Sea Urchin Editions

30/01/2025

in stock:

TAKEHISA KOSUGI 2LP

Released by Slowscan, 2021. Edition of 400. Name card: George Maciunas. Cover photo: Takashima, courtesy Takehisa Kosugi.
Design: Johnny Van de Koolwijk.
€ 32,00

Takehisa Kosugi (1938-2018) was a Japanese composer and violinist. Kosugi studied ethno-musicology at the Tokyo University of Arts, from which he graduated in 1962. Influenced by his professor Fumio Koizumi, the Italian Futurists and Pierre Schaeffer, Kosugi broke away from his classical training in 1958 and formed the seminal Group Ongaku with six other musicology students while still at university. The group’s Concert of Improvisational Music and Sound Objects in September 1961 was witnessed by Toshi Ichiyanagi, who had studied under John Cage in New York. Ichiyanagi sent recordings of the group to George Maciunas, who not much later announced that the “complete works of Kosugi” were available via mail order for the price of two dollars. From that moment on Kosugi had been incorporated in Fluxus. Kosugi himself moved to New York several years later, in 1965, but earlier his works were included in Maciunas’s Fluxus 1 and various Fluxus performance programs. Kosugi collaborated with Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik and formed the legendary Taj Mahal Travellers (1969-75), whose itinenary to the Taj Mahal led to various recorded and released concerts in Europe. Kosugi’s primary instrument was the violin, the sound of which he sent through various echo-chambers and effects to create unique drone-like music.

Slowscan Vol. 53 is a double LP, of which the first is a remastered version of Kosugi’s New York, August 14, 1991 recording. This recording orginally appeared on cassette as part of the Slowscan Fluxus Anthology box set in 1994 and later as a 12″ vinyl in 2019. The second LP contains Unnamed Information (I, II, III), a recording of a live improvisation by Takehisa Kosugi and Ted Szànto at Bellevue Theatre, Amsterdam on 12 June, 1979.

Live improvisations 1979 and 1991.

24/01/2025

in stock from MOLOKO PLUS:

CATHERINE MARSHALL & SIMON JOHNSON - ORDINARY STUPID PEOPLE
(Joan Vollmer's Life Before the Beats Began)

Published by Moloko Plus, 2024. Language: English. Design: Robert Schalinski.
€ 15,00

“… Joan Vollmer’s memory has long been framed within the narrative of the troubled five-year common-law marriage to the writer William S. Burroughs… her accidental death at her husband’s hand is unforgettable, the most enduring event of her short life. The shooting made her life a taboo topic for those who knew her well and a subject of fascination for those who did not. But the shooting tells us nothing about the 28 years of Joan’s life that preceded it… Joan Vollmer was extraordinary. The dean of her college knew it. Burroughs knew it. We knew it, too…”
(from the introduction to the book by the authors)

The Moloko publication ‘Ordinary Stupid People’ is aptly subtitled ‘Joan Vollmer’s Life Before the Beats Began’. Written by Cathy Marshall and Simon Johnson, the book is a first extract from a wider biographical work on Joan Vollmer which has received support and encouragement from members of the Vollmer family, as well as James Grauerholz of the William S. Burroughs Estate. Supplemented with photos, and beautifully designed by Robert Schalinski, this little book is another fine publication in the series of Moloko’s scholarly studies on Burroughs.

Cathy Marshall has published over a hundred scholarly articles about hypertext, digital libraries, ebooks, annotation, crowdsourcing, and personal digital archiving, as well as a book about ebook research, ‘Reading and Writing the Electronic Book’ (Morgan Claypool, 2009). With artist Judy Malloy, she co-created a collaborative hypertext memoir, ‘Forward Anywhere’ (Eastgate, 1995). ‘Ordinary Stupid People’ is her first foray into biography. A full biography of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, based on ten years of research and interviews, is forthcoming.

Simon Johnson is an archivist, based in Scotland. His research has led to collaboration with James Grauerholz, literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs, and he contributed research to Barry Miles’ 2014 publication ‘Call Me Burroughs’. He has conducted extensive research into the life of Anthony Burgess, working in collaboration with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, which invited him to present his findings at the Life, Work, Reputation conference in Manchester in 2017.

