivity ; Dislocational Practice, Group Projéct, HFG 2020 Instructions ; Or/Are ; Transfer of Agency: Interview with Nakul Krisnamurthy ; Time Diagram For The Nondimensional Listener: Peripheral Contouring, Paralleling, Contextual-Unfolding and Performance-as-Procedure ; ‘Ordinary Linear Organisational Frame works and Cartesian Subjectivity are Products of One Another’— Discuss ; INTRA: Time and the Phenomenology of Basket Weaving ; Unusual Electronic Music Typically Without Academic Affiliation: A Definition ; Bullet Points on Aesthetics ; Technology, Disagreement, and Truth: A Tragedy at Reighton Gap ; Everything is True, Nothing is Permitted: Notes on Social Media ; All I Wanna Do (Remix) ; Adjacent Music #k1. A Composition: Durational Performance/Installation System ; Another Kind Of Awareness: On Milford Graves’s Statement in the Film Full Mantis ; Sound in the Absence of Language ; ‘The Musical Score is the Worst Thing in the History of

Music’— Mark Fell and Rian Treanor on Notation ; One-Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning ; Institutional Entanglements ; Why? What? How? What If? In Dialogue with Andrew McKenzie ; Environment and Synthesis, Modes of Listening ; Nothing Short of a Total Why ; All Music is Ritual Music