Ian Preece tells all on Listening to the Wind, his hefty yet accessible book profiling intrepid independent labels from across the globe
There have been many memorable books about independent record labels over the last couple of decades, lifting the lid on the colourful backstories behind Creation Records, Factory Records, Merge Records, 4AD, Rough Trade Records, Sub Pop and Sarah Records. Ian Preece’s recently published 702-page compendium – Listening to the Wind: Encounters With 21st Century Independent Record Labels (Omnibus Press) – certainly adds to the girth of this literary sub-genre.
However, it astutely avoids many of the clichés that have peppered and sometimes overwhelmed previous like-focused books. Concentrating more on the actual music being curated, the guiding philosophies and the practical economics behind companies that range from the micro to the mid-sized, rather than upon distracting or dispiriting tales of substance-use, personality clashes and financial/legal disputes, Listening to the Wind delivers fascinating globe-trotting miniature-biographies of diverse enterprises such as Thrill Jockey, Second Language, Light in the Attic, Clay Pipe Music, Temporary Residence, Paradise of Batchelors, International Anthem, Heavenly Recordings and Analog Africa.
In short, Listening to the Wind is an approachable anthology that caters for music lovers wanting to learn more about how artistic ideas make their convoluted journeys into palpable artefacts, to be collected and heard by the outside world.
Caught up with via electronic means just before his late summer family holiday – not including pit-stops at record label offices this time around – Ian Preece was more than lucid and enthusiastic in accounting for his time delving deep and wide into the world of independent music enterprises, without whom we could not properly appreciate so many quality aural wares.
How has releasing and promoting a book been in the midst of a pandemic? Did you have to cancel/postpone a lot of tie-in events?
It’s been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. One leading high street book chain, once their shops shut they cancelled all the orders. I don’t really understand all these ‘book trade remains buoyant in trying circumstances’ headlines in the trade press and the broadsheets. It sounds like Boris Johnson talking. That’s not how the reality seems from here. Children’s books are maybe doing okay; I read sales of Camus’s The Plague were up. Shout out to Canada: they’ve taken a good few pallets of Listening to the Wind; far better than any order here in the UK. Next holiday: Vancouver. I was really pleased Phil at Norman Records took some; and Drift; and I think now Mono[rail] in Glasgow too.
Yeah, there were a couple of mooted events in London, which didn’t happen. But, at the end of the day, I love my other half. I think my kids are happy at college. When I wake up the sun is often shining on my small patch of rhubarb, tomatoes and herbs; I can put the needle on a record first thing. I don’t have to worry about the rent on a bookshop; or losing my job in publishing, or being unemployed because I work in a café or a bar or at some live venue. I’ve tried to buy as many records to support as many shops, distributors, labels and musicians as I can.
In the introductory pages you cite a lot of the factors and influences that went into compiling Listening To The Wind, principally on how you chose the labels you wanted to feature. Did you manage to achieve everything that you intended? Was there much left on the cutting-room floor?
Travelling around east London in Howard Williams’ van dropping off copies of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbro’s Speilt Eigene Komposition and some Kleenex/LiLiput LPs – Howard is Japan Blues but also works as an independent record distributor; he’d just taken delivery of a Mississippi shipment – was a great unexpected bonus. There’s not so much on the cutting-room floor. There were a couple of scenes and a few asides that, well, either didn’t or probably wouldn’t have survived the legal eye. I was really happy that I managed to get all 34 labels onboard. The main criteria was they have soul; they release beautiful music; they don’t care about market trends; they often, in fact, don’t give a fuck at all; they would let me buy them a coffee or a beer and turn up with my tape recorder (or send a few email questions); I have a lot of their records. Cutting the book down to 34 labels was a nightmare. I probably should have been more succinct in the intro.
Was it a challenge making the leap from being a publishing commissioning editor to commissioned book author? Did your experience on the other side of the fence help in pitching such an extensive book on not-that-famous labels?
Well, pretty much everything boils down to who you know (for good and for bad). It took me years to learn that. So there’s no question that helped when I was fresh out the door with my P45 and Doug Cheeseman from When Saturday Comes, who I’d edited two or three books with back in my publishing days, got in touch with a couple of article ideas for the magazine which led, in turn, to us getting commissioned to do a book about football annuals in the 1960s and 70s. No one wants to read an Oscars speech, but a couple of literary agents and editors (David Luxton and Charlotte Atyeo especially) were also really helpful – you know, kept me off the barstool in the Tropicana with other writing and editing jobs. Jeff Barrett (Heavenly/Rivertones) encouraged my tentative keyboard strokes at Caught by the River.