A first extract from a wider biographical work on Joan Vollmer. Supplemented with photos, and designed by Robert Schalinski.

23/01/2025

in stock:

ED SANDERS - THE EX-TERR POEMS

Jointly published by Moloko Plus & Sea Urchin, 2020. Designed by Anneke Auer.
€ 20,00

Moloko Plus and Sea Urchin have joined forces again to publish ‘The Ex-Terr Poems’ by Edward (Ed) Sanders. The book, beautifully designed by Anneke Auer, combines new poems and glyphs by Sanders in his series of Bardic Glyph-Books. “These poems were begun in late January 2020, around the advent of my knowledge of the Corona Virus Invasion”, Sanders explains. “With my wife Miriam as videographer and great idea-person, for the last 14 years I have been writing and broadcasting a Saturday evening half-hour program, ‘The Woodstock Journal’, from 7 to 7:30 p.m. over the Public Access television studio at the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center in Woodstock. I bring a DVD of each show from home to the station, and send it out to viewers over station equipment. While each show is running”, Sanders continues, “I am free to write, work on my daily journal, or read. Last January 24, while The Woodstock Journal segment was being aired, I had a strange idea to write a poem about Sassy the Saucer. First I drew a Glyph of an extraterrestrial named Sassy, which, finished on the page, inspired the poem. Each Saturday evening, for the next 10 weeks, I drew a Glyph and wrote a poem about an extraterrestrial. Here they are, all fourteen of them.”

Ed Sanders (1939) is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher. In 1958 Sanders dropped out of the University of Missouri and hitchhiked to New York City. There he founded the avant-garde journal F**k You/A Magazine of the Arts and, a couple of years later, his Peace Eye Bookstore, which turned into a hotbed of poetry, art and radical activism. In 1964 he graduated from New York University with a degree in Greek and founded the seminal countercultural band The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. At the time Sanders’ subversive activities in the Lower East Side were described by William Burroughs as a “total assault on the culture”. An unstoppable anti-war activist, Sanders took a prominent part in the famous attempt to levitate and exorcise The Pentagon in 1967 and published ‘Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961–1985’ twenty years later. Sanders lives in Woodstock with his wife Miriam, where he has worked on his investigative 9-volume ‘America, A History In Verse’ since 1998. In 2018 he published ‘Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy’.

Available from Sea Urchin:
https://www.sea-urchin.net/books/sea-urchin-books/ed-sanders-the-ex-terr-poems/
or from Moloko Plus:
http://www.molokoplusrecords.de/finder.php?folder=Print&content=64

Extraterrestrial Glyphs & Poems in times of Corona.

22/01/2025

in stock from MOLOKO PLUS:

RICHARD BYRNE - HOTEL MAYFLOWER

English / German edition published by Moloko Plus, Schönebeck, 2024. German translation: Mark Kanak. Design: Ralf Zühlke.
€ 20,00

True story: Before finding fame as a writer, Beat Generation icon William Burroughs met a German Jewish woman named Ilse Herzfeld Klapper in Dubrovnik. A year later, in 1938, they married. Ilse Burroughs received a U.S. visa from this marriage, which allowed her to escape N**i Germany. She arrived in New York in 1939, where she worked for exiled anti-fascist German writer Ernst Toller. During his exile, Toller had become a leading figure in the anti-fascist resistance. He gave speeches, wrote articles, raised money for the hungry in Spain and even wrote film scripts in Hollywood. In his play ‘Hotel Mayflower’ Richard Byrne imagines how Toller, Herzfeld Klapper and Burroughs met and collided in a Manhattan hotel in 1939. Byrne’s ‘Hotel Mayflower’ is a fictitious world based on historical facts: a picture of exile and displacement amid growing fascism, and attempts to erase and rewrite history. Where does that leave the artist? As Byrne himself puts it: “Toller and Burroughs are at opposite poles in their views about writing and politics. And the story of Ilse Herzfeld Klapper Burroughs – polyglot, refugee, friend to the famous – is utterly enigmatic. ‘Hotel Mayflower’ was my opportunity to explore a tangle of key issues in our moment through the prism of a forgotten story of 1939 that should be better known.”

