Ordering, submissions, spam and privacy

How to Order

To order, contact us at questions**experimentalmusic.co.uk (replace ** with the usual @ when mailing us).  Give us the titles and catalogue numbers of the items of which you’re interested.  If you’d like to know more about them, or if there’s something else you want which you don’t see here, then get in touch, and we’ll try to answer your query.

We will figure out the postage and packing charge—please tell us which country you would like your order sent to and whether you’d like it air or surface mail to help us to do so! – and let you know the total by return email.  There are two ways to pay: by Paypal and by cheque.

By Paypal.  Those of you who have found our cheque charges for dollars and other non-sterling currency too much, well, we did, too.  All the money went to our bank and it was the best we could find at the time.  However, Paypal allows us to receive payments by Visa and Mastercard for a small (reasonable) fee. Go to http://www.paypal.com, Paypal’s web site, to see if it’s for you; with it, ordering through us should be faster, quicker and cheaper.  There is a small charge for the use of this service which we’ll have to pass on, but it’s usually only one or two pounds instead of almost £7 the banks charge.  We’ve been told that it’s easier to join if you’re resident of the US, Britain, and certain other countries: check their site for more information on this.  Also, in our experience we’ve found the conversion rate used by Mastercharge and Visa to be okay, so if you want to pay by credit card in pounds sterling, rather than having us convert the price into dollars, euros or yen, it might work out slightly cheaper.

By cheque or international money order.  This is no longer an option, unless you’re a big corporation with strict rules against using Paypal. The conversion rates are really costly, especially after Brexit!

Delivery.  As soon as we get payment, we will send out your order.  If you’re ordering music which you are going to play in public, let us know when you’re going to do so and we’ll put a notice on our Blog.  And do let us know about the way you got into experimental music and how you like it—it’s really fun to hear from all kinds of ‘experimental’ people!

Guide for contributors

The EMC welcomes new works by composers for consideration as to publication.  Simply contact us telling us about your music, and we will tell you how to submit your score for our perusal.

What the EMC looks for.  All decisions about the content of the EMC are made by the directors of the EMC and all such decisions are final.  These decisions may be made on criteria other than the quality of the submission, for good or for ill; rather they are made on the basis of whether a submission can be thought of as an EMC piece. The EMC house style has been that of English experimental music in all of its manifestations throughout the years: a tendency toward quirky eclecticism is one of the main features of this movement. Other features may be discerned through a study of the works of EMC composers through the years. What the EMC does not want is for contributors to re-invent the wheel, however. A genuinely original work will be looked upon with more favour than a slavish imitation Voicepiece or The Piano (unless the originality of a good pastiche is meant).

Keep watching this space.  As in the old EMC, the new EMC will be publishing anthologies of new works.   If you’re on our mailing list, you will receive word of any search for compositions; otherwise, you can find all such news on this page.

Address for submissions: submit**experimentalmusic.co.uk (for **, substitute @)

Sending us stuff

We’ve been receiving a lot of email and Facebook messages about new releases. Some of those announcements have confused us. “Check out my new single!” and a link, for example. Is this a circular to a mailing list? Is this a personal note to the EMC? Sometimes we just don’t know. So we thought we might give some handy household hints to help you let us know about your music, what we need to know and what we can (and cannot) do.

  1. The first thing we’d like to know is…what do you want from us? Are you sending us news of your release, composition, or other work? Or are you sending it, hoping to get a review, or for us to publish it? Can you tell us about it? About yourself? Would you like to engage in a conversation, or are you just spreading the news?
  2. If you want an answer from us, it’s always best to personalise your message and direct it to the right person. And the best, most permanent and sure way to do that is by email, not Facebook messages. Our address for submissions goes directly to our founder, Chris Hobbs. You can find out how to submit here: Ordering, submissions, spam, and privacy. Or you can contact Virginia Anderson (the EMC web thingie) or me (admin) via the contact information on our home page, for any other announcements or queries.
  3. It would help us to know what you’re doing if you understand what we do. Before you submit, please check out our site—especially the Catalogue and our Bandcamp page. Can you see your album or score on those pages? Your music doesn’t have to sound like the music on the EMC site. But would you be happy to have it there? Would the EMC be the natural place your fans would go to find your music? Can you explain to us what makes your music perfect for the EMC?
  4. Procedural/technical issues: if you are sending a sample of your work, we’d prefer to check it out on a streaming or other website like Soundcloud or YouTube first. Try to avoid paywall services such as iTunes, Spotify, or Amazon Music, unless you only wish us to hear the short sample on those sites. And we’d appreciate downloads later in our conversation—we don’t need them immediately.
  5. Finally, neither the EMC nor our peer-review journal, JEMS, has a tradition of or facility for album reviews. We might chat about a minimalist or experimental concert we’ve attended or performed in, or we might share a link to an archival performance we’ve found on YouTube and elsewhere, but we don’t do formal reviews. Sorry. There are many online journals and sites like WireDustedNewMusicBox, and Perfect Sound Forever that do this better than we can.

Anyway, I hope this will be of help and that this will clear up any confusion when we receive your announcements of new music. And even if you don’t want us to publish your work, we love hearing about it, so keep spreading the news!

Thanks, admin

Spam and Privacy Policy

The EMC hates spam as much as anyone else.   We do not use addresses of subscribers on email lists we may join and will only mention EMC music on these lists if it is pertinent to discussions or the ethos of the list and preferably with the permission of the list owner.  The EMC will never sell any address list it holds, nor any information on EMC clients.

We understand that there is too much traffic in emails these days, so we have moved to an RSS feed for our events and blogs.  If anything we send is not for you, then send a message to nothanks**experimentalmusic.co.uk (for **, substitute @) and we’ll part as friends.

On a related subject, we will never send you an attachment unless you have requested it (such as in our current ‘Why Not?’ offer).  There’s been a spate of Microsoft viruses which have in a couple of circumstances taken our address from a victim’s afflicted inbox and we have, ourselves, got viruses sent from ‘ourselves’ (actually a spoofed address).  We send our correspondence about orders and submissions in plain text.  For safety’s sake (to deter the accidental transmission of viruses), we would appreciate prior notification if you want to send attachments to us (submission materials, for instance).