The first book ever to be written on this
extremely fringe, but fascinating, topic, full of
strange facts, obscurities and eye-opening
research, with some wider cultural and
aesthetic reflections. The blurb on the back
puts it this way: early recordings demanded
brevity: after two minutes a cylinder was full, so
pop songs evolved to be short. But the idea of
really short recordings (a minute, less;
seconds; fractions of a second) paradoxically
emerged only when the arrival of the 33 rpm LP
gave musicians the possibility to work with
longer timespans. This book analyses the
many roles that miniature tracks have played
across a wide variety of genres, documents
their formalisation through a strange obsession
with the arbitrary duration of sixty seconds, and
tracks their inevitable descent into madness -
situating these developments broadly in the
context of precedent musical forms, the
contingent miniaturisations of memory space
and both physical and virtual media. Discursive
but brisk, wryly opinionated and gently
analytical - it comes with a CD of 67 highly
diverse but amazingly complete very short
tracks, created by artists variously famous,
unfamous and infamous.
Shipping: Outside UK: £5