Bumping Into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal
released May 2014 - Book (edition of 300)

Written by Ezekiel Honig
Illustrations by Asli Senel Smith
Book design by Giles Dickerson

Bumping Into a Chair While Humming explores the sonic potential in everyday objects, spaces, and interactions - the importance of recognizing happy accidents and using the tools at your disposal toward creative ends. It concentrates on how to create a personal soundscape by searching for the moments in one's immediate environment that resonate for the individual, while editing, arranging, and completing work. The author, Ezekiel Honig, imparts clues into his favored music production processes, but the book is more focused on the practice of listening itself, and how that benefits one's art, and life in general. It plays with ideas in the creative process and how to use them, through anecdotal qualities and illustrations of hypothetical moments ranging from the associations we have with inanimate objects, utilizing different types of spaces, and experimenting with rhythm.

The book is punctuated by, and highlighted with, illustrations by Asli Senel Smith – complex line drawings that abstractly define the subjects of each chapter, concretizing the concepts on the page and capturing the introspective, yet expansive tone.

The first edition pressing of 300 comes with a letter-pressed cover on handmade paper, filled with the texture and individual artifacts of the careful production process. (Photos on this page are courtesy of Giles Dickerson.)

$20 + shipping