Minor Compositions

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 6 The Institution Negated?   In this episode we are joined by John Foot, Susana Caló, and Godofredo Enes Pereira for a wide-ranging conversation on the publication in English of The Negated Institution, and the radical milieus that shaped it, emerging from the turbulent political and intellectual landscape of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion traces the...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 5 Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary   In this episode owe are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a wide-ranging conversation on cultural funding, radical publishing, and the changing conditions of collective knowledge production. The discussion begins with Gary Hall’s recent book Defund Culture , which challenges conventional calls to increase...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 4 Wages Against Dreamwork   In this episode of Minor Compositions, the usual format is playfully overturned as Richard Gilman-Opalsky stages a friendly “revolt,” taking over hosting duties to interview Stevphen Shukaitis about The Wages of Dreamwork , co-written with Joanna Figiel. What unfolds is less a conventional author interview than a comradely and...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 3 Communism Actually In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we discuss Communist Ontologies with its authors Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Bruno Gulli, exploring their proposal that communism be understood not only as a political program but as a form of life. The conversation ranges across questions of political economy, ontology, and revolutionary sub...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective    In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we are joined by Steven Belletto and Grégory Pierrot, in order to discuss Steven’s book  Black Surrealist. The Legend of Ted Joans. Together we explore Joans as Beat Generation insider, jazz trumpeter, collage artist, Pan-Africanist, and self-styled Surrealis...

S2E1 – In girum imus nocteet consumimur igni Season 2 opens with a conversation with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson – filmmakers, artists, and co-founders of Firefly Frequencies – reflecting on radio as a collective, political, and affective medium. Moving between the history of autonomous radio, projects such as Lullabies for the Revolution and Terminal Beach, and collaborations including the...

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 43 Communize the city   This episode begins with Kike España’ presenting his essay “Communize the City: Towards an Insurgent Vicinity,” a text that examines the contemporary urban condition through the lens of financial brutalism, before segueing into a discussion of themes from it. España argues that cities have become logistical infrastructures of extraction, w...

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 42 We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher   In this episode, we speak with artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter of Close and Remote about their sprawling, collaborative, and genre-bending project We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher . The conversation traces the origins of the film: how an initial spark in Fisher’s writing grew into a hybrid work that fus...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 41 Alifuru World: Stateless Histories, Decolonial Futures   Discussion with Ferdiansyah Thajib & Hypatia Vourloumis on the forthcoming book Anarchy in Alifuru: The History of Stateless Societies in the Maluku Islands by Bima Satria Putra Putra’s book traces the histories of the Alifuru peoples – those who refused incorporation into the state formatio...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 40 Utopia in the Factory?   Discussion with Rhiannon Firth & John Preston on their new book Utopia in the Factory. Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics There’s long been this seductive idea that automation, AI, and robotics might finally deliver us into a kind of post-work utopia. You can find it everywhere, from Silicon Valley pitch decks to...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 39 From Disalienation to Collective Care. Institutional Psychotherapy as Resistance Discussion with Elena Vogman & Marlon Miguel discussing the work of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury  Born amidst the ruins of World War II and the shadow of fascist extermination policies, institutional psychotherapy emerged not just as a form of mental health care,...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism   This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor   This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory . In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s concep...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 36 Feral Class Untamed. Unheard. Unstoppable. For this episode with have a chat with Marc Garrett about his forthcoming book Feral Class. The book is Marc Garrett’s raw and resonant memoir of surviving – and creating – on the margins. It delves into the lived realities of working-class artists, charting Garrett’s journey from the edges of cultural produc...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 35 It’s summer and we’re feeling a bit lazy… so rather than record something new, for this episode we’re presenting a recording of a seminar discussion between Stefano Harney & Stevphen Shukaitis that occurred this May in London. It was part of an event organized by CHRONOS from Royal Holloway.  You are on the way to destruction, make your time . In...

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 34 Communism After Deleuze   Discussion with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee about his new book Communism After Deleuze .  What if communism was always the secret engine of Deleuze’s thought? This episode uncovers a hidden itinerary running through Deleuze’s work: a subterranean current where the idea of the Third World becomes a cipher for revolutionary desire. Against the...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 33 Dismantling the Master’s Clock In this episode, we speak with Rasheedah Phillips about her groundbreaking book Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time . Drawing from Black Quantum Futurism, Phillips challenges dominant, Western notions of time – showing how they have been shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and racial oppression. Why d...

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 32 States of Divergence For this episode we have a discussion with writer and theorist Sven Lütticken, as we delve into his new book States of Divergence . In it we will explore the book’s core themes: the lived experience of accelerating catastrophe, and the emergence of divergent, resistant practices across art, politics, and everyday life. More on the...

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Take This Refusal and Dance To It This episode is a conversation with Paul Rekret, centered around his book Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (2024). In this discussion we explore the book’s key themes through both discussion and curated music selections that speak to the intersections of labor, leisure, and sound.  Take This Hammer examines how shifts in...

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Penny as Producer Penny Rimbaud is best known as a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective Crass, as well as for his work as a poet, writer, and philosopher. But beyond these well-known aspects of his life and practice lies another, less frequently discussed dimension: his role as a record producer. The original idea for this episode of Minor Compositi...

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 29 Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues   This episode is a discussion with Paul Buhle, Abigail Susik, and Penelope Rosemont about the newly released book Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture . This collection brings together legendary Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture over a period of more...

E28 Band People with Franz Nicolay  This episode is a recording of a seminar held at the University of Essex with Franz Nicolay on his book Band People . In it Franz Nicolay explores the working and creative lives of musicians. In it, he argues that to talk about the role of a ‘band person’ is not only to talk about art and craft but also to develop a critique of the value placed on fame and a cel...

For this episode we have a discussion of the book  Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Improvisation with its author Daniel Spicer and long time comrade and fellow radical theorist / free jazz musician Richard Gilman-Opalsky. In it we discuss the countercultural and artistic milieus that shape Brötzmann as an artist, the importance of his work as an organizer and catalyst, a...

For this episode we talk with Brixton-based textile artist Scorpio about his life and work. Last summer a quest to learn more about the 1990s militant queer art collective Homocult led us to visiting “Iconic Queer,” an exhibition of Scorpio’s work at the Lambeth Archives. Moved by the power of the work, and sensing there would be interesting stories behind these pieces, which focussed on cycles of...

For this episode, in light of the current sector wide university crisis in the UK, we present the recording of a seminar with Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, and Simon Lilley about their book  Shaping for Mediocrity . In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic fre...