Richard Byrne writes plays and films. He is also an award-winning editor and journalist. His work has been published in places including Time, The Nation, The New Republic, The Baffler, BookForum, New York Press, The Wilson Quarterly, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. Byrne lives in Washington DC. His plays ‘Burn Your Bookes’ and ‘Nero/Pseudo’ have been produced in Prague and Washington DC. His new film, ‘The Drowned Girl’, has been screened in New York City and Washington DC. Moloko Plus has now published ‘Hotel Mayflower’ – originally titled ‘Three Suitcases’ – as a bilingual (English-German) edition with a German translation by Mark Kanak. Design: Ralf Zühlke.

In his play ‘Hotel Mayflower’ Richard Byrne imagines how Ernst Toller, Ilse Herzfeld Klapper and William Burroughs met and collided in a Manhattan hotel in 1939. Byrne’s ‘Hotel Mayflower’ is a fictitious world based on historical facts: a picture of exile and displacement amid growing fasc...

19/01/2025

in stock:

ASMUS TIETCHENS / FRIEDER BUTZMANN - NNO1 #2

12” vinyl in gatefold sleeve, published by 90% Wasser, Großwoltersdorf, 2020. Edition of 300. Artwork: Frank Diersch. Design: Robert Schalinski.
€ 18,00

NNOI is an annual open air festival for experimental music in Großwoltersdorf, close to Berlin. Since 2016 the festival, organised by Column One’s Robert Schalinski, has seen line-ups of artists and musicians such as Limpe Fuchs, Christoph Heeman, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Felix Kubin, Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg (Uli Rehberg), Asmus Tietchens and Frieder Butzmann. The latter two composers have now been brought together on an LP, which was released on Robert Schalinski’s 90% Wasser label in September 2020. NNOI #2 is the second in a series of vinyl releases that not only documents but also elaborates the live performances of the festivals. Like the first NNOI release the gatefold sleeve is the result of a collaboration of Robert Schalinski himself, who took care of the design, and German master draughtsman Frank Diersch, who provided the artwork.

German composer, radio play and performance artist Frieder Butzmann (1954) took part in one of the NNOI festivals, where he staged his ‘SinusToneSuite’. This live recording has now been released on NNOI #2, where it is followed by his composition ‘Da Capo’, a vocal canon after J.S. Bach. On the other side of the record ‘Stenogramme, erste Folge’, by another renowned experimental German composer, Asmus Tietchens, can be heard. The composition was recorded in Audioplex Studio, Hamburg in 2020.

2nd release dedicated to the annual NNOI festivals

17/01/2025

in stock:

ED VAN DER ELSKEN - BAGARA

First printing, published by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1958. Design: Jurriaan Schrofer. Text booklet: Ed van der Elsken & Jan Vrijman. Fine condition except for the dustjacket which shows wear and has a small tear. Complete with accompanying text booklet.
€ 75,00

Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) was born in Amsterdam, where he was trained as a stonecutter and sculptor until 1944. Inspired by the photojournalistic Picture Post and Weegee’s ‘Naked City’ he shifted his interest from sculpting to photography in the late 1940s. When he tried his luck Paris in 1950, he took up a job printing photos in the darkrooms of Magnum agency. There he met his future wife, the Hungarian photographer Ata Kandó, who was twelve years his senior and was part of the bohemian rive gauche. Through the friendships and acquaintances of Ata, Van der Elsken became one of the best-known documentalists of that seminal post-war scene. Van der Elsken divorced Ata in 1955 and moved back to Amsterdam, where his photo novel ‘Love on the Left Bank’ – starring Australian bohémienne Vali Myers – was published by De Bezige Bij one year later. The influential edition was to be the first of some twenty photo books published over the following decades.

In 1956/57 Van der Elsken travelled through the interior of Central Africa on the equator. A selection of the thousands of photographs he took during that journey was published by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam in 1958, most of them printed black and white. ‘Bagara’ means ‘buffalo’, an animal which – according to Van der Elsken – personifies the savagery and vitality of Africa. Designed by Jurriaan Schrofer, the book presents a brutally honest insight into life and death in Central Africa at the time. ‘Bagara’ counts as one of Van der Elsken’s major publications; an exhibition devoted to ‘Bagara’ was organised by Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem in 2004.