The idea for a book about labels was cooked up with another agent, Tim Bates, in a pub in Earl’s Court about eight years ago one night after the London Book Fair. Kevin Pocklington of The North Agency (an habitué of Mono in Glasgow) ended up touting it around. A couple of other publishers were really keen, but in terms of rejections we’d reached double figures by the time Kevin finally did a deal with Omnibus. I guess I’m fairly exacting as an editor – I still do this freelance to help pay the bills; and after 30 years in book publishing in one guise or another I’ve seen a lot of nonsense. I’ve probably driven Imogen, Baz and David at Omnibus mad: ‘Can we just have correctly spaced ellipses throughout . . . please. Oh, and we must get a copy to Bruce at the Downtown Music Gallery in Chinatown, New York.’ They’ve been very understanding.
As an editor myself I’ve been under pressure at times in the past to, say, lose 100,000 words from a manuscript. (Talk about one rule for some . . .) I’ll be forever grateful to Omnibus for not forcing me to do that. (It’s longer than Moby Dick . . .) I also really need to thank Doug for helping me out on social media – where I am really slow. My admiration for proper writers has increased a thousand-fold.
Which of the labels featured in Listening to the Wind did you most enjoy engaging with?
I hope it doesn’t sound too much of a fudge/cop-out to say absolutely all of them – in different ways.
You mention that a few of the labels that you approached declined to take part or ignored you. Which ones were you most disappointed to have not been able to include?
I had a fair bit of email toing and froing with Joel Leoschke at Kranky, but ultimately he felt too apart from ‘the industry’ to want to contribute. He was pretty gentlemanly and decent about it all, and I respect his reasons – but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was pretty crushed by that early on. I love that label. It’s far quicker to list the titles I haven’t got on Kranky. But he certainly didn’t ignore me. I won’t mention the four who did. I mean, I’m not quite, ‘Fuck em’ – but let’s say I’ve cooled.
Parts of the book feel like an extended travelogue, with record label offices visited as part of a globe-trotting holiday, instead of museums, beaches or historical attractions. Did that help shape the way that the final book came together? Was it important for you to meet as many label folks as you could in person in their work environments?
Yes and yes. I wanted to gently tackle that ineffable music and place thing, write about the places the music was coming from. But also, I dunno, I just felt more comfortable attempting to write in a journalistic style about the interviews themselves – or at least that felt more honest and hopefully captured people, or some essence of them, more accurately. I had to do some electronically because of cost – I couldn’t make it to Istanbul (Siné Buyuka, Injazero), Cairo (Alan Bishop, Sublime Frequencies), Hawaii (Michael Ehlers, Eremite), Bangkok (Vik Sohonie, Ostinato) or LA a second time (Peter Kolovos, Black Editions) but they provided great copy/good answers/thoughtful takes by Skype or email anyhow. For the same reasons there are no Australian or Japanese labels in there, sadly.
Did your family take some convincing of combining holiday time with book research and acquiring a lot of records to ship home?!
They were cool about all this. There were times in the past, when the kids were still kids, when they’d point out that maybe if there weren’t so many records arriving in the post we might be able to afford to go to Iceland or Japan or somewhere. Now they’re 21, it’s like, ‘You have not played that Tribe Called Quest/Gang Starr/Joe Gibbs/Messiah record for years, maybe I could take that one back to college?’ We’ve never really been ones for beach holidays; Thurston and Edie have always loved cities, so it was fine. And the breakneck schedule meant we had fewer of those holiday family arguments. I felt bad that Angela, as road manager, had so many logistics to sort out. I just had to drive, listen to music and try to remember my next bunch of questions – and try not to worry they were too stupid (or that I was bankrupting us). I only got stopped for speeding once – in California.
We share a likeminded love for the extended Chicago-birthed post-rock/post-jazz family, which you refer to a lot in the book, particularly those that have been curated or connected to Thrill Jockey at some stage. Was it therefore a dream come true to visit Chicago, the TJ office and so forth?
