Source: The Wire.
For over 40 years, Wolke Verlag has been an essential source of writing on free music and contemporary composition. Based in Hofheim, a small town near Frankfurt, the publisher was founded in 1980 by a small group of four dedicated jazz fans and continues to be run by one of the quartet to this day, Peter Mischung. In recent years Wolke Verlag has published an account of Peter Brötzmann and Jost Gebers’s freewheeling Free Music Production organisation, a book dedicated to the “ergodic scores of the postwar avant garde”, and a collection of “vocal adventures” by improvising singer Lauren Newton, as well as books about Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton and Dmitri Shostakovich. Shortly to come will be a collaboration with the Darmstadt International Institute of Music called Black Composers, edited by George Lewis and Harald Kisiedu. The house also maintains close ties with the Darmstadt Jazz Institute. This top five list of publications is a good place to start for anyone who’s curious about Wolke’s catalogue.