This particular copy of the sought-after first printing is fine: no damage or ownership marks. It comes with a copy of the accompanying text booklet by Van der Elsken and Jan Vrijman slipped into the dustjacket. The dustjacket itself shows some staining and wear and has a small tear.

https://www.sea-urchin.net/collectible/collectible-art/ed-van-der-elsken-bagara/

16/01/2025

in stock:
Various SLOWSCAN releases on vinyl. Slowscan is run from 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands by Jan van Toorn. Dissatisfied with the limited availability of good artists' recordings, Jan founded his internationally acclaimed label to release cassettes in 1983 and recordings on vinyl in 2000. Most of the record sleeves are designed by Johnny Van de Koolwijk.

11/01/2025

in stock:

JEROME ROTHENBERG - SENECA JOURNAL

Bilingual edition published by Moloko Plus, 2022. Languages: English & German. Translations: Barbara Felicitas Tax & Norbert Lange. Artwork: Susanna Lakner. Design: Ralph Gabriel.
€ 17,50

Jerome Rothenberg was born into a Polish-Jewish family in New York City in 1931. He studied at the City College of New York and received a Master’s Degree in Literature from the University of Michigan in 1953. After his return from military service in Germany, Rothenberg resumed his studies at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1959. His publishing career began in the late 1950s when he translated Paul Celan and Günter Grass and other German poets for City Lights Books, founded several literary magazines and his own Hawk’s Well Press, which published Rothenberg’s first compilation of poems ‘White Sun Black Sun’ in 1960. He used the term ‘deep image’ for his poetry of that period and published eight more compilations plus an anthology of traditional and modern poetry in the course of the 1960s. Rothenberg taught at the State University of New York and the University of California, San Diego, where he has lived since the 1970s, and has published fifteen books of his own poetry as well as translations of poetry by European spearheads of the avant-garde such as Nezval, Lorca, Schwitters and Picasso since 1990. In 2008 a selection of his critical essays was publised under the title ‘Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005’. Rothenberg died in Encinitas, California in 2024.

‘Technicians of the Sacred’ (1968) marked the beginning of Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics which, apart from folk songs, included visual poetry, sound poetry and ritualistic chants and texts. Rothenberg edited further ethnopoetic anthologies in the 1970s and 1980s, which he described as “assemblages or pulling together of poems & people & ideas about poetry (& much else) in the words of others and in my own words.” Inspired by his own ethnopoetic anthologies, he built in the 1970s and in the following decades an ancestral poetry of his own: “a world of Jewish mystics, thieves, & madmen”, as he described it. Furthermore he explored and translated native American themes and poetry in so-called total translations, which formed the core of his poetry performances and collaborations with various avant-garde musicians and composers.

‘Seneca Journal’ (1978) is one of Rothenberg’s ethnopoetic explorations. The Seneca, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, accepted the Rothenbergs into their community in Salamanca, New York State during one of their ethnological and poetic studies in the 1970s. In his journal of the period Rothenberg, adopted by the Seneca Beaver clan as one of their own, draws parallels between the fate of his Jewish ancestors in Eastern Europe and the ethnic cleansing and genocide that the Seneca suffered and documented in their myths and stories. Moloko Plus has published Rothenberg’s classic ‘Seneca Journal’ as a fine bilingual English-German edition with translations by Barbara Felicitas Tax and Norbert Lange and artwork by Susanna Lakner.

Bilingual (English-German) edition of Rothenberg's 1978 ‘ethnopoetic’ classic.

09/01/2025

in stock:

VARIOUS ARTISTS - BEING ON THE BEAT

CD released by Moloko Plus, 2020. Compiled by Ralf Friel & Rex Joswig. Designed by Robert Schalinski.
€ 15,00

German writer Jürgen Ploog worked as an airline pilot for 33 years. Transience and crossing borders were integral to his existence and writings until his death at the age of 85 in 2020. Ploog’s early literary output gravitated naturally to the cut-up method that William Burroughs and Brion Gysin popularised in the 1960s. His early experiments at cut-ups were published in the satirical magazine ‘Der Metzger’ and in the German Beat magazine ‘Gasolin 23’, which Ploog founded with Carl Weissner and Jörg Fauser in 1971. Since then the cut-up technique remained an essential component of Ploog’s prose, at first prominently present – for instance in his hardcore cut-up novels ‘Cola-Hinterland’ (1969) and ‘Die Fickmaschine’ (1970) – and later subdued and overlain by loose episodical structures. ‘Pacific Boulevard’ (1977) and ‘Nächte in Amnesien’ (1980) are examples of those later logbook-like works. The CD ‘Being on the Beat’ was compiled by Moloko’s Ralf Friel and Herbst In Peking’s Rex Joswig and released in 2020 as a tribute to German cut-up master Jürgen Ploog.

