MERCHANDISE

Comprising more than 5,000 works of contemporary art dating from the 1960s to the present, the collection of the MUSEUMMMK für Moderne Kunst is one of the most important of its kind in the world. With canonical works by Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Lothar Baumgarten, Thomas Bayrle, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Miriam Cahn, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, Roy Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Franz Erhard Walther and Andy Warhol, the holdings constitute an important source for art-historical research.

The retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin—produced in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris—is accompanied by this comprehensive catalogue, which sheds light on the manifold facets of Brancusi’s oeuvre: it features major works from international collections as well as views of his studio. Photographs of the artist from his personal collection round out the extensive plate section. With an introduction by Ariane Coulondre; and other essays by Nina Schallenberg on Brancusi’s staging of his works, and Maike Steinkamp on the reception of his art in Europe

Reprinted on the occasion of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, this book presents the international Fluxus legacy through sound. With works by John Cage, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and others, it explores the interest of Fluxus artists in music and sound through performance, scores, records, and objects from the Luigi Bonotto Collection. Their public events challenged conventional form and content in music, and the approach to music scores was equally radical. Instead of traditional sheet music, they devised notational systems based on graphics, poetry, and the visual arts.

The first English-language collection of Takuma Nakahira’s influential writings on photography.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira’s essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography’s relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira’s essays “both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world.”

by Takuma Nakahira

300 pages, 175 x 129mm paperback w/ litho printed cover & french flaps. We mint our short run book publishing imprint, The End books, with a collection of flyers for soundsystem dances, clashes and blues parties from across the UK between the early 1970s and mid 1990s. Comes complete with introduction by David Katz (People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae) and outroduction by Kevin Le Gendre (Don't Stop the Carnival: Black British Music, Children of the Ghetto: Black Music in Britain). Colour scans sit alongside scuzzy photocopies amassed over several years with the assistance of multiple archivists, the material presented in A Night to Remember is not just valuable musical history, but the story of a community and a culture that would revolutionise sound in the UK. "The flyers collected in A Night To Remember speak to the burgeoning sound system underground that flourished in Britain in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. There are held events on hallowed ground as well as lesser-known sets. Flyers for house parties remind that shebeens remained an important feature of social life in black communities and the many sound clash and cup clash events emphasise the rivalry and camaraderie that has always been at the heart of the culture, as friends go head-to-head with their dub plates, vying for that definitive crown. Dances featuring guest appearances by name-brand artists such as Sugar Minott, Lone Ranger, Barrington Levy and Admiral Bailey, as well as sound systems such as Jack Ruby, King Jammies, Ray Symbolic, Arrows, Black Scorpio and Metro Media remind how closely the local sound systems remained to their Jamaican roots, even as sounds such as Saxon, Unity, Java and Diamonds carved out a distinctly British niche. All hail the enduring sound systems of Britain – long may they reign!" — David Katz Special shouts out to Ruff House & Jeremy Collingwood.

The second outing for our short run book publishing imprint, The End books, takes the form of a reprint of Spanish Cante Jondo and Its Origin in Sindhi Music, originally published in Spanish in 1955 under the name Cante Jondo: Su Origen y Evolución and later in this English translation. Aziz Balouch presents his theory on the roots of flamenco's 'deep song' in modern-day Pakistan, a cultural journey that mimics the routes of his own life, having been brought up among the Islamic mysticism and devotional songs of Sindh before travelling to Gibraltar in the early 1930s and becoming transfixed with the cante jondo across the border in southern Spain. Positing this concept through personal accounts rather than solid theoretical backing, this text provides a valuable account of an extraordinary existence that crossed remarkable geographical, musical, and spiritual lines. Issued here with a new introduction from anthropologist of sound, the senses and Islam, Stefan Williamson Fa. "It would be easy to place Balouch on the fringes, as an eccentric footnote in flamenco history. But that misses the shape of his life and work. He was a figure who moved intuitively across boundaries that our present categories of nation, genre, discipline tend to fix in place. His work predates the founding of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, the global circuits of world music, and the marketplace logic of fusion projects by decades. He was not an ethnographer or a proto–world musician, but someone for whom the deep song of Andalusia and the devotional song of the subcontinent resonated along the same fault lines of feeling, and who spent his life trying to trace them. This book is one of the few surviving traces of that attempt. To read it now is to encounter a perspective that resists tidy narratives of influence or origin, despite its title and what he claims to do. It stands instead as evidence of an idiosyncratic musical imagination, one that relied less on proof than on listening, and on the belief that certain echoes carry farther than history can easily explain." — Stefan Williamson Fa

