Curious Sounds
A Dialogue in Three Movements
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A collaborative book by two extraordinary Black artists about finding beauty in the chaos.
Roger Mooking is well-known as a celebrity chef and the host of such television shows as the Cooking Channel’s Man Fire Food and Everyday Exotic; he is also a recording artist with five albums to his credit and a visual artist who creates immersive experiences that merge the visual, sonic, and culinary arts. francesca ekwuyasi is a writer and filmmaker who won wide acclaim for her award-winning, bestselling debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread. These two enormously talented Black artists join forces in Curious Minds, a book of art, stories, and conversations that illuminates the journey to find solace and perspective in an increasingly hyperactive and distracting world.
Inspired by the fact that the average human attention span lasts 8.25 seconds, Curious Sounds is a collection of small bursts of light, color, and words that explore how time shapes and defines the world, especially from a Black perspective. Comprising three parts, which mirror the arc of a life—the Learning, the Living, and the Leaving—the book is a series of fleeting moments and visuals that help us to discover the beauty in our own chaos.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mooking, musician and host of the TV show Man, Fire, Food, and novelist ekwuyasi (Butter Honey Pig Bread) weave together an exuberant multimedia celebration of "being alive," and of creativity as an "outlet to quell the things that damage," based on Mooking's 2023 concept album, SoundBites. The first section unfolds in a loose conversational format, as the authors "shoot the shit and ponder the human condition," holding forth on the creative process, grief, and intergenerational trauma. In the process they unearth the stories behind each of the album's songs, including a poignant discussion of "When Words Fail," which reflects the grief Mooking felt after losing two of his children (the track is "raw with emotion, the kind of wisdom that can only come when you've seen some things," ekwuyasi observes). In later sections each song is paired with a painting and a haiku-like micro-story from Mooking, some animated by an emotional immediacy ("The boulder rolls heavy down the mountain. It splits its head open without a sound"). While the motley mix of lyrics, conversation, narration, art, and story often jumbles together, the unorthodox structure is part of the appeal—there's a sense of a mind spilled onto the page, with sharp insights scattered throughout. The results are both odd and enchanting. Illus.
