Meeting number 9, dedicated to introducing Kathodik readers to those involved in promoting a discourse of music criticism in Italian and international publishing. The first meeting was with Marco Refe of Edizioni Crac in Falconara Marittima (here). The second meeting was with Professor Luca Cerchiari, editor of the ‘Musica Contemporanea’ series of Mimesis Edizioni (here). The third meeting was with Karl Ludwig, Communication Manager of the German wolke verlag (here). The fourth meeting was with Domenico Ferraro, Editorial Director of Squilibri Editore (here). The fifth meeting was with Fabio Ferretti, creator and editor of the series ‘Chorus’, by Edizioni Quodlibet (here). The sixth meeting was with Massimo Roccaforte, editorial curator of Goodfellas Edizioni (here). The seventh meeting was with Christina Ward, co-curator of the US publishing house Feral House (here). The eighth meeting was with Ken Wissoker, Senior Executive Director of US publishing house Duke University Press (here). Today I travel virtually to the UK to interview Mark Pinghington and Jamie Sutcliffe, creators and publishing directors of Strange Attractor Press. The publishing house has many really interesting titles in its catalogue, ranging from studies on musicians to research on underground culture, which as you will read from their words, are just waiting to be read and studied.
Here you can find the Italian translation
How did the idea of the Strange Attractor Press on music publishing house come about?
Mark:
In the early 2000s I was working as a freelance writer, doing journalism, writing for magazines and newspapers, as well as copywriting – all the things writers do.
The artist and film maker John Lundberg and I were running events at the Horse Hospital in London. We called them “infomation happenings”, with talks, music, films etc on unusual topics, under the name Strange Attractor.
I was frustrated that so many brilliant authors I knew were struggling to get longer texts on unusual subjects published. So, inspired by the journals and zines I remembered like Rapid Eye, Re/Search and Fortean Studies, I started Strange Attractor Journal in 2004 with the intention of making it a quarterly publication, and 20 years later we’ve published only five volumes, but over 100 books in total!
Our wider remit, if we have one, is to archive and document UK underground and subcultures, and what was once called the counterculture, though that term is largley meaningless these days, when there is no monoculture, and our many cultures are flowing in every direction at once!
SAP was never intended to be a music publisher, that’s just one component of our list – I’ve always had one foot in the UK underground and experimental music world, playing in projects, writing for magazines etc, so it is just an extention of that really. I still make music, and co-produce an annual small music festival, Acid Horse, where I live in Wiltshire.
How do you select the titles for publication?
Mark:
Mostly they arise out of discussions with friends and colleagues, or are sent to us. It’s not often that we will come up with an idea for a book and commission it, though it has happened. Jamie and I are both fairly active outside of SAP in cultural affairs, teaching, writing, performing etc, so we talk to a lot of people and as the reputation of the Press has thankfully grown, we get a lot of interesting submissions coming our way. Many more than we can see through to publication of course!
Jamie: There have certainly been a few instances in which authors have serendipitously approached us with the idea for a book we’d been thinking about for some time, but never found the time to produce. We’re both admirers of the work of the visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig for example, and had been talking for years about the possibility of putting together an art book of Mick’s wonderfully irregular watercolours, which are often scrawled hastily into his notebooks whilst conducting fieldwork. Thanks to the encouragement of a mutual friend, Jesse Bransord, Mick ended up reaching out to us directly and pitching the very book we’d been imagining, ‘Postcards For Mia’, a collection of hand-painted images that communicate the strangeness of his travels to his young grandaughter back in New York.
As far as the selection of foreign authors is concerned, which school of music criticism is the most referred to? Just to give you an example: are you more interested in English-speaking authors? Or in French-speaking authors? Or other languages?
Mark:
Oh we have no preference – we just follow our interests.
We have an forthcoming book about French experimental rock post 1968, ‘Concrete SF Riot’, but it’s by an English author, Warren Hatter. A few of out books, particularly our music titles, have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Russian.
Jamie: We’re lucky to work with so many ambitious authors whose interests and research find them wandering far from the beaten track in this respect. David Toop, Roy Christopher, Stephen Coates… they’re all music writers whose works venture further than the anglophone world to sample voices from diverse cultures and communities. That might entail translating the testimonies of the Russian bootleggers who were pressing pop music to disgarded X-Rays under Soviet censorship, or sifting through the writings of African American rootworkers, magicians and voodoo practitioners to shed further light on a strange early recording by the New Orleans R&B musician Dr. John. As a press, we’re publishing in English, but there’ll always be a cross-cultural cacophony of international voices and styles of thought in the mix.
