Thursday, January 28, 2010

A Collection of Essay's by Bruce Russell

Bruce Russell launched his book Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 tonight. It's really, really good - and not just in terms of sound, but culture in general; production, resistance, the possibility of radical action; the understanding of one's position within a semantic economy. There's a lot of material in there that is going to be very helpful to me - I'm writing on improvisation and text at the moment, and one of my intentions (they are various....) is to look more at artistic economies as wholes - media-centred distinctions are counter-productive (as Bruce states in the introduction to the show Towards a Cinema of Pure Means currently at the Physics Room gallery).

I've got a review copy - so a write-up is impending. I highly reccomend it - and anyone who is not familliar with Bruce's work should look into it - here's his Wikipedia page.

5 comments:

Richard said...

Yes I saw a YouTube I think of Russel et al and I got onto him via Brett Cross of Titus who is also very much into sound music etc and he leant me a magazine about records or album covers that that comments by Russell and others in it -it was very interesting. He also presents alternative music etc on the Concert Program from time to time.

Yes spell check doesn't like Blog - but at one stage I had a facility built in as well as spell check for rewriting what I had written, and in one poem I had, I found that the computer's program's version was better than mine, so I adopted it!!

Ross Brighton said...

Bruce writes for the Wire quite a bit - Good mag, if a bit pretentious/elitist at times...
I'm a big fan of his sound work/music (in the book he doesn't describe it as music, though I'm more inclined to agree with Cage, who describes music as sound that is framed aesthetically - though I see where Bruce is coming from in term of popular opinion/common usage). And the book - I'm very impressed by the amalgamation of political/cultural theory into a cartography of practice. Still reading/letting my thoughts percolate, but aside from some niggly stuff ("i like this theorist better than that", etc, a couple of minor typos) it's all pretty positive. I'm surprised at the Marxism - there's some radicalism there!

Bruce said...

where's that review Ross?

Ross Brighton said...

Hi Bruce - It's coming - I've been inundated with work for university, and have been I'll. Just about finished though. I'm really sorry it's taken so long.

hema said...

thank you