‘Being on the Beat’ is a lovely and varied collection of 23 recordings by Ploog himself, friends and affiliated artists such as William Burroughs, Alfred 23 Harth, Tarwater, Herbst In Peking, The Same, Rex Joswig, Jan Herman/Carl Weissner and others. The accompanying 14-page booklet, like the CD sleeve designed by Robert Schalinski, contains interesting texts by Thomas Stemmer, Thomas Antonic, Alfred 23 Harth and Phil Shoenfelt, photos and collages by Jürgen Ploog. What a beautiful and fitting tribute to Ploog this release has turned into!

Compiled by Ralf Friel & Rex Joswig as a tribute to Jürgen Ploog (1935-2020)

08/01/2025

Available from our Collectible catalogue:

IRA COHEN - KATHMANDU PORTFOLIO

Published by Bardo Matrix/Cold Turkey Press, 1976. Limited edition of 250. Portfolio containing 12 postcards of photos by Ira Cohen. Complete set in very good condition. Some wear to the jacket.
€ 150,00

American photographer, poet and publisher Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents in the Bronx in 1935. After having dropped out of Cornell University, having married and having had two children with his wife Arlene Bond, Cohen sailed to Tangier in 1961, where he stayed for four years. In those years Cohen published his seminal Gnaoua journal with contributions by Jack Smith, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse a.o. Cohen returned to the US in the mid-1960s, where he took inspiration from Bill Devore’s photographic work and started his famous series of mylars, which included portraits of Jimi Hendrix and William Burroughs. In 1968 Cohen directed his acclaimed films ‘Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda’ and ‘Paradise Now’, documenting the Living Theatre’s US tour. With former Living Theatre member Petra Vogt Cohen travelled to Kathmandu in the early 1970s, where he published the delicate Starstreams poetry series on local rice paper together with Angus MacLise and the Bardo Matrix crew. Cohen stayed in Amsterdam for several periods during the mid and late 1970s, where his friends Simon Vinkenoog and Eddie Woods lived and fellow-expat William Levy introduced him to Gerard Bellaart from Rotterdam. Through his Cold Turkey Press Bellaart published Cohen’s ‘Kathmandu Portfolio’ and ‘From the Divan of Petra Vogt’ in 1976. In 1981 Cohen returned to New York, where he married and had a daughter with Caroline Gosselin. They divorced in 1989. Cohen spent the rest of life in New York and died of kidney failure in 2011.

Ira Cohen produced his ‘Kathmandu Portfolio’ during a week’s stay in Rotterdam at his friend Gerard Bellaart’s place in 1976. The portfolio of 12 photographs was a joint production of John Chick’s Bardo Matrix imprint from Kathmandu, with whom Cohen and Angus MacLise had teamed up in 1974, and Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press from Rotterdam. The jacket was silkscreened black and silver and Ira Cohen’s photos inside were printed offset as 12 separate postcards. 250 copies of the ‘Kathmandu Portfolio’ were made. Available from Sea Urchin is a very good and complete copy of the portfolio with some wear to the jacket and Bellaart's ex libris stamped on the inside of the jacket.

Published by Bardo Matrix, Kathmandu and Cold Turkey Press, Rotterdam, 1976. Complete set. Condition: very good.

05/01/2025

in stock:

ROGER KNOEBBER - HYSTERESIS: A PROFILE OF BRION GYSIN

Published by Inkblot and Theo Green in collaboration with LargerNovae, 2024. Edition of 300 copies. Forewords: Theo Green & Roger Knoebber. Layout: Tim Furman. Cover Design: Janet Galore. Cover photograph: Udo Breger.
€ 47,50

Hysteresis (physics): The continuation of an effect after its cause has been removed.

