About Musics Magazine

Musics Magazine

Musics Magazine, published simply as Musics, was a London magazine devoted to free improvised music and the wider experimental culture around it. Launched in the spring of 1975, with a first issue dated April and May of that year, and published until November 1979, it was created collectively by many of the musicians who were themselves defining British free improvisation. Its catalogue record carries ISSN 0307-2924, but its methods were the opposite of institutional: independently published, run without advertising or grant income, distributed by subscription and through alternative bookshops and like-minded record shops, and assembled by hand.

Musics described itself, in its own playful formulation, as an impromental experivisation arts magazine. Behind the wordplay lay a serious proposition: that improvised music needed a written forum of its own, produced by practitioners rather than by the commercial music press, and that improvisation belonged in conversation with sound art, field recording, live electronics, performance art and non-Western music. Long scarce and difficult to obtain, the magazine was returned to circulation in 2016 when Ecstatic Peace Library published a facsimile edition of its issues, confirming a reputation that later writers have summarised by calling it one of the most significant jazz-related publications of the later 1970s.

A collective founding in London

Musics was not founded by a publisher who then hired an editor. It was founded by a meeting of musicians. The founding group recorded across sources comprised Derek Bailey, Steve Beresford, Max Boucher, Paul Burwell, Jack Cooke, Peter Cusack, Hugh Davies, Madelaine and Martin Davidson, Richard Leigh, Evan Parker, John Russell, David Toop, Philipp Wachsmann and Colin Wood. These were central figures in London's improvised music scene, several of them already involved in musician-led structures such as the Incus record label, founded in 1970 as the first musician-owned independent label in Britain.

The idea for the magazine was suggested in a conversation between Evan Parker and Madelaine and Martin Davidson. At the first meeting, held at the Davidsons' house, Paul Burwell proposed the title Musics, and it was unanimously adopted. The plural was itself a statement. As later accounts of the magazine note, the title represented a shift away from treating music as a single, bounded tradition and towards recognising many musics, made by different methods and in different cultures, as subjects of equal seriousness. A magazine that would place free improvisation beside traditional Asian instruments and treat both as paths of equal value needed a name that refused a hierarchy, and Musics supplied it.

An anti-commercial publishing model

The magazine was independently published and deliberately run with no advertising and no grant income. That decision shaped its economics and its editorial freedom in equal measure. Without advertisers, Musics owed nothing to record companies, instrument manufacturers or venues. Without grants, it owed nothing to funding bodies and their criteria. Its income came from the people who read it, through subscriptions, and from the alternative distribution network of bookshops and record shops willing to stock a specialist, hand-assembled journal.

The costs of that independence were real. Production was carried out by what the facsimile edition's publishers describe as effectively a communitarian collective with few publishing skills and no support structure. The result was a magazine whose roughness was part of its character. Issues were hand-assembled, and their scarcity, noted by later commentators, kept the magazine from reaching many musicians and listeners who were active in the very field it documented. Musics chose autonomy over reach, and its history has to be understood on those terms: influence within a scene rather than circulation beyond it.

What Musics covered

The core subject was free improvisation: music made in the moment, without scores or predetermined structures, by the London-based players who had been developing the form since the 1960s. Around that core, Musics ranged widely. Its pages covered sound art, field recording and live electronics alongside improvised and non-Western music, as well as twentieth-century composition and audio culture more broadly. Performance art also fell within its scope, reflecting the overlapping interests of the circle around the magazine.

The facsimile edition's description of the contents gives a flavour of the mixture: scores, dialogues, debates, position pieces, arguments, appreciations, critiques and elements of absurdist and Dada humour. This was not a listings magazine or a review sheet. It was a place where practitioners argued about what improvisation was, how it should be documented, how instruments and electronics changed it, and how traditions from outside Europe complicated Western assumptions about musical value. Contributors to the writing, graphics and photography included, beyond the founders, figures such as Annabel Nicholson, David Cunningham, Lindsay Cooper, Eddie Prevost and Val Wilmer, which widened the magazine beyond a single ensemble's house journal.

A manifesto against artificial boundaries

Musics launched in the spring of 1975 with a manifesto that proposed the destruction of artificial boundaries. In the account given by its modern publishers, that manifesto linked free jazz with the academic experimental tradition represented by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and with indigenous and non-European music. The linkage was the editorial programme in miniature. Improvisation was not presented as a footnote to jazz history or as a rebellion confined to one genre, but as a practice that connected concert music, folk traditions and avant-garde experiment.

