Musics (magazine)

[1] In 1975 Derek Bailey,[2][3] Steve Beresford,[2][4] Max Boucher,[2] Paul Burwell,[2][5] Jack Cooke,[2] Peter Cusack,[2][6] Hugh Davies,[2] Mandy and Martin Davidson,[2] Richard Leigh,[2] Evan Parker,[2] John Russell,[2][7] David Toop,[2] Philipp Wachsmann[2] and Colin Wood[2] came together and agreed to produce a magazine.

[10][11][1][8] Eva Prinz and Thurston Moore hosted an exposition on the magazine and the book, covering it at the Red Gallery on Rivington Street in London in July 2017.

Eventually it was possible to pay the printers (Islington Community Press) to make the plates and run off the copies.

From the beginning the Musics collective took the position that they would not accept paid advertising or grant aid, and the only income came from subscriptions and sales through (mostly alternative) bookshops.

It was significant in the discussion of traditional Asian instruments (Clive Bell) as paths of equal value for the performance of musics, a term that discarded the use of the word "jazz".

[12] Early issue covered audio soundscape work, reviewing performance events from a cliff-top piano hurling festival or burning pianos, trap set improvisation against a rising sea tide that drowned cymbals and floated and retuned toms, or drummer Han Bennink's inclusion of saws and power tools in his percussion set.

Electronics were explored as micro-environments at a level of equality with acoustic instruments in the precursors of glitch, such as the STEIM experiments with the cracklebox or the circuit board work of Hugh Davies (1943–2005), and an attack on the possibilities of brass instruments, notably by Steve Lacy and Evan Parker.