What genres do you prefer to deal with for your publications and why?
Mark: We work primarily with non-fiction – that’s not really a genre of course! – but we’re not a fiction publishing house. We do occasionally publish fiction by authors who have a history in other fields, most recently for instance, Victoria Nelson.
But our non fiction can span a wide range of subject areas – art, anthropology, medical history, science, cultural and social history, occult and religious history. We just look for themes, narratives and perspectives that feel fresh and intriguing to us – and of course we need to take into consideration what audiences will be interested in.
We are trying to keep to eight books a year, so the selection process is increasingly challenging.
Jamie: As our name implies, we have a preference for ‘strangeness’, which doesn’t imply a genre as such, but certainly suggests an irregular approach to both content and style. Eleanor Morgan’s wonderful book ‘Gossamer Days: On Spiders, Humans, And Their Threads’, might be a great example of this… it’s fundamentally a book about the various wonders we might encounter in the world arachnids, but it’s written with a brilliantly expansive hybrid style that leaves it uncategorizable in many ways; it’s a work of natural history, design theory, and living art practice simultaneously.
What is the most interesting title that has been published to date and why?
Mark: Oh it’s not possihle, or fair, to say!
Jamie: Agreed!
Do you think co-production between publishers for selected releases is possible, as it happens between microlabels in music?
Mark: Certainly – we have done this with a few titles, Erik Davis ‘High Weirdness’ was co-published with MIT Press, our distributor, and we’ve worked with galleries, museums and record labels.
Jamie: Yes, this certainly works well for us given the right circumstances. We’re increasingly working with galleries and artists who can bring funding to a project but require our editorial exeptise, apporach to design, and distribution network. We’ve worked with Tae previously, and a recent book on financial worlding with artist Gary Zhexi Zhang was kindly funded by both the Gaia Art Foundation and AGYU (The Art Gallery of York University, Toronto). We’ve just entered into an exciting new relationship with Cosmic House, London, the iconic home and archive of the Charles Jencks Foundation, and will be co-producing books as part of their programme of contemporary art shows.
Does the UK state help publishers with publishing?
Ha no!
Mark: There was a period in the 1990s when publishers could get Arts Council funding, but not anymore.
Sometimes authors, artists or institutions we’re working with might receive some funding to produce a publication, so some, or occasionally, all our production costs might be met, which is a great help, but it’s not something we can rely on.
Jamie: Yes, as Mark said, we’re on our own in an increasingly precarious publishing sector. We’ve looked to alernate funding models—crowdfunding through kickstarter for example—but given that it’s just the two of us running everything, from commissioning and editing to deisgn, layout and marketing, it’s very difficult to find the time to run an effective funding campaign with all of the work that requires.
In addition to books, are you thinking of other forms of publication? For example documentaries, movies, podcasts?
Mark: We’d love to do more but the workload between the two of us is already enormous and we struggle to keep on top of it. We both have projects that we are working on outside of SAP however – writing, teaching music, curating, programming events etc – and these things often overlap with our work as SAP.
Jamie: Yes, as Mark said we’re both involved in a good number of projects beyond the press. Mark has a very active career as a musician these days with a number of new releases this past year alone, and is increasingly called upon to talk on the UFO phenomenon as it takes on new resonances in the present. I’m constantly writing for art publications have a number of books in print and in production, while developing exhibiton projects. We’re both very active as respondents too, often joining panel discussions on music, art, technology and their various political resonances.
Are there any forthcoming titles worth mentioning?
Always! New titles for the next year or so include:
– Dorothy Max Prior’s second volume of memoir, which sees her teaching ballroom dancing while on tour as the drummer for Psychic TV;
– A history of artists’ psychedelic light shows in Britain;
– A biography of Anthony Balch, the British film maker and producer who collaborated with William Burroughs and imported exotic and erotic cinema into the UK, including ‘Haxan Witchcraft Through the Ages’ and ‘Freaks’.
– A biography of Eric Dingwall, psychic investigator and keeper of the forbidden library at the British Museum.
Link: Strange Attractor Press Home Page
Link: Strange Attractor Press Facebook Page
Link: Strange Attractor Press Twitter Profile
LInk: Strange Attractor Press Instagram Profile