Takuma Nakahira, one of the most legendary photographers of post-war Japan and a life-long rival of Daido Moriyama. Overflow is the first photobook in which his installation work comes alive in entirety and detail since its unveiling in 1974.

Takuma Nakahira’s series ‘Overflow’ was originally presented as an installation during the 1974 exhibition ’Fifteen Photographers Today’ (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). The work consisted of 48 color photographs that were arranged on a wall 6 meters wide and 1.6 meters high. The photobook Overflow is the first chance to view Nakahira’s astonishing series outside the context of an exhibition.

The photographs show elements of a city — eery rifts in a space overflowing with objects, commodities and information — that Nakahira encountered and captured in his everyday life, from ivy creeping across walls and manhole covers in the streets to the tire of a large truck, from a pale-bellied shark floating in the transparent darkness behind the glass of an aquarium to close-up shots of a subway station.

The photobook’s layout strictly mimics each photo’s position in the installation piece in order to replicate the series’ original experience within the confines of a book. Additionally, Princeton University assistant professor Franz K. Prichard contributes an extensive essay in which he compares the Overflow series with Nakahira’s vision of an ‘illustrated dictionary’ (as outlined in Nakahira’s 1973 essay ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?’), thereby offering a deep exploration of Takuma Nakahira, who integrated praxis and theory in his work like no one else.

‘Overflow compels us as viewers to see the interplay of a seemingly random distribution of fragments, surfaces and residues. And in so doing, we are made to sense the undifferentiated enumeration of parts of an incomplete whole. This is, if you recall, the definition of the “illustrated dictionary” form that Nakahira provided in the essay “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?”’

— from Franz K. Prichard’s essay

Book Size 364 x 257 mm

Pages 64 pages

Binding Softcover

Publication Date 2018

Language English and Japanese

Hardback cover. 250 pages, richly illustrated. Aphex Twin: A Disco Pogo Tribute compiles interviews, essays and features from various music journalists, all exploring Richard D. James' decades-long career. Like Daft Punk, the people behind Disco Pogo have had a long-standing relationship with Richard D. James for over 30 years via their 90s magazine Jockey Slut. The book is edited by Disco Pogo editor Jim Butler and features interviews, essays and features from the best music journalists working today. The book features Images from across James' career, and an iconic cover portrait of Aphex by seminal photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, plus a huge amount of great photography of Richard since the very beginning from some of the best music photographers in the world.

Thanks also to the designer of Aphex's logo Paul Nicholson who has opened up his archives to us and also the assistance and support from the label homes of Aphex - Warp, R&S and Rephlex. Thanks also to the people behind Aphex fan website Lanner Chronicle. The book is hardback, 250 plus pages and is beautifully designed and printed of course.

Revised and expanded second edition of Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent's comprehensive reference Omniverse Sun Ra, originally published in 1994. Full-color 304-page hardcover book. French fold cover with metallic silver foil blocking on cyan faimei cloth. 290mm x 245mm portrait. Omniverse Sun Ra features many previously unpublished photographs of Sun Ra and His Arkestra in New York in 1966 and Germany in 1979 by Val Wilmer, and Hartmut Geerken's previously unpublished photographs from Heliopolis in Cairo, Egypt, in 1971, in addition to an updated comprehensive pictorial and annotated discography by Chris Trent, including chronological discography and alphabetical record title, composition, personnel, and record label indexes, as well as indexes of shellac 78RPM records, 45 RPM singles, jackets, and labels. Also includes essays and photo documents by Hartmut Geerken, Chris Trent, Amiri Baraka, Robert L. Campbell, Chris Cutler, Gabi Geist, Sigrid Hauff, Karl Heinz Kessler, Robert Lax, and Salah Ragab.

