Bloomsbury is extremely proud to announce the third of fourteen new 33 1/3 volumes…coming to a bookstore (and kindle/iPad) near you in: Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016 and Fall 2016. It was extremely difficult to select these titles from a pool of over 400 brilliant proposals so we hope you enjoy! To highlight each new title and the author behind it, we’ll announce one book each day over the next two weeks.

Beat Happening- Beat Happening

By Bryan C. Parker

Coming September 2015!

This is the album that sent a shockwave of empowerment through the nation’s cultural underground. In 1985, Olympia, Washington band Beat Happening released their eponymous debut of lo-fi pop songs on K Records and challenged every conception held about music. At the center of the group was the enigmatic Calvin Johnson and his revolutionary vision of artistic creation. His foresight and industriousness allowed him to recruit to the K Records roster other free-spirited artists like Beck, Modest Mouse, and Built to Spill long before they gained widespread acclaim.

This book, structured in abecedarian fashion, breaks down the fundamental components that defined Beat Happening’s self-titled album. Organized in a light-hearted yet incisive format, each of the book’s chapters details one particular facet of the record—band members, historic shows, recording sessions, songs, and ideologies. Open to any page, read a chapter or two; the individual parts and episodes of the album exist as reflections of the album as a whole.

Here is the story of a band that popularized do-it-yourself projects and home recording with four-track tape machines decades before the digital revolution would extend an open hand to garage bands everywhere. This is the story of musical pioneers. This is Beat Happening.

A bit about the author: Bryan C. Parker is a writer and photographer living in Austin, TX. He is editor-in-chief of the blog Pop Press International and creator of the quarterly print journal True Sincerity. Through these outlets, he interviews and photographs artists, documenting the local and national independent music community. In 2005, he founded the now defunct blog Urban Pollution. A graduate of the University of Texas, he teaches literature, rhetoric, and composition in Austin area high schools.

You can find Bryan on twitter here and here. You can also find his writing on Pop Press International and True Sincerity.