Paul Hegarty

Benjamin Halligan

Michael Goddard

Noise permeates our highly mediated and globalised cultures. Noise as art, music, cultural or digital practice is a way of intervening so that it can be harnessed for an aesthetic expression not caught within mainstream styles or distribution. This wide-ranging book examines the concept and practices of noise, treating noise not merely as a sonic phenomenon but as an essential component of all communication and information systems. The book opens with ideas of what noise is, and then works through ideas of how noise works in contemporary media, to conclude by showing potentials within noise for a continuing cultural renovation through experimentation. Considered in this way, noise is seen as an essential yet excluded element of contemporary culture that demands a rigorous engagement. Reverberations brings together a range of perspectives, case studies, critiques and suggestions as to how noise can mobilize thought and cultural activity through a heightening of critical creativity.Written by a strong, international line-up of scholars and artists, Reverberations looks to energize this field of study and initiate debates for years to come.

The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise

Reverberations

Anne Etienne

Christopher Weedman

Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium? Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s

Adult Themes

Alexei Penzin

Stefano Pippa

Rebecca Carson

Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many – they are few!' This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics, crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin Halligan, Marc James Léger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.

Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency

Politics of the Many

"Since the turn of the millennium, protest movements and strategies have multiplied and diversified; old models of organization involving spokespeople, grand gestures and lobbying, have given way to new approaches. Protests in the 21st century are arranged around collectives as centreless, leaderless, amorphous assemblages. This tendency towards proliferation has been theorized through the concept of multitude, most famously put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which conceptualized a new proletariat for the age of globalization. The idea of multitude primarily sought to revisit and re-energize micro-models of protest, such as radical feminist movements, wildcat strikes, refugee and sex worker rights, hacktivism and reclaiming the streets, squatting and "dropping out", the "temporary autonomous zone" and occupy. Politics of the Many problematizes the concept of multitude, taking in the substantial criticisms produced in previous decades, and the concept's testing in the many global upheavals of the last decade, in order to interrogate the ways in which politics and ideology persist in the current moment"--

These essays penetrate the fathomless depths of the Fall's sound and Mark E. Smith's vision, bringing back fresh perceptions that do not `explain' so much as enhance and expand the inexhaustible mystery of this singular band. Simon Reynolds, author of Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 and Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews The strength of this book draws ultimately on the complexity of the Fall, with its cosmic library of `screwed up' lyrics to unfold, and its vast conurbation of psychic soundscapes to drift through. There is bound to be controversy over whether the band is a legitimate subject for academic study. The best response to the sceptics can be found in the pages of this brilliant collection. Simon Ford, author of the Wreckers of Civilisation and Hip Priest This volume offers a comprehensive range of approaches to the work of Mark E. Smith and his band the Fall in relation to music, art and politics. Mark E. Smith remains one of the most divisive and idiosyncratic figures in popular music after a recording career with the Fall that spans thirty years. The key aspect of the group that this volume explores is the invariably creative, unfailingly critical and often antagonistic relations that characterize both the internal dynamics of the group and the group's position in the pop cultural surroundings. The Fall's ambiguous position in the unfolding histories of British popular music and therefore in the new heritage industries of popular culture in the UK, from post-punk to anti-Thatcher politics, to the `Factory fiction of Manchester' and on into Mark E. Smith's current role as ageing enfant terrible of rock, illustrates the uneasy relationship between the band, their critical commentators and the historians of popular music. This volume engages directly with this critical ambiguity.

Art, Music and Politics

Mark E. Smith and the Fall

Robert Edgar

Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs

The Music Documentary offers a wide-range of approaches, across key moments in the history of popular music, in order to define and interrogate this prominent genre of film-making. The writers in this volume argue persuasively that the music documentary must be considered as an essential cultural artefact in documenting stars and icons, and musicians and their times – particularly for those figures whose fame was achieved posthumously. In this collection of fifteen essays, the reader will find comprehensive discussions of the history of music documentaries, insights in their production and promotion, close studies of documentaries relating to favourite bands or performers, and approaches to questions of music documentary and form, from the celluloid to the digital age.

Acid Rock to Electropop

The Music Documentary

Nicola Spelman

A groundbreaking collection of essays, proposing new frameworks for the discussion of noise - from postpunk to showgaze and beyond.

Noise and Contemporary Music

Resonances

Michael Reeves died at age 25 in 1969, between the end of Swinging London and the collapse of the British film industry--an apt candidate to represent all that could have been. This critical biography claims Reeves as the great, lost auteur of British cinema and traces his conception of film back to his childhood and formative experiences. Benjamin Halligan examines Reeves' films in the context of the times, citing The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General as foreshadowing and critiquing the psychedelic and revolutionary zeitgeist. Reeves's earlier work on the fringes of the freewheeling European exploitation cinema is also covered, with particularly emphasis on his Revenge of the Blood Beast.

Benjamin Halligan

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