Paperback. 150 pages. "One of the towering figures of 20th-century art holds forth on his controversial life and career in a previously unpublished set of interviews. Over six sessions between September 1951 and November 1952, Marcel Duchamp sat down with collectors and gallerists Harriet and Sidney Janis for a wide-ranging conversation about his inspirations and working processes, and his many opinions on the workings of the modern art world and its histories. The Janises, owners of the influential Sidney Janis Gallery, were ardent supporters of modern art and close friends with Duchamp. Harriet, an accomplished author, led the interviews with an eye toward writing a monograph on Duchamp, though this was never realized. Now, this previously unknown chronicle is available for the first time through the efforts of Carroll Janis, Sidney and Harriet's son. Under Harriet's expert guidance, Duchamp holds forth on his artistic philosophies, his career, his friends, his rivals and his lifelong obsession with chess. He provides an inside look at some of his most famous works, from his controversial 'Readymades' to 'The Large Glass.' Contextualized with illustrations, annotations and an introduction by Carroll Janis, this publication is a rich treasure trove of information on one of the 20th century's most controversial, groundbreaking and larger-than-life artists. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) dismantled the boundaries of what constitutes a work of art. Although he began his career as a painter, Duchamp was also a curator, conservator, art advisor, professional chess player, writer, inventor and celebrity. Following the completion of his conceptual masterpiece, 'The Large Glass' (1915-23), he abandoned traditional artmaking altogether. Today he is best known for his 'Readymades' -- ordinary objects such as a urinal or bicycle wheel, elevated to works of art -- which challenged traditional aesthetics and redefined authorship."

The tenth and final anthology from Blank Forms explores the early electronic work of French composer Éliane Radigue, whose radical approach to feedback, analog synthesis, and composition on tape has long evaded historical and technical interpretation. Combining key texts, newly translated primary documents, interviews, and commissioned essays, this compendium interrogates the composer’s idiosyncratic compositional practice, which both embraces and confounds the iterative nature of magnetic tape, the subtleties of amplification, and the very experience of listening.

Among these entries is an in-depth overview by cellist Charles Curtis, a close collaborator of Radigue’s, examining the composer’s earliest experiments with feedback techniques and analog synthesis, her eventual shift to composing for unamplified instruments and live performers, and her unique aesthetic configurations of time and presence. A number of detailed conversations between the composer and researchers Georges Haessig, Patrick de Haas, Ian Nagoski, and Bernard Girard provide crucial insights into her working methods at different points throughout her career. Religious studies scholar Dagmar Schwerk reflects upon Radigue’s profound synthesizer work Trilogie de la Mort (1988–93) in the context of Tibetan Buddhist thought and its history, while texts by musicians Daniel Silliman and Madison Greenstone examine, in notably different ways, the technical characteristics of Radigue’s sound practice. Sketches for unrealized work, contemporary reviews, concert programs, and other ephemera mapping the performance history of Radigue’s early work are presented together for the first time. The anthology concludes with a roundtable discussion between Curtis, Greenstone, and Anthony Vine, untangling the knot of paradoxes at the center of Radigue’s artistic practice to trace the thread of her continued “ethos of resistance.”

Trance has been the flagship for electronic music across the globe during the nineties and early zeroes. The sound’s trademark optimistic and euphoric aspects has brought some of the most compelling musical pieces of its time, and undoubtedly had a significant influence on future electronic music to come. Yet, its historical significance has been highly overlooked. Hypnotised is the first encyclopedia to cover the global trance movement during its most prolific years. The 332-page book spans a near-complete discography of supposedly essential albums, labels and releases, alongside exclusive photos and in-depth interviews with influential artists and label owners.

