About Firesign: A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and ’70s told through the story of the period’s most important forgotten comedy group.

This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. At the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock explores how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture.

He deploys a vast range of material sources, drawing on numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group’s obsessive and ludic reflections—on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more—to focus on Firesign’s work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era.

About Instrument of War: An original history of music in the lives of American soldiers.

Since the Civil War, music has coursed through the United States military. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and packed the seats at large-scale USO shows. “Reveille” has roused soldiers in the morning and “Taps” has marked the end of a long day. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there was war, there was music, too.

Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with war’s emotional and psychological realities. Opening our ears to these practices, Suisman reveals how music has enabled more than a century and a half of American war-making. Instrument of War unsettles assumptions about music as a force of uplift and beauty, demonstrating how it has also been entangled in large-scale state violence.

Whether it involves chanting “Sound off!” in basic training, switching on a phonograph or radio, or cueing up an iPod playlist while out on patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers’ wartime experiences. Now we all can finally hear it.

Jeremy Braddock is the author of the first full-length study of the Firesign Theatre, Firesign:  The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums (2024) and of Collecting as Modernist Practice, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2012.  He teaches literature, sound and media studies at Cornell University.

David Suisman is the author of Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (2024) and the award-winning Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009). He is an associate professor at the University of Delaware and an occasional disc jockey at freeform radio station WFMU.

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