*Please note that this is a ticketed event hosted by Cafe Oto and RSVPing here does not guarantee entry*

Book your place here (advance tickets are £5) https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/repeater-books-presents-down-with-childhood/

Down With Childhood
Repeater Books presents a night of discussion and music revolving around musical innocence, wonder, and the demand to grow up. This evening will mark the publication of the book Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence by Paul Rekret, and will feature performances by Patchfinder, Jacob Williams and others to be announced, a multimedia presentation on the book by the author, followed by a panel discussion with Ash Sarkar, Dr Marie Thompson, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Paul Rekret.

About Down With Childhood
Sometimes music registers our concerns and anxieties more lucidly than we realise. This is evident in the case of an ideal of childhood innocence in rapid decay in recent decades.
So claims Paul Rekret’s new book Down with Childhood, as it takes in psychedelia’s preoccupation with rebirth and inner-children, the fascination with juvenilia amidst an ebbing UK rave scene and dozens of nursery rhyme hip-hop choruses spawned by a hit Jay-Z tune. Down With Childhood explores the relationship between the often remarked crisis of childhood and changing experiences of work and play and ultimately, to an ongoing capitalist crisis that underlies them.

Patchfinder – live performance
strong and stable electronics of austere-death

Jacob Williams – live performance
A one-off live electronic performance by musician and sound artist Jacob Williams (Petwo Evans/flies+flies), which will manipulate audio recordings from Paul Rekret’s archive – all around the theme of childhood – into an emotive soundscape/noise work using digital DJ technology and techniques inspired by the history of experimental turntablism.

Chloe Frieda (Alien Jams) – DJ set

Speaker bios:
Marie Thompson
Marie Thompson is a Lecturer in Lincoln School of Film and Media. Her research centres on the affective, material and gendered dimensions of sound, noise and music. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She has also published a number of chapters and articles on the intersections of noise and femininity.

Paul Rekret
Paul Rekret is Associate Professor in Politics at Richmond American International University. He is author of Philosophy, Politics, Polemics and his writing on music politics has appeared in The Quietus and Cesura//Acceso, among others. He is producer and host of Resonance.Extra’s ‘Beholder Halfway’.
Beholder Halfway
Down with Childhood

Ash Sarkar (Novara)
(bio to come)

Dhanveer Singh Brar
Dhanveer is a scholar of Black Studies, as it intersects with Cultural Studies, Sound Studies and Critical Theory. The research he undertakes covers theorizations of black diasporic sonic culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the question of form in the black radical tradition, and the politics of black critical thought. He has published in journals such as Social Text, Darkmatter and Cesura // Acceso and is a founding member of the London based Black Study Group. At present he is working on a book manuscript analysing electronic dance music, urban geography and sonic culture in the contemporary black diaspora of the Global North. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures, at Goldsmiths College, University of London