Oh yeah, I just love Chicago. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it’s something to do with the music not being easily boiled down – just such a rich, experimental legacy; when Tortoise first appeared, and the Chicago Underground iterations, there couldn’t have been anything further away from reductive Britpop. It’s like Rob Mazurek says in that interview you did with him all those years back for Under the Surface – ‘it’s not really a jazz record, it’s just cool sound’. That’s 18 years ago now, but you can sort of imagine on a track like “Exponent Red” or “Two Concepts for the Storage of Light” (from Axis & Alignment) that that could almost be Jaimie Branch blowing along with Chad Taylor twenty years later. I love the sense of lineage, but also running with the ball; and the space in the music – I got obsessed with Val Wilmer’s notion in As Serious as Your Life of the wider spaces in Chicago being refracted through the music (as opposed to, say, the density of living in New York).
I love the North Side, somewhere like Bucktown; and the South Side, somewhere like Hyde Park. Hyde Park Records – that’s a shop; and 57th Street Books. I know there are huge problems in the city with inequality. But it’s got a beautiful vibe: you can work your way around the 49 open air pools in the city parks for free. I mean, I didn’t quite go Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, but it was a total privilege to interview Scott McNiece in the Co-prosperity Sphere building, a sort of cool cultural hub/arts space in Bridgeport; and Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey in her front room in Pilsen, a nice Mexican/Hispanic district. Bettina talking about listening to Fred Anderson play on quiet afternoons in the Velvet Lounge, in between him setting up the bar, sent me back to those beautiful records with Hamid Drake on Thrill Jockey.
I could listen to Scott all day talking about the different artists on International Anthem – he should be a late night DJ. He’s great on the laidbackness of Jeff Parker. Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, Rob Mazurek – probably three of my all-time favourite musicians. I only scratch the surface; you could write a book on these two labels and the city alone – in fact, I can’t wait for Peter Margasak’s book on Chicago to come out.
There’s a line that sticks out as quite key in the book, where you say “But we’ll always need a curator. Otherwise it’s a world where everybody publishes that novel they have within them, unedited, on Amazon…”. This feels like an important reminder that despite all the methods of self-release now available to musicians that good record labels will always be needed in some form, to provide cultural context, to act as quality control filters, to fight for attention space needed for their artists to reach audiences… and to do a LOT of admin. Would you agree?
Yeah, totally. Steve Lowenthal (VDSQ) is good on helping out with album sequencing; Jeff Barrett knows just when to intervene and when not; Frances Castle at Clay Pipe put together Retep Folo’s LP from listening to hours and hours of recorded output; Shaun and Paul at Zube have to do Kafkaesque amounts of admin now they’ve set themselves up as music publishers too; Alex Cobb at Students of Decay was entertaining on artist follies; Jeremy DeVine at Temporary Residence is great on kind of prevaricating but then taking the plunge anyway. The artist who won’t countenance outside interference, who thinks they’ve written or recorded a masterpiece without the input of seasoned pairs of ears that have spent a lifetime soaked in all aspects of this . . . well, chances are that artist hasn’t written or recorded a masterpiece. And sometimes of course not doing much is the right thing too: I sound like a stuck record, but good editing, or good producing or curating is like being a good referee in a football match – the one in the middle you don’t notice, who’s nevertheless working hard to ensure it all flows.
It’s a mystery to me that people don’t follow labels more ardently. What are you going to do? Trust an algorithm written by someone who wears a headset in a dystopian theme park on the west coast of America that says ‘if you like this, why not try this?’ Or trust someone like Pete Holdsworth at Pressure Sounds, who loves 70s soul and free jazz and Pharoah Sanders, who’s lived the life through punk and post-punk, was one of the founders of On-U Sound, and has been rooting around with dubplates and lost tapes and alternate versions for half a century? (And who’s also spent a fair amount of time shouting at Augustus Pablo and Lee Perry.)
What makes Listening to the Wind particularly refreshing is the lack of emphasis on salacious office gossip, fraught business relationships and tales of hedonism that have characterised and often weighed-down other record company biographies. Instead, it feels like you chose to put far more focus on the actual artistic, operational and economic build-the-scenes mechanics as well as to spend time writing about many of the key records that drove your affection for the labels in the first place. Was this a very conscious part of your overall approach?