That breadth distinguished Musics from both the commercial music press and academic journals of the period. The commercial press covered improvisation rarely and usually as novelty. Academic writing covered experimental composition but seldom the nightly, musician-organised activity of the London scene. Musics occupied the space between, written by the people doing the work, and it treated questions of technique, philosophy and cultural value as inseparable. Its discussion of traditional instruments from Asia as equally valid routes into musical performance exemplified that stance, challenging the assumption that innovation flowed only from Western technology or notation.

Musics and the London Musicians' Collective

Musics overlapped with the London Musicians' Collective, the musician-run organisation that provided concerts, workshops and infrastructure for improvisers in the capital. Later accounts credit the magazine with a role in the foundation of that collective culture, describing it as instrumental in the environment from which the Collective emerged. The relationship was natural. A scene organised around self-help, shared venues and musician-owned labels needed a means of communication that was more durable than word of mouth and more reflective than a concert listing.

Read in that light, Musics functioned as connective tissue. It gave geographically scattered improvisers a shared reference point, carried arguments between issues, and documented performances and recordings that received little coverage elsewhere. For historians of British experimental music, that documentary function is now among the magazine's most valuable legacies, because much of the scene's activity was ephemeral by design: improvised, unrecorded and performed in small rooms. Musics fixed some of it in print while it was happening.

Frequency, run and final issue

The magazine's final issue appeared in November 1979, ending a run that began with the April/May 1975 issue. Modern publisher accounts and reference works agree that Musics appeared six times a year, a rhythm consistent with a collectively produced journal made alongside its contributors' performing careers. The Ecstatic Peace Library edition describes the run as a series of hand-assembled issues gathered complete in facsimile, and the Cambridge Twentieth-Century Music bibliography cites the magazine's later issues in its scholarly apparatus, evidence that the journal entered academic reference during and after its life.

Why Musics ended is less a story of a single closure decision than of collective capacity. A magazine produced without advertising, grants or professional publishing staff depends entirely on the sustained voluntary labour of busy musicians. By 1979 the founding generation was deeply engaged in performance projects, labels and collaborations in Britain and internationally. The magazine had demonstrated its model and documented its moment. Its disappearance left a gap, but it also left a complete, bounded body of work that could later be reissued as a whole.

Scarcity and growing reputation

For decades after 1979, Musics was easier to cite than to read. Its small, alternative distribution meant that few sets survived outside the collections of participants and committed followers, and its publishers have acknowledged that this marginality kept it from musicians who would have valued it. Reputation travelled by testimony: Derek Bailey's biographical accounts list the magazine among his significant collaborations, and descriptions of it as an important publication of the later 1970s recur in writing about Bailey, Evan Parker and the London scene generally.

That reputation rested on the identity of the founders as much as on any single article. Bailey, Parker, Hugh Davies, David Toop and their colleagues were not commentators on free improvisation from outside; they were among its originators. A magazine they made collectively, under a title one of them proposed at a meeting in the Davidsons' house, carries an authority that a commissioned history cannot replicate. Musics is therefore read both as journalism and as a primary source: evidence of how the second generation of London improvisers understood their own work while they were making it.

The 2016 facsimile edition and the 2017 exhibition

In 2016 Ecstatic Peace Library published Musics: A British Magazine of Improvised Music and Art 1975–79, a facsimile reprint of the magazine's issues between a single set of covers. The volume carried a foreword by founding contributor Steve Beresford, an introduction by David Toop and an afterword by Thurston Moore, the American musician whose Ecstatic Peace activities connected the London improvisers to a later generation of experimental rock and free music. Facsimile reproduction was the right method for this material: Musics was as much a visual and physical artefact as a text, and resetting it would have destroyed the hand-assembled character that expressed its production model.

The reissue was accompanied by public presentation. In July 2017 the Red Gallery on Rivington Street in London hosted an exposition and events programme devoted to the magazine and the book, presented by Eva Prinz and Thurston Moore. A magazine that had originally reached readers through alternative bookshops thus returned, nearly four decades later, through a gallery exhibition and a substantial collected edition, reaching the wider audience its original economics had denied it.

Legacy

Musics Magazine's legacy is disproportionate to its four and a half years of publication. It provided the British free improvisation scene with a forum written by its own leading practitioners, operated on an explicitly anti-commercial model of no advertising and no grants, and articulated a manifesto that placed improvisation in dialogue with composition, electronics, field recording and the music of other cultures. Its pages remain a blueprint, in its modern publishers' phrase, for the interdisciplinary activities that later came to be gathered under sound art and audio culture.

For WorldNM, Musics also illustrates a recurring truth about specialist magazines: the titles that document a movement most faithfully are often those made inside it, with the least conventional publishing support. Musics was fragile as a business and durable as a record. The facsimile edition and the continuing scholarly citations suggest that the record is what will last.