[Ursula Block, Michael Glasmeier, eds]
Broken Music
New York City, USA: Primary Information, 2019
280 pp., 26 x 21 x 2.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 2500
The first ‘art’ job I ever had was for a now-defunct space called Lake Galleries, the first Toronto venue (that I was aware of) to dedicate itself to conceptual art.1 It was an offshoot of the antiquarian bookstore D&E Lake, which remains active today. My first curatorial project ever was compiling a slim catalogue for the store, of artists’ records, and records designed by artists.
One of the resources I used was a book they had in their second story office called Broken Music. I asked to buy this book from them, and the owner Don Lake said “I can’t sell that book. That book makes me money”.
The record catalogue became the impetus for an exhibition by Roger Bywater at Art Metropole, which became my second arts employer. They too had a copy of Broken Music on the office shelf and I also pleaded with them to let me buy it, and was told no. It was too valuable a resource to part with.
Both of these jobs paid very little, so the three hundred dollar price tag on the secondary market for the 1989 out-of-print book meant I was resigned to never owning it. I would check Ebay as often as possible, in the hopes of finding an affordable copy, but an autobiography with the same title meant scrolling through pages and pages of sellers with buyer’s remorse from purchasing a memoir by Sting.
One year we went to the Berlin Art Fair for Art Metropole, bringing mostly multiples, some artists’ books and a small flip-display of CDs. On the second day of the fair a woman arrived and seemed to beeline to the audio works. She quickly and expertly filtered the good from the bad, and made a pile to purchase.
Sizing up her selections, I exclaimed “Who are you?”.
She quietly introduced herself as Ursula Block. Excitedly, I said “Oh, very nice to meet you, you produced the best book on sound art ever published. Please sell me a copy!”
Like Lake and Art Metropole before her, she declined, with a demure shaking of her head. “I no longer have copies for sale.”
We spoke for a few minutes before she stopped, her eye catching a book behind me on the shelf. She asked about it and I said “That’s the second best book on sound art ever published”.
She enthusiastically flipped through it, and promptly proposed a trade.
We scheduled an appointment for us to visit Gelbe Musik, a record store she had been running since 1981 (it closed a few years later, in 2014). The store felt a bit out of the way, and seemed fairly unassuming from the street, but inside had an incredible selection of records (I bought as many as I could carry) and also a space for very small sound art exhibitions.
While wondering how there could possibly be enough interest in Artists Records to sustain a store dedicated only to them, a few customers trickled in - on a Monday, when they were usually closed. Both of them made purchases. It was pretty heartwarming. I attributed it to the strength of her reputation.
Urusla was followed around the store by her pet terrier, who (by no coincidence, I’m sure) closely resembled Nipper, from the HMV logo (and the painting by Francis Barraud titled His Master's Voice, which provided both name and graphic to the record store chain). She went to a cabinet in the office area and pulled out a sealed copy of Broken Music, and handed it over.
For the price of the Art Metropole book Sound by Artists (minus my employee discount) I finally had a pristine copy of a book I had wanted for years.
It didn’t take long for the volume to begin to show signs of wear. Like Jon Hendrick’s Fluxus Codex, the book was regularly consulted and frequently scanned. There was soon a real danger that the spine would give out.
The news that Primary Information (already with a stellar track record of essential facsimile reprints of difficult-to-obtain texts) were set to produce a reprint was most welcome. I'm surprised it took me this long to order a copy (the donation of 100% of the proceeds to Black Lives Matter last month made it a very easy decision).
Broken Music was one of the first books published on the subject of artists’ records and remains the most comprehensive. It includes essays by both Block and Glasmeier, as well as Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, Hans Rudolf Zeller and dealer/publisher René Block (husband of Ursula). Perhaps most essential is the 200-page bibliography of artists’ records, including works by Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Jack Goldstein, Hans Haacke, Joe Jones, Martin Kippenberger, Anna Lockwood, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Michael Snow, Jean Tinguely, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner and many others.
Like the Art Metropole2 book I traded for it, Broken Music also features a flexi-disc, a recording of the Arditti Quartet performing Milan Knizak’s “Broken Music”, the book's namesake.
1. It quickly branched off into many other things, including a distasteful exhibition of court drawings from the trial of serial killer Paul Bernardo, which led to my brief appearance on an episode of the American tabloid ‘news’ show Hard Copy.
2. Sound by Artists (also recently reprinted after being worth around $300 on the secondary market) also includes a flexi-disc record, by Christian Marclay. Unlike the Knizak disc in Broken Music, Marclay's cannot be played, as it is bound into the book.
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