Imprints, Magazines & Presses
Texte und Tone
Rob Carmichael & S. S. Sandhu
New York, NY
2012-
New York, NY
2012-
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale (2012)
"The poet, sculptor and novelist Brian Catling, who produced a Texte und Töne publication about a talking mongoose on 1930s Isle of Man, described the imprint as being devoted to the 'sacred unreadable'. It gravitates towards the poetics and the politics of the discontinued, the deleted, the forgotten, or what Iain Sinclair has called 'the re-forgotten'. Titles are designed by Rob Carmichael and printed by Keegan Mills Cooke at The Circadian Press. They have ranged from meditations on Pinochet's murderous disappearances and Margaret Thatcher's fatwa against industrial manufacturing to obsessive and imaginative fossickings over obscure Scottish post-punk bands. Not infrequently they accompany related—and undocumented—performances or screenings in New York. Paper is a theology: there are no PDFs or e-books, and titles are often accompanied by cassettes, flexis and (soon-come) vinyl. (Never downloads). What is crucial: Risographic textures, analogue ambience, mimeograph memories, the rush and righteousness of the autodidact's fanzine. Residues of the Birmingham School's Stencilled Occasional Papers, the CCRU's Abstract Culture series, Pamfletti by The Pastels/Bob Stanley/ Stereolab, labels like Balsam Flex and Alga Marghen, The Bristol Recorder, RēR Quarterly, German poetry books. Images are used as moodscape-gardening rather than as illustrations. Hermetic circles, triangles and mysterious leylines proliferate. Colours sometimes bleed through pages—leakages from the future, conjurations of a past that refuses to be dormant. The pages aspire to be rich in silence and echoic space. Roger Luckhurst gets at something important when, writing about the imprint, he cites Garrett Stewart's writings on the value of demediation: 'To mediate is to convey, to bridge, to deliver, to transmit. To demediate is to block, to put signals and signs into remission. To mediate is to cross; to demediate is to double-cross, to sabotage the message function.'Most important of all: a belief in the culture of—and through—friendship, elective affinities, quiet joy."
—S. S. Sandhu, April 2017
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—S. S. Sandhu, April 2017
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Selected Output
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale (2012)
B. Catling. Unvanished (2014)
David Peace & Paul Myerscough. The Stink Still Here (2014)
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Edge is Where the Center Is - David Rudkin & Penda's Fen: A Conversation (2014)
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Edge is Where the Center Is - David Rudkin & Penda's Fen: An Archaeology (Revised edition, 2015)
B. Catling. Unvanished (2014)
David Peace & Paul Myerscough. The Stink Still Here (2014)
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Edge is Where the Center Is - David Rudkin & Penda's Fen: A Conversation (2014)
S. S. Sandhu (ed.). The Edge is Where the Center Is - David Rudkin & Penda's Fen: An Archaeology (Revised edition, 2015)