'Soundwriters: The Incomplete Guide to Indonesian Diaspora Music (1969–1989)' is a book and catalogue devoted to artists whose work shaped the cultural life of postcolonial Netherlands, yet rarely entered official archives; cataloguing 62 rare and overlooked releases by Indonesian diaspora artists recorded in the Netherlands and Suriname, from soul and funk to reggae and pop. "Written by Michiel Sekan with additional research by Harry “Munir” Septiandry, the book combines historical analysis with personal reflection. Essays move between migration histories, colonial legacies, family memory, and music culture. At its core sits a catalogue of sixty two releases that document the range of sounds created by Indo-European, Moluccan, Papuan, Javanese Surinamese, Peranakan, and broader Indonesian diaspora communities. Soul, funk, pop, reggae, rock, and protest songs appear side by side. Together they form an aural record of resistance, adaptation, and creativity across continents. Printed in Jakarta and published by Jiwa Jiwa in three languages, Dutch, English, and Indonesian, Soundwriters positions music as both archive and testimony. It asks how sound preserves stories when written records fall short, and how listening can reconnect personal memory with shared history. The project extends beyond the page through exhibitions, listening rooms, documentaries, and public programs in the Netherlands and Indonesia. Michiel Sekan is an Amsterdam based DJ, curator, and multidisciplinary artist. Through his platform Jiwa Jiwa he researches and presents music from the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora across radio, exhibitions, publishing, and club culture. His work links record collecting with archival study and personal history. Soundwriters is his first book."

256 pp., thread-sewn softcover 1 color offset, size: 135 x 200 cm First edition, first printing: 2500 Language(s): French / English (all content appears in both language) — Authors: François J. Bonnet, John Giorno, David Grubbs, Yannick Guédon, Lee Gamble, Sarah Hennies, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Stine Janvin, Joan La Barbara, Youmna Saba, Akira Sakata, Pierre Schaeffer, Peter Szendy, Ghédalia Tazartès

phatmedia presents 'UK Rave Flyers 1988–1989' - including over 800 flyers from iconic events like Shoom, Hedonism, Future, Spectrum, Land Of Oz, Apocalypse Now, Hypnosis, Sunrise, RIP, Coozz, Trip, Sin, Genesis, Rage, Wetworld, Rave At The Cave, Boilerhouse, Trip City, the Hacienda and many more one-off / smaller promotions.

"phatmedia presents UK Rave Flyers 1988–1989 is a deluxe book showcasing original flyers from the breakthrough years of UK acid house. Sourced from the phatmedia archive and beyond, it captures the raw energy of a scene that exploded from underground parties into a nationwide movement.

Featuring high-quality reproductions of flyers promoting warehouse raves, club nights and early promoters, the book highlights the DIY creativity and bold visual style that defined the era. It’s a visual journey through the scene’s formative years, with the narrative led by the flyers themselves, interspersed with quotes from DJs, designers, promoters and ravers - including Dave Little, Andy Boilerhouse, Pez, Steve Reid (Shoom), Ellis Dee, Chalk E White, Nicky Holloway, Mr C, Ratpack & many more - plus, photos from clubs of the era taken by Dave Swindells, Kevin Cummins, Peter J Walsh and Gavin Watson.. This commentary offers cultural context, making this an essential document of one of the most radical and influential moments in British youth culture.

“We would be lost without Dave’s incredible documentation of flyer history. If we didn’t have his absolute precision in sharing dates within the timeline. So much of the exact history would be lost. phatmedia is an asset to the entire rave scene and history.” - Billy Daniel Bunter

“Rave flyers capture an essential piece of cultural history. More than just advertisements, they reflect the creative energy of the early rave scene and serve as a window into the underground music culture of the time. Each flyer tells a story about the events, people, and communities that helped shape the movement.” - Eddie Richards

“This book is more than just a collection of flyers; it’s a time machine. It’s a tribute to the birth of a culture that shook the world. We built something from nothing. Every flyer, every illegal rave, every risk we took, it created a movement that would become a multi-million pound industry.” - DJ Phantasy"

