Free Music Production. FMP – The Living Music

This book is dedicated to the history of the music label Free Music Production (FMP), which from 1968 to 2010 achieved incomparable things as a Berlin platform for the production, presentation and documentation of music. Based on many conversations from over thirty years with key protagonists such as Peter Brötzmann or Jost Gebers, Markus Müller tells the success story of a musicians' initiative that emerged in the context of the 1968 ideas of self-organization and self-determination and worked successfully in an international network for over 40 years. Thematic focal points include formats developed by the FMP such as the Total Music Meeting and the Workshop Freie Musik, the production of recordings, relations with GDR musicians, FMP and women, the internationally groundbreaking collaboration with Cecil Taylor (to which a text by Diedrich Diederichsen is also dedicated), as well as FMP and its interdisciplinary border crossings. In doing so, the book builds on the major FMP exhibitions in Munich and Berlin curated by Müller, but in many aspects goes far beyond them. Thanks to unrestricted access to the FMP-Publishing Archive in Borken, countless first-published documents and photographs from the history of the FMP can be found. The 400-page, large-format book, designed by Double Standards, has more than 300 illustrations and presents the FMP as West Berlin's most important cultural and cultural-political contribution to the 20th century.