Paperback Books 10 Items

By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album In on the Kill Taker, the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs (combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining Repeater and 1991's impressionistic follow-up Steady Diet of Nothing) inside of five years, Fugazi was on creative roll, astounding increasingly large audiences as they toured, blasting fist-pumping anthems and jammy noise-workouts that roared into every open underground heart. When the album debuted on the now-SoundScan-driven charts, Fugazi had never been more in the public eye.

Few knew how difficult it had been to make this popular breakthrough. Disappointed with the sound of the self-produced Steady Diet, the band recorded with legendary engineer Steve Albini, only to scrap the sessions and record at home in D.C. with Ted Niceley, their brilliant, under-known producer. Inadvertently, Fugazi chose an unsure moment to make In on the Kill Taker: as Nirvana and Sonic Youth were yanking the American rock underground into the media glare, and “breaking” punk in every possible meaning of the word. Despite all of this, Kill Taker became an alt-rock classic in spite of itself, even as its defiant, muscular sound stood in stark contrast to everything represented by the mainstreaming of a culture and worldview they held dear.

This book features new interviews with all four members of Fugazi and members of their creative community.

Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today, the cult of Jawbreaker-in their own words, "the little band that could but would probably rather not"-is now many times greater than it was when they broke up in 1996. Like the best work of Fugazi, The Clash, and Operation Ivy, the album is now is a rite of passage and a beloved classic among partisans of intelligent, committed, literary punk music and poetry.

Why, when a thousand other artists came and went in that confounding decade of the 90s, did Jawbreaker somehow come to seem like more than just another band? Why do they persist, today, in meaning so much to so many people? And how did it happen that, two years after releasing their masterpiece, the band that was somehow more than just a band to its fans-closer to equipment for living-was no longer?

Ronen Givony's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is an extended tribute in the spirit of Nicholson Baker's U & I: a passionate, highly personal, and occasionally obsessive study of one of the great confessional rock albums of the 90s. At the same time, it offers a quizzical look back to the toxic authenticity battles of the decade, ponders what happened to the question of "selling out," and asks whether we today are enriched or impoverished by that debate becoming obsolete.

Why is it that thousands of clubbing tourists land at Berlin Schönefeld airport every weekend? Why have clubs like Berghain become the stuff of legend the world over? Why have some of the best-known producers and techno DJs like Richie Hawtin and DJ Hell moved with their labels to this city? These are the kind of questions explored in Lost and Sound by Tobias Rapp, a German music journalist who has been living, working and partying in Berlin since the beginning of the nineties. He has spoken with DJs, clubbers, label bosses, hostel managers and urban planners; he has looked and listened carefully; and most important of all, he has been part of the dance floor himself. Every day of the week – from Wednesday night (in Watergate) right through to Wednesday night (back in Watergate).

Lost and Sound is not one of those books that try to grasp techno from a desk-bound position. Rapp zooms in to relate intimate moments in front of the DJ booth and at the bar, and then cuts to historical tangents and theoretical reflections. Detailed research is interspersed with accounts from a first-person perspective. An excellent portrait of Ricardo Villalobos, the biggest star of the Berlin minimal techno and after-party scene, stands alongside a precise sociological portrayal of the queue for Berghain. Through this interplay of music, architecture, infrastructure and drug-induced explorations of personal limits, Rapp is able to capture what makes Berlin such a unique place for electronic music and how this music is experienced.

Following its publication in Germany in February 2009, Lost and Sound made an impact not
seen from a book about popular music for a long time. This was undoubtedly due in part to the
term coined for its subtitle: the ‘Easyjet set’ is a new group of music fans who – thanks to the
deregulation of the European air travel market – now regard the aeroplane as a taxi service for
parties, effectively making Barcelona, London and Paris suburbs of Berlin.

In The Graffiti Coloring Book, sixty of Scandinavia’s best graffiti writers have provided the outlines. You choose the colors. The graffiti sketch can be used as a pattern for a graffiti piece, but is equally a work of art in its own right. The book features drawings by legends such as Skil, Nug, Egs and Bates. The Graffiti Coloring Book is as fun for children as adults. Get out your markers and walk the path of the kings of graffiti.

An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that Dummy engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade; and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

248 pages.

The complete DIY bible of street art is back in print by popular demand. A rich source of inspiration for anyone interested in do-it-yourself culture. The Street Art Cookbook is a guide to the materials and techniques used within today's most creative and progressive art movement. In hundreds of pictures and illustrations and a dozen of interviews with some of the world's most famous artists, the authors show how street art is made. From stencils and stickers to laser tagging and guerrilla gardening, Street Art Cookbook takes us on a trip around the world in the search of the tricks and trades of street artists. Posters, stickers, screen print, mosaic, sculptures. There is no limit to their imagination. Hundreds of books filled with pictures of street art have been published in the last few years, but this is the one that shows how the artists work. Learn from the best: Street Art Cookbook is filled with tips and examples of how to create your own stencil, sticker, poster or installation. These techniques can be used on all kinds of materials: textiles, glass, metal, concrete or wood and is suitable for everything from scrapbooking and designing clothes with motifs to home decoration and outdoor use. The Street Art Cookbook gives a unique insight into the alternative art world and it's a rich source of inspiration for anyone interested in DIY-culture. Mark Jenkins, Swoon, Gould, WK Interact, Caper, Victor Marx, C215, Poch, Ron English and Knitta Please, are some of the artists featured in this book.

This is the story of streetwear. Authors King ADZ and Wilma Stone recount how a long line of subcultural movements have taken over both the high street and high-end fashion, and explore just how a revolutionary sartorial trend has evolved to encompass a vast range of disparate tribes, offering a powerful sense of belonging and identity to all.

The story begins in 1972, in Jersey City, USA, with the birth of the first ever streetwear shop, Trash and Vaudeville. The journey then encompasses punk, Ivy League preppies, the hip-hop kings and queens of Harlem, the dresser/casual movement born out of British football culture, the skater scene of California, the Paninari scooter-brats of Milan, and much more. Whether focusing on major brands such as Stüssy, Carhartt, Tommy Hilfiger and SHUT or today’s up-and-comers from South African townships or downtown Seoul, this dynamic study surveys the scene. It also takes a look at how the internet era has changed the ways streetwear is sold and consumed, and how the field may evolve in the future.

Packed with profiles of industry pioneers, Q&As with key figures and over 300 illustrations, this is the complete history of the fastest-growing and most influential movement in contemporary clothing.

Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the subversive, wounded intelligence that gives this album its staying power as a work of art. Here Lou Reed managed to make a fun, accessible rock'n'roll record that is also a troubled meditation on the ambiguities-sexual, musical and otherwise-that defined his public persona and helped make him one of the most fascinating and influential figures in rock history. Through close listening and personal reflections, songwriter Ezra Furman explores Reed's and Transformer's unstable identities, and the secrets the songs challenge us to uncover.

Catalog for Arunski's exhibition Clash Of The Machines.