Hardcover. 12.6" L x 9.8" W (2.75 lbs). 192 pages. "Edited with text by Erin Christovale. Foreword by Ann Philbin. Text by Franya J. Berkman. Interviews by Ashley Kahn, Erin Christovale. Rashid Johnson, Cauleen Smith and others pay tribute to a truly extraordinary figure in 20th-century American jazz. This volume unpacks the cultural legacy of musician, spiritual leader, wife and mother Alice Coltrane. Accompanying the eponymous exhibition at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum, the book takes its title from Coltrane's 1977 autobiography and devotional text, Monument Eternal, in which she reflected on her newfound spiritual beliefs and the path to healing and self-discovery. Coltrane was 'ahead of her time,' as her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, says: she was 'one of the first people to move outside the mainstream, and certainly one of the first female, Black, American jazz musicians to record her own music in her own studio, and to release music on her own terms.' Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal explores themes including spiritual transcendence, sonic innovation and architectural intimacy. The project juxtaposes works from 19 contemporary American artists with pieces of ephemera from Coltrane's archive -- including handwritten sheet music, unreleased audio recordings and rarely seen footage -- to honor her cultural output and practice. Alice Coltrane was born in Detroit in 1937 and took up music at an early age, beginning piano lessons at seven years old. In 1967 her husband, saxophonist John Coltrane, gifted her a harp, on which she went on to record seminal albums including Journey in Satchidananda and A Monastic Trio, making her one of the very few harpists in the history of jazz. Coltrane moved to Southern California in 1972 and founded the Sai Anantam ashram. She lived and worked in Los Angeles, where she died in 2007 at age 69. This book was published in conjunction with Hammer Museum."

228 pp., thread-sewn softcover
1 color offset, size: 135 x 200 cm
First edition, third printing: 1000
Language(s): French / English

—

Authors: Félicia Atkinson, François Bayle, François J. Bonnet, Drew Daniel, Brunhild Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Eliane Radigue, Régis Renouard Larivière, Espen Sommer Eide, Daniel Teruggi, Chris Watson.

To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again—with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals.
Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, remaining always identical, it is actualised in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. Such is the multitude of resonances evoked in the pages below: a multitude of occurrences, events, sensations, and feelings that intertwine and welcome one other. Everyone may have their own history, everyone may resonate in their own way, and yet we must all, in order to experience resonance at a given moment, be ready to welcome it. The welcoming of what is other, whether an abstract outside or on the contrary an incarnate otherness ready to resonate in turn, is a condition of resonance. This idea of the welcome is found throughout the texts that follow, opening up the human dimension of resonance, a dimension essential to all creativity and to any exchange, any community of mind. Which means that resonance here is also understood as being, already, an act of paying attention, i.e. a listening, an exchange.
Addressing one or other of the forms that this idea of resonating can take on (extending—evoking—reverberating—revealing—transmitting), each of the contributions brought together in this volume reveals to us a personal aspect, a fragment of the enthralling territory of sonic and musical experimentation, a territory upon which resonance may unfold.
The book has been designed as a prism and as a manual. May it in turn find a unique and profound resonance in each and every reader. 
— The Editors

"With this I would like to make this the final chapter of my prayer (Lautreamont / Takashi Mizutani)"
Les Rallizes Denudes - Takashi Mizutani, and his words.
Photographs by original member Nakamura Nakamura and "Les Rallizes Denudes Poems" in three languages: Japanese, English, and French. Editorial commentary by philosopher Yoshihiko Ichida. Contribution by Soji Suzuki.
Flowers of Ibiscus.
Recorded in 1969 / Includes a CD with 20:19 of never-before-released sound recordings.

