Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Big Announcement Time! About My New Book, Blown Horizonz

Hello friends!  I'm really excited to make an exciting announcement. About WRITINGS.

If you read this here blog, you see random, scattered, off-the-cuff musings on a semi-random assortment of popular culture nuggets, political haps, hot links, etc.  But you may also occasionally see links to my writing elsewhere, and maybe you've wondered at those times, HEY, WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT?

What's it all about is that I pretty frequently for the last ten years or so have been writing about music for outlets like Tinymixtapes, the Japan Times, The Wag, Popmatters, Audiogalaxy, etc.  I've now finally taken the time to compile some of these pieces into my FIRST BOOK!

It is titled Blown Horizonz: Incidental Comments on Psychedelic Noise, Abstract Rap, and Other Music That Will End Your Mind, and it will be released on September 1st, 2012.

Actually I should have probably written "FIRST BOOK"! above, in scare quotes, because it may or may not be a real "book."  It's an ebook, which I'm self-releasing, with the generous cooperation of my various editors and publishers. Is that a real book?  Your call, bro.

The collection will contain essays about everything from free jazz to weird folk to U.K. garage to Kool Keith.  It includes interviews, mostly with white rappers like Cage, Themselves, and MC Paul Barman.  Some of these pieces are difficult or impossible to find, including essays on Japanese hip hop and the Night People scene that I published in the print-only magazine Signal to Noise, and pieces from a decade ago that only saw the light of day in small newsletters.  There will also be at least one piece written fresh for this collection.

One of the Signal to Noise essays was shortlisted for the 2010 edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing, so that might be worth checking out.  My writing has also been praised by such luminaries as Michael Gira of Swans and Dylan Ettinger.  But just in case that's not compelling enough, you can watch this space over the next month for samples, plugs, and the like.

Best of all, the book will be FREE for at least two weeks after its initial release!  How will I make money, you ask?  And my answer is, of course, volume, my friend.  Volume.

I hope at least one or two of you are as excited about this as I am.  (Thanks Mom!)




If you would be interested in receiving a digital copy of the book for review, please let me know in the comments section below.  Thanks!

1 comment:

Nicholas Ochiel said...

It's about time sir! About damn time. Congratulations on the book coming together and ready for release. I'd love to receive a copy to review. My e-mail address is nochiel [at] gmail.

Congratulations again, and good luck.