When I was in [my] mid-twenties, having always been addicted to biscuits, I once dunked way too many hash cookies in my tea. That evening culminated with an ambulance ride and an overnight stay in the Whittington hospital. Not exactly Ken Kesey but, too many pints of Guinness aside, that’s probably about as rock and roll as it gets. So I’m pleased you view it like this. I was worried I might be judged against, you know, the goings-on at Creation, Vaughan Oliver naked on the glass roof at 4AD, or something. But in this world today I think Jeff Barrett, Pete Holdsworth, Alan Bishop, Michael Ehlers, Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft are pretty rock and roll just in their being, their views, some of the records they put out. Whether it’s Marisa Anderson, Jaimie Branch, Jeff Parker, Diggory Kenrick, Tommy McCutchon (Unseen Worlds), Siné Buyuka (Injazero), Fletcher Tucker (Gnome Life), Steven Ramsey (Constellation Tatsu), Eric Isaacson (Mississippi), Sean McCann (Recital) and on and on – they’re all bad asses by just being true to themselves and having great integrity.
We don’t need more drug stories. I think the music and world views of all the above, of everyone in the book, really, are more interesting and speak a greater truth – well, far more interesting than my late-night experiment at writing up my impressions of listening to “Phosphorescence” by Harry Bertoia stoned. That ended up on the cutting-room floor happily. When someone like Chris Kirkley at Sahel Sounds talks so insightfully and fluently about life and music in the Sahel – or Brendan Greaves at Paradise of Bachelors is so thoughtful about framing musical context and language – well, it’s a different book. Heavenly’s roots are from that earlier era, and that’s really entertaining and slightly melancholic in a time-passing kind of a way in their book (out in the autumn on White Rabbit). But I guess I wanted to focus on Kate Carr’s magnificent and epic I Had Myself a Nuclear Spring on Rivertones.
You profile both labels that are putting out new material and those that focus on archival releases. You most notably feature Light in the Attic in the latter respect. How important do you feel that dedicated reissue labels are to the whole record business ecosystem?
I remember when I first interviewed Jeff [Barrett, Heavenly], we were both sort of agog at the number of cool reissue labels endlessly finding stuff – Finders Keepers, Light in the Attic, Mississippi, Dust-to-Digital; purveyors of Italian soundtracks, West African highlife, Kenyan and East African rhythms, etc, etc. And Jeff made the point that virtually none of it seemed to be barrel-scraping.
That was four years ago – if anything there’s even more now; the amount of cool 60s/70s/80s jazz, say, is hard to keep up with. In more fanciful moments I sometimes think the reissue labels are being pretty revolutionary – Superior Viaduct disappearing deep into the Impulse back catalogue; Black Sweat issuing more Don Cherry; incredible minimalism on Soave or Die Schachtel from Italy; an unearthed Lee Perry dubplate on Pressure Sounds that feels more exciting than “Police and Thieves” or maybe The Upsetter; Light in the Attic’s engrossing Japanese odyssey; Jennifer Lucy Allan’s Arc Light bringing out 80s Nordic jazz; Samy Ben Redjeb having visited 28 African countries and collected enough records already to release in his lifetime on Analog Africa; Vik Sohonie digging deep in East Africa – it’s like the mainstream smothered everything back in the day.
And still today, looking back at the 60s/70s/80s – Uncut just dropped through the door the morning I’m typing this; The Rolling Stones on the cover for a change – there is and always will be an ocean of stuff, because that’s how a lot of companies work in the capitalist marketplace: one record, one book, gets all the marketing budget, gets the slots bought; so there will be plenty of others that didn’t receive their due when they came out and fell by the wayside. But hopefully now, or at some moment in the future, they will get their small moment in the sun.
When I was in San Francisco in the summer of 2017 F.J. McMahon’s The Spirit of Golden Juice had just been reissued and I remember Steve of Superior Viaduct telling me it had shot in and out of their Stranded stores. If you’re into Tim Buckley or Fred Neil or Lee Hazlewood you have to own that LP – it’s a beautiful record, and one of my happiest writing memories ever is interviewing FJ in a diner on a Sunday morning in Studio City in LA on that trip (for Caught by the River). He was so humble and devoid of rock star bullshit.
Now we’re in so called ‘late capitalism’ there’ll always be a Stoner, a The Street; a Spirit of Golden Juice or Brown Rice or Green or The Expanding Universe – it’s part of the model; part of the backwash of everything being available always online. So it’s good to have a proper LP; so I think for discerning labels with integrity, at the level we’re talking about here – 500 or a 1000 copies tops – long may it continue to work. Aladdin Sane on orange vinyl for Record Store Day – I’m not interested; you might as well be selling fridge-freezers.
