BURNING BOOKS PRESS

Burning Books was founded in 1979 by writer/editor Melody Sumner Carnahan and artist/designer Michael Sumner and is dedicated to avant-garde fiction, music, and art. Author/Artist/Collaborators include John Cage, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Madeline Gins, Joan La Barbara, Larry Polansky, Mark Weber, Barbara Golden, Toma Longinovic, Steina, Woody Vasulka, Charles Amirkhanian, Michael Peppe, K. Atchley, Sheila Davies, Patrick Sumner, Laetitia Sonami, Susan Stone, Charles Shere, Dino J.A. Deane.


Designated by the NEA in 1987 as one of the "best independent press books of the year," this book is compilation of the texts, scores, and ideas of seven American composers who use words as an integral part of their compositions. Each chapter includes a text in the form of libretto or lyrics, often with complete score. Also included are interviews with each composer about her or his ideas on music, daily life, consciousness, the future, and possibilities.

Check them out here : http://www.burningbooks.org/

Leighton Pierce - The Back Steps

Leighton Pierce is a child.

His works are filled with perceptions that only the most embryonic of minds can take hold of. Blurs of light and texture that go mostly unnoticed by the constant motion of the adult world become alien universes of the familiar. Minuscule swatches of time mimic the environmental landscape of information discerned by the guiltless innocence of the child. A child’s mind holds a near real-time version of memory, the only past is that of the immediate, the future is not yet a concept beyond a matter of minutes. It is with these eyes that Pierce builds a Midwest mythology of the elevated ordinary, creating a new, uncorrupted grammar.

In The Back Steps, Pierce holds captive two little girls inside a twist of time, both in constant departure from Leighton’s back porch steps into the yard beyond. This restless escape creates an orographic cyclogenesis, the night becoming the mountainous walls that hold in the whirlwind of Halloween costumes and scurrying feet. Time folds in on itself, a panorama of endless disappearances, each scherzo slightly askew from the previous, following an internal logic of it’s own, unshared design.

“Time is, in fact, what I see as my main material.” – Leighton Pierce

TheBackStepssample.m4v