Ed Kuepper’s Honey Steel’s Gold
John Encarnação
BookIn September, Bloomsbury published John Encarnação’s book on Ed Kuepper’s 1991 album Honey Steel’s Gold in its 33 1/3 Oceania series. The book combines music criticism, musical analysis, popular music history and Australian cultural history. In this lightning talk, John will discuss the choices he made in writing the book with respect to style and content, in so doing contextualising it within the broad, emerging field of album studies.
John Encarnação is the author of Ed Kuepper’s Honey Steel’s Gold (2023, for 33 1/3 Oceania) and Punk Aesthetics and New Folk (2013), and co-editor (with Diana Blom) of Teaching and Evaluating Music Performance at University (2020). Recent essay subjects include Throbbing Gristle, Courtney Barnett, improvisation and collaborative composition in early Pink Floyd, and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve as a prognostication of the Trump era. Recent albums include the song collection Wooden Box With Strings (his fourth as Warmer) and the entirely improvised Giraffe Quartet and Duets. He lectures in music at Western Sydney University, and gigs with a number of bands as vocalist and guitarist.