Published, designed, and produced by Ross Waitman and Amaya Productions in collaboration with the artist, ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE compiles mail-art, collages, assemblages, flyers, slides, video stills, ephemera, record and tape covers to present an arresting cross-section of the genre-sundering art Nigel Ayers created between 1980 and 1992. It features an introductory reflection from Ayers, as well as an essay entitled “Bleeding Images: Antipsychiatry, Death, and Mind Control” by art historian and critic Nicolas Ballet (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), contextualizing Ayers’s work and extensive career.
Hi Fi Sound by Nigel Ayers 11″x9″; photocopy paper & Letraset collage; 1990. Courtesy of the artist.
ABOUT THE ARTIST Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline Kaye), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminating not only NE sides but also defining work from Lustmord, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, and others between 1979 and 1986. In 1987, Ayers inaugurated the Earthly Delights label with the now-canonical Caroline K recording Now Wait For Last Year, and the imprint has since served as Ayers’s primary outlet for releasing new work, whether as Magnetizdat, Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, or Nocturnal Emissions, a going concern to this day.
Text adapted from the publisher’s press materials
ABOUT THIS BOOK ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE by Nigel Ayers 160 pages; full color offset, quarterbound wrap hardcover 12.25″x9.25″ ISBN: 9780578978208 $80 USD Limited edition of 750 copies; Printed by Edition One, Oakland, California, USA Amaya Productions, 2021
