“My own material existence I am reasonably assured of. I can imagine my friend at the other end of the line. But between us two there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else[…]The vocal inhabitants of this strange region have an amazing vanishing quality[…] And sometimes…you hear the confused murmur of a hundred voices. You catch more expressions from private conversations than your nerves can transmit to the central office of your brain; and if you are imaginative, you may undergo, as I have, a feeling as if you had a hundred astral bodies that were guiltily listening at as many keyholes.”
“A Reporters Visit to the Boston Telephone Exchange”
Scientific American 1887, 106
joe[a]strangeregion.co.uk
Strange Region is a publisher of writing by artists, novelists and poets.
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We endeavour to use publishing as a collaborative tool to celebrate writing as performance, as architecture, as a mechanical component of creative practice and as a space to enjoy the perilous corners of the human experience.
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We were established in 2022 and are based in Bristol, UK.
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"An imploration for clear weather" Midē Songs + Picture songs. Technicians of the Sacred ed. Jerome Rothenburg
stockists:
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Argonaut Books Edinburgh//Arnolfini Bookshop Bristol//Bookhaus Bristol//The Corsham Bookshop Wiltshire//Far From the Maddening Crowd Linlithgow//Gloucester Rd. Books Bristol//Good Press Glasgow//Hopscotch Reading Rooms Berlin//Typewronger Books Edinburgh//Voce Books Birmingham
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THE INFINITE FURY AND OTHER STORIES
book launch: Bookhaus, Bristol
november seventeenth
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THE INFINITE FURY AND OTHER STORIES
written by Ian Macartney
edition of 300
116 x 177mm, 120pp
cover design by Joe Vaughan
isbn 9781739784010
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2023
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twelve pounds
Two husbands talk at the end of everything. A train, full of flowers, is derailed by love. Edinburgh is enslaved by city-sized alien bodies. Something close to hell inhabits the basement of a bakery and ghosts explore the energy-root of the multiverse.
The stories read like dispatches from a digital apocalypse. Written as prose, speech, thought and game, this collection is a catalogue of post-internet mythmaking, a discourse in Celtic surrealism, gay techno-hauntings, acid-mannerism, and sprawling, spitting hyper-fiction.
Written with tender, geometric prose, Macartney uses the experiences of online youth, retail labour, modern queerness, and Scotland’s quiet and mysterious sadness to address the seething strangeness of social spheres, emotional exploitation, and the looming threat of ourselves.
COLLIDING WITH GREAT SPEED FROM GREAT DISTANCE, OFTEN MISSING
written by Joe Summers + Joe Vaughan
in collaboration with SVS Collisions, Munich
edition of 200
116 x 177mm, 28pp
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2022
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four pounds
Colliding with Great Speed from Great Distance, Often Missing is a pamphlet created during the development of The Angel’s Share (a mixed media performance piece by Joe Summers & Joe Vaughan) as part of the SVS collective’s Collisions festival and exhibition. Part of the text was written in response to a period of personal and creative dissonance between the two artists and includes WhatsApp messages sent and received between them in the weeks preceding the SVS residency in Canfranc, at which only one of them was able attend. Some of the experimental texts explore the idea of meaning being derived from the presentation of two unrelated expressions and the similarities we automatically infer through our innate desire for meaning. Sentences overlap, collide and forge new phrases by virtue of their collisions. From this plurality one may gain something close to a singular, personal understanding.
THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SOULS
written by Joe Vaughan + Joe Summers
cover design by Alex Harwood
edition of 100 risograph
116 x 177mm, 60pp
isbn 9781739784003
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2022
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ten pounds
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Three Hundred Thousand Souls is written documentation of a sound art performance created by Joe Summers and Joe Vaughan. Drawing inspiration from Aztec poetry, the philosophy of acoustic community and the history of Slovenian dissent, the artists performed on the streets of Ljubljana, Slovenia. They broadcast their noise via a handmade radio transmitter to an audience watching through binoculars from the castle that stands many hundreds of metres above the city.
This book is an extension of the ideas, structures and geographies that inspired the work, as well as an act of poetic remembrance for the process of its creation and the friends, allies and guides who nurtured it into existence. Just as a radio may facilitate the migration of song across distance, so too does the written work allow art to travel across time.
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THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SOULS
live pirate radio performance, Llubljana 2019
[a] Cirkulajica2
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