ISBN: 978-0-9655570-9-2
12,7 x 20,3 cm (softcover)
224 pages (color ill.)
Published: 2006

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Julius Nil is the radionym of conceptual sonician, writer, and musician, SETH KIM-COHEN. Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician, and writer who makes as little distinction between these categories as he can get away with. He is author of Against Ambience (2013), In The Blink of an Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (2009), and One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music (2006).

One Reason To Live: Conversations about Music with Julius Nil
Edited by Seth Kim-Cohen

Choose one piece of music – one reason to live.

This is the challenge posed by Julius Nil, Sunday nights on Resonance FM in London. Each episode, Nil invited one guest to choose one piece of music to listen to and talk about. One Reason To Live compiles fourteen insightful, inciteful, conversations with some of the most important and innovative figures in jazz, rock, classical, sound art, cultural theory, and philosophy. Guests include David Toop, John Parish, Kaffe Matthews, Steven Connor, Eric Roth, Scanner, Andrew McGettigan, Brandon LaBelle, Simon Critchley, Esther Leslie, Andrew Morgan, Ken Vandermark, and Ben Watson. These conversations explore the diverse, imaginative ways in which we can – or perhaps ought to – make meaning and value of the music in our lives. Despite the divergent backgrounds of the participants, common concerns emerge: art and commerce; sociality and the self; the relation of form to content, and of form and content to politics, discipline and freedom. All in all, these discussions create a connect-the-dots constellation of current responses to the sonic arts.

"I just got an e-mail from Amazon with a recommendation to pre-order One Reason To Live!" — Stephen Vitiello

"Like Proust's madeleines, these slices of listening open up onto rich fields of musical history and memory." — Christoph Cox, editor of Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music