Subtitled: The Anatomy of Practice.

This book was already published in 2021, but I could not lay my hands on it for unclear reasons – now it’s finally available. Mark Fell, a pioneering artist known for his sound installations and his musical work solo and as part of SND and Sensate Focus, assembles a collection of diverse materials charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music.

An amalgam of workbook and manifesto, featuring a collection of interleaved statements, diagrammatic scores, and instructional texts, Structure and Synthesis is a direct engagement with Fell’s original thinking and his continual provocations in regard to “experimental” music. Alongside reflections on theory and practice, the volume includes exercises for dismantling musical expertise, habits, and intuitions, documenting Fell’s explorations of the peripheries of rhythm, shape, and time in perception and performance.

Long-term collaborator designer Joe Gilmore provides a striking graphic context for Fell’s evolving thinking and the methods and structures he has developed through his solo and collaborative work.

An accompanying playlist is available on Urbanomic’s YouTube channel, featuring tracks mentioned and discussed in the book.

Fell’s sense of humour smacks across the page. […] While the book is primarily a volume of Fell’s own practice, it also serves as a timely provocation to artists, institutions and arts funders. We should applaud his incredible ability to call out shit things for being exactly that. (Mariam Rezaei, The Wire)

Softcover, published in 2022, 400 pages, 25 black&white photos, 50 black&white illustrations.