Free Music Production
FMP - The Living Music Book
Markus Müller (Editor)
Germany: Wolke Verlag, 2022.
Large format.
400 page soft cover.
Profusely illustrated.
(Contact for international shipping as book
without packaging is over 5lbs.)
This book is dedicated to the history
of the music label Free Music Production (FMP),
which from 1968 to 2010 achieved incomparable things
as a Berlin platform for the production, presentation
and documentation of music. Based on many conversations
from over thirty years with key protagonists such
as Peter Brötzmann or Jost Gebers, Markus Müller tells the success story
of a musicians‘ initiative that emerged in the context of the 1968
ideas of self-organization and self-determination and worked
successfully in an international network for over 40 years.
Thematic focal points include formats developed by the FMP
such as the Total Music Meeting and the Workshop Freie Musik,
the production of recordings, relations with GDR musicians,
FMP and women, the internationally groundbreaking collaboration
with Cecil Taylor (to which a text by Diedrich Diederichsen is also dedicated),
as well as FMP and its interdisciplinary border crossings.
In doing so, the book builds on the major FMP exhibitions
in Munich and Berlin curated by Müller, but in many aspects
goes far beyond them. Thanks to unrestricted access
to the FMP-Publishing Archive in Borken, countless
first-published documents and photographs from the history of the FMP
can be found. The 400-page, large-format book,
designed by Double Standards, has more than 300 illustrations
and presents the FMP as West Berlin’s most important cultural
and cultural-political contribution to the 20th century.