I especially enjoyed the illuminating chapters on Clay Pipe Music and Second Language, as we’re big in fans of them both at Concrete Islands. What do you like about them that specifically made you want to cover both in such fascinating depth?
I got hooked on Second Language with those Music and Migration CDs. Also – and I promise this is the last ‘I knew them before’ – I knew David Sheppard, as I did his fine Brian Eno biography On Some Faraway Beach in my publishing days (that was a great moment when, halfway round the world in a darkened bar in LA, Sean McCann at Recital started talking about it unprompted); and I knew David would be a superb interviewee. Listening to those old Second Language podcasts from 2010 or 2011 (still on their website) was some of the most entertaining research – real life-affirming stuff; as David noted, a sort of lo-fi south London throwback to Mixing It. Shamefully I’m not a subscriber so I only get the basic 2L CDs, but they’re still great things of beauty – as are, of course, all Clay Pipe releases.
I’ve always been guilty of a bit of, you know, the grass is greener over there, with a deep love of American musics, European ambient and electronica, plunging into African music, or whatever – and the Tindersticks aside, or someone like Philip Jeck, the Caretaker or a brief obsession with drum & bass 12-inchs back in the day, I’d been a bit casual and/or burnt out with a lot of UK music since the days of The June Brides, The Pastels, Felt, maybe Disco Inferno, the Pale Saints, Boards of Canada’s first LP, Springheel Jack and Cornershop. Things like David’s Snow Palms, then Clay Pipe and Second Language (even though they’ve got a deep current of European melancholia going on too) made me love a certain kind of British sensibility again. It’s a kind of natural move from the Tindersticks’ Curtains into Clay Pipe.
I’m not reducing all these records to egg and chips and rainy days and bus shelters and lidos, but, well, Gilroy Mere/Oliver Cherer’s Green Line LP, that sort of encapsulates it all – totally pastoral and yet motorik too. And Adlestrop sounds incredible on the first few listens. Beeching was a filthy word when I grew up – my granddad was a freight train driver in the sixties. He lost a toe in one of those revolving turntables they had to turn the steam engines round in the goods yard, then he lost his job under Beeching and never got over that. The whole goods line north out of Nottingham was ripped up. He died of cancer two years later in 1968. I was just one then, I can’t remember him. But I’ve still got the baize marbles board he made – ‘marbles cricket’: one team bowls while one bats, with a snooker cue potting marbles under a sort of miniature viaduct of carefully cut wooden arches, numbered 1 to 11; everyone should play that – and some of his black and white photography he developed in his shed on the red-brick, inter-war council estate in Nottingham where my mum was born. Frances’s artwork will be in the Tate one day; I was really happy when she started talking me through the places and London landmarks behind the tracks on The Hardy Tree’s Through Passages of Time.
The Second Language chapter ostensibly incorporates a mini-biography of label co-founder Glen Johnson (also part of Piano Magic/Textile Ranch et al. and formerly of Tugboat and Rough Trade Records), which felt worthwhile for someone who has seen and done such a lot as both an artist and record label entrepreneur. Was his interesting back story something that you were previously unfamiliar?
What I didn’t know was that Glen was from Nottingham too – well, born in Radford but grew up Pinxton, Notts, just a couple of junctions up the M1 from me. Now there’s about three hours worth of tape on the cutting-room floor! He worked in Selectadisc and Rock City; tales of life in Nottingham pubs; gangs attacking each other with motorcycle chains outside the school gates in the 1970s; when exactly the Highbury Vale Cinema closed down and became the Co-Op. Actually, I got a lot of it in – and no, I wasn’t aware of his pivotal role in bringing Low to the UK, whose first London show (I think) I saw at the Garage.
So all those years, I’d been sort of following Glen around. I’ve got Piano Magic’s first LP on vinyl, and I saw them do a terrific gig in the Brick Lane Rough Trade not long after that shop opened. He should have written the book, really – what he doesn’t know about Static Caravan and Wurlitzer Jukebox and spring reverbs and Kraftwerk and the Durutti Column, and the history of independent music in the UK; life at Tugboat/Rough Trade . . . and now Proper. David’s the same, a couple of years older than Glen and me, hung about at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works as an art student in Sheffield; another connoisseur of Les Disques du Crépuscule and Factory Benelux.