124 pp. tweed embossed softcover otabind binding Four colors offset on tracing, coated and uncoated papers Format: 210 x 280 mm Print run: 500 copies Language: English & French June 2023 Published by Shelter Press All content by Félicia Atkinson Design by Bartolomé Sanson Translation by Rachel Valinsky

This time focusing on “Ghosts In The Machine”, or rather - the applications of AI and Machine Learning in the domain of music making, the foreward sets the tone “…the artificial, the artefact, is always the extra-human brainchild of a human, all too human dream.” Inside, Steve Goodman reflects on his “IT” sound installation about the myth of Golem, Bill Orcutt explores repetition and automatism in music, Florian Hecker and Robin Mackay investigate their electroacoustic pieces ‘FAVN' and ‘Inspection (Maida Vale Project)’, Lucy Railton in conversation with Peter Zinovieff (R.I.P.) with a heartbreaking final line, Akira Rabelais’ semi-impenetrable but ultimately rewarding Lyre-mangled auto-fiction and, of course, Roland Kayn on Cybernetic Music. Lots more to explore inside.

Includes enclosed flexi-disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak's Broken Music. "Facsimile edition of the definitive guide to records by artists Broken Music is an essential guide and discography for recordings and audio works by visual artists, originally published in 1989 and edited by Ursula Block (founder of Gelbe Musik in Berlin) and Michael Glasmeier. Records chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: record covers created as original work by visual artists; record or sound producing objects (sculptures); books and publications that contain a record or recorded media object; and records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists. Hundreds of works are documented by artists such as Vito Acconci, albrecht d., Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Harry Bertoia, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli/Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Milan Knízák, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Hermann Nitsch, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Tom Philips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, selten gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Jean Tinguely, Yoshi Wada, William Wegman and Lawrence Weiner, among others."

Limited reprint. Corbett vs. Dempsey announce the release of four books of poetry by Sun Ra. Two of these were pamphlets that accompanied early Sun Ra albums issued in the late 1950s; the other two were published more than a decade later by Infinity Inc./Saturn Research. CvsD's reprints are fastidiously designed facsimiles of the original publications, marking the first time they have been available in their Ra-ordained form since they were published. An architect of Afrofuturism and one of the great musical thinkers of the 20th century, Ra's work extended far beyond jazz and even music to the realms of pageantry, performance, theater, philosophy, visual art, and literature. In the mid-1950s, he handed out leaflets and gave street corner lectures -- revisionist interpretations of the Bible and bold meditations on the status of African Americans in American society. A few years later, Ra began disseminating his poems in -- and sometimes on -- his albums. His debut, Jazz By Sun Ra, was issued in 1957 by the Boston-based Transition label, a short-lived company that sold records by subscription; this record contained a beautiful booklet, now as prized as the LP itself, with rare photographs and a selection of poems and proclamations, as well as the personnel and recording credits. Ra's Jazz In Silhouette was released two years hence on Saturn Records, the label he started with Alton Abraham, and it came with a mimeographed liner booklet -- now exceedingly rare -- that was folded, unstapled, as an ultra-economical accompaniment to the vinyl. The CvsD version folds this slim pamphlet of poetry into a slipcover with a classic photo portrait of Ra by Thomas "Bugs" Hunter on the back. Perhaps Ra's best-known book of poetry, reprinted in many alternative versions with different contents over the years, is The Immeasurable Equation; this incarnation restores the original Infinity Inc./Saturn Research version, published in Chicago in 1972 and distributed widely by the Arkestra, often from the bandstand. It features more than 60 of Ra's poems. Finally, perhaps the rarest of Ra's poetry books is Extensions Out: Immeasurable Equation Vol. II, which was also published by Infinity Inc./Saturn Research. This 8 1/2 x 11 inch book is a massive compendium of more than 130 poems, very much in step with the mimeo poetry publications of its era -- simple staple binding, one-sided pages -- featuring three photographs of artwork by Ayé Aton, a close ally of Ra's in this, the period of the Arkestra classic Space Is The Place, on which Aton plays percussion. Great care was taken to reproduce the special textured cover of this highly sought-after book. These four books are exclusively sold as a set. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies. Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to represent the non-musical side of the Sun Ra Estate. The label gratefully acknowledges Irwin Chusid and Sun Ra LLC for the permission to release this historically rich chronicle of Ra's poetry, presented as he originally conceived it.