In the late 1950s in Paris, at the famed Beat Hotel – 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur – writer Roger Knoebber was living amongst a community of creative people, including the core of what became known as the Beat Generation – Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg, and others. In this bohemian center of exploration Roger became intimate friends with the artist, writer and mystic Brion Gysin.

From the time that Roger left the Beat Hotel in 1962, through his time raising a family in California, his return to Paris in 1984, and until Gysin’s death in 1986, Roger and Brion maintained a friendship captured in letters. in 1996, ten years after Brion’s death, Roger completed writing ‘Hysteresis: A Profile of Brion Gysin’, a painting-in-words to capture Gysin’s complex personality and history. Within this text are recollections solicited by Roger from many of Brion’s friends and associates including William S. Burroughs, Terry Wilson, Felicity Mason, Françoise Janicot, Ramuntcho Matta and others.

In 2004, Roger Knoebber also passed away, with the manuscript left unpublished. Finally, nearly thirty years after it was written, Hysteresis is here, summoning up the spirit of Brion for us.
(From the blurb of this edition)

In the late 1950s in Paris, at the famed Beat Hotel – 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur – writer Roger Knoebber was living amongst a community of creative people, including the core of what became known as the Beat Generation – Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg, and others. In this bohemian center of exploration R...

28/12/2024

in stock from Moloko+:

GUSTAV SACK - PARALYSE

Published by Moloko Plus, 2021. Illustrated by Ben Schot. Designed by Robert Schalinski.
€ 15,00

‘Paralyse’ is the title of a novel that Gustav Sack conceived and started in 1913 but never had the chance to finish. The novel was to revolve around the delirious ideas and fantasies of a poet/philosopher who, like Sack’s inspiration Friedrich Nietzsche, suffers from dementia paralytica in the final stages of syphilis. In a letter to his fiancee Paula Harbeck Sack explains that the main character of his novel will be “physically completely miserable, incapable to recollect or think logically, while lapsing into the wildest, most fantastic yet optimistic delusions; a glowing embrace of life and at the same time helpless as a child”. Moloko+ has now published the opening chapters of Sack’s hallucinatory novel, in which the main character’s syphilitic deliria gradually manifests itself and contrasting ideas fuse in a sublime nihilistic fire. Designed by Robert Schalinski and illustrated by Ben Schot this book is another fine publication in Moloko’s expressionist series.

Gustav Sack (1885-1916) grew up in the German village of Schermbeck, close to the Dutch border and the industrial Ruhr district. He attended the grammar school of the nearby town of Wesel and did German Studies and Natural Science at the universities of Greifswald, Münster and Halle before dropping out in 1910. Sack developed an interest in literature during his grammar school days, when he discovered Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Schopenhauer and many others and started writing himself. His wild and intoxicated student days were reflected in his first novel Ein verbummelter Student, written in 1910 when Sack was 25 years old. Despite Sack’s high expectations the novel was rejected by a Munich publisher that same year, but determined to pursue a career as a writer, Sack moved to the Bavarian capital anyway in 1913.

In Munich – in those days a mecca of German bohemianism – Sack and his future wife Paula Harbeck got in touch with the literary avant-garde and the first generation of expressionists. But the outbreak of World War I and his inevitable mobilisation made anti-militarist and anti-nationalist Sack decide to leave the country and take refuge in Switzerland. Being treated as a deserter by both the German and Swiss authorities, finding his financial support cut completely by his family and being separated from Paula, whom he had just married, left Sack financially and emotionally bankrupt. He returned to Germany in 1914, reported to the military authorities and was sent to the trenches of the Somme front a month later. In poems and an extensive correspondence with Paula he documented the insanity of the trench war for the next year and a half. After having been arrested for misconduct and insubordination, Sack was transferred to the psychiatric ward of a military hospital, where he stayed for a while and then was reunited with his wife. In 1916 they moved back to Munich. Just as Sack had reconnected with the avant-garde circles there and Paula had managed to raise interest in his work, Sack was sent to the front again – this time to Romania – where he was killed in action a couple of weeks later. None of Sack’s major works saw publication during his lifetime, but through the efforts of Paula they were published posthumously and then were acclaimed by leading authors such as Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger and Theodor W. Adorno.

Gustav Sack's unfinished novel, 1913-1916

24/12/2024

Season's greetings!