From your many years of working in the publishing business, what do you think are the biggest similarities and largest differences between the two cultural industries that you identified during the gestation of Listening to the Wind?
That’s an interesting question – and almost impossible to answer adequately in anything under book length. I think independent record labels on the whole are far more adventurous. I worry that I tend to gripe on about contemporary book publishing too much but the first question in most meetings in publishing seems to be, ‘Well, who’s going to buy that?’ I don’t think Mike Harding or Jon Wozencroft at Touch ever approach things quite like that. Ditto most of the labels in here, even though one or two have, of course, had their ups and downs – about halfway through the interview in Berlin Maxwell at Root Strata told me they were packing up – but they’ve all probably said no to something because they didn’t like it.
Towards the end, in my job in publishing, it felt like I was turning up to work every day just to say no to every writer and agent who got in touch. But that was a big place, one of the perennial champions league pretenders. But I don’t think back in the day anyone said, ‘Well, who on earth is going to buy this?’ when Raymond Carver, Nicholson Baker, Angela Carter and Don DeLillo were first published. Of course, great stuff still comes out today. I follow Fitzcarraldo Editions religiously like I do plenty of record labels. This is news to no one, but it’s much, much harder these days, if not virtually impossible, for writers and musicians to make a living from their work. And under the climate generated by this spiritually impoverished government – a bunch of chancers stealthily infecting all aspects of everyday life with cronyism and cheap profiteering – we’re sinking back into the mire. Eric, at Mississippi, whose flame burns for fuck-you independence as beautifully as anyone’s, would say the stakes are a bit lower in the music world; well, certainly his music world.
What do you feel are some of the commonalities across all of the featured labels in respect to how hard it is to run them these days? The balancing out of all the complexities in the deployment of physical formats, downloads and streaming release routes seem to be one broad recurring area of concern in the book…
It’s funny, when I started out I was asking people about download codes; by the end most had just about travelled through their anti-Spotify phase to more or less . . . not exactly embracing but perhaps co-existing with the streaming beast (semi on their terms, fully socially distanced, if at all possible). Apart from Eric at Mississippi, of course; and I’d guess Michael at Eremite too. All of them love vinyl, or tapes. Tommy at Unseen Worlds gives a good defence of the CD – I think he might be ahead of the curve there. Lance at Dust-to-Digital wondered if I might be documenting the end of an era (of physical product); John at Important was upbeat about the future (certainly before the pandemic); Monique and Erik at sonic pieces/Miasmah have just opened a cool-looking record shop in Berlin.
No one does it to make money or for an easy life – it’s total love and hard work. Dylan Golden Aycock of Scissor Tail up all night working his vintage letterpress. I mention it in the book a few times, but if you look at the graph of worldwide vinyl sales at their peak (1982, the last year before CDs kicked in) then look at the worldwide vinyl sales in 2019, having read about the vinyl revival in the broadsheet press 137 times . . . then look at the worldwide streaming graph . . . well, grain of sand, or water droplet in the ocean, doesn’t begin to cover it – and it should send you straight out to your local independent record shop and/or online dealer.
If you could pick and put together your favourite aspects of the labels profiled inside and outside the book to make your dream imprint, what would you choose?
Something from absolutely every last label in here – but mainly the fact you never know what’s coming next. There’s always a bit of mystery to their releases. It’s like life trips you up. In these times when so many people in so many positions of power in all walks of life are so grimly predictable and crass and obvious and unpleasant, so many of these labels seem to know how to live life – and, I’m fairly sure, how to treat other people with respect. Brilliant ears and design sensibilities are a given too, of course. Siné at Injazero plants trees with any profits made from producing vinyl.
Do you have any plans for another book in the future?
If someone paid me enough so that I could afford to pay a transcriber this time, and to travel again too, I’d do volume 2. I’ve got one or two ideas floating about. I have a rather grand plan of a triptych of the three cultural aspects of life that make it worth living. I’ve attempted two panels – football and music. Maybe something on books/literature next. I’m just hugely grateful that people have taken the time to read Listening to the Wind, or parts of it, and seem to like it. Thanks for letting me ramble on here.
You can follow Ian Preece’s Twitter account for more information on his book and related activities.
Listening to the Wind can be purchased from, among other places, the following stores:
- Not Turning Off: Volume 54 - May 4, 2024
- Not Turning Off: Volume 53 - March 26, 2024
- Not Turning Off: Volume 52 - February 22, 2024