21/12/2024

Last copy in stock:

JOHN CHICK - HIPPIE STORIES

C60 released by Sloow Tapes, Stekene, Belgium, 2015. Limited edition of 100. Artwork: Dana Young and John Chick.
€ 12,00

John Chick (1944-2013) was one of the members of the original Bardo Matrix crew, who started out as a psychedelic lightshow or ‘experimental cine’ group in Boulder, Colorado. After moving to San Francisco in 1967, Chick helped set up light shows at the Avalon Ballroom with The Family Dog, with whom he was staying that summer. Doing so, Chick found himself at the heart of San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Once that summer had been spent, he moved back to Colorado where he helped The Family Dog set up The Denver Dog – the Avalon Ballroom’s Colorado branch – and helped distribute The Avalon’s psychedelic posters in Denver. At The Denver Dog Chick worked with Blue Cheer, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin and many other musicians and bands. The next year, in 1969, Chick decided to follow the hippie trail to Kathmandu, where he opened the Spirit Catcher bookstore and continued Bardo Matrix as a printing press for Western travellers and expats. The bookstore became a meeting place for expat poets and musicians and it was under the Bardo Matrix imprint that Ira Cohen and Angus MacLise published their Starstreams poetry series on local rice paper from 1974 to 1979. Chick witnessed the arrival of the first Magic Bus in Kathmandu (which had Wavy Gravy and Dr. Larry Brilliant aboard) and many buses to follow. In 1972 he opened the legendary Rose Mushroom Nightclub on ‘Freak Street’ to accommodate the steadily growing flux of hippies.

John Chick had many an inside story to tell in his lifetime and Sloow Tapes did a great job releasing some of them on cassette. John Chick recorded his hippie stories on Bali in 2009. On the cassette they are completed by Chick’s recording of a Balinese Galungan ceremony of that same year. The cassette sleeve shows artwork by John Chick and Dana Young, as well as photographs by Graig Love, all members of the original Bardo Matrix crew.

Stories about Bardo Matrix and the Spirit Catcher bookstore.

20/12/2024

in stock:

UDO BREGER - IDENTITY EXPRESS

Published by Moloko Plus, 2021. Language: English. Photos: Udo Breger. Ticker Tape: Jürgen Ploog. Design: Ralph Gabriel. Cover art: Gregor Kunz/Wolfgang Schulz.
€ 15,00

Udo Breger (1941) is a German author, translator and publisher with close ties to the Beat Generation. Breger studied English and Romance Language & Literature at the University of Göttingen from 1964 to 1971, during which period he also ran an art gallery in Göttingen. Between 1968 and 1975 his Expanded Media Editions published and organised projects with Joseph Beuys, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and others. In the mid-1970s Breger translated Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Illuminatus! Trilogy’ for Sphinx Verlag, Basel. With the exception of a couple of years spent in Sweden, Breger has since then worked in Basel as a publicist and translator of works by Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, John Lilly, William Burroughs, Franco Beltrametti and others for various publishing houses including his own. During his stays in the USA between 1978 and 1992 he met Andy Warhol, Herbert Huncke and Buckminster Fuller to mention some of his many overseas friends and acquaintances. Breger’s Expanded Media Editions and his magazine Soft Need has published works by cut-up artists Jürgen Ploog, Carl Weissner, Jörg Fauser, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin as well as works by Allen Ginsberg, Claude Pélieu and Gerard Malanga. Together with Axel Heil and Peter Weibel, Breger curated the exhibition ‘The Name is Burroughs‘ in ZKM Karlsruhe and the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg in 2012.

Udo Breger’s ‘Identity Express’ was originally published in an edition of 500 by the Swiss Caos Press in 1979. This compilation of Breger’s fine-tuned ‘écriture automatique’, notes and intimate photographs of friends has a ticker tape text by Jürgen Ploog running across the pages from beginning to end, which functions as snippets of information viewed from a window in an inside-out and outside-in express hurtling through sceneries and memories stored in the author’s mind. Gregor Kunz’s cover art based on a photograph by Wolfgang Schulz and Ralph Gabriel’s elegant design form the icing on this fine cake, now made available again by Moloko Plus.

Reprint of Udo Breger's 1979 work. With photo's by Udo Breger and a tickertape text by Jürgen Ploog.