Mark Sinker's CV
I am available for full-time, part-time or short-term projects in editing, rewrite, subbing and proofing,
including consulting on book or magazine or web projects.
I also run a workshop for non-professional writers.
I am a Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders.
Contact me at marksink3r at googlemail dot com
books and other projects
2023: Editorial consultant on Bob Stanley’s Bee Gees: Children of the World, Nine Eight books
2022: Editorial consultant on David Renton’s Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism, Routledge
2022: Editorial work on P.P.Arnold’s autobiography Soul Survivor, Nine Eight books
2022: Editorial consultant on Bob Stanley’s Too Darn Hot, Faber & Faber
2022: Editorial work on Stephen Coates’ Bone Music, Strange Attractor
2021: Proofing Andrew Krivine’s Reversing Into the Future: New Wave Graphics 1977-1990, Pavilion Books
2021: Editorial work on Rose Simpson’s Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden A Girl’s Life in The Incredible String Band, Strange Attractor
2020: Editorial work on Joe Banks’ Hawkwind: Days of the Underground — Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia, Strange Attractor
2020: Editorial work on Humphrey Ocean, a catalogue for the Royal Academy of Arts
2019: Editorial work on Joe Muggs’ Bass, Mids, Tops — An Oral History of Sound System Culture, Strange Attractor
2012: Editorial consultant on Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! A History of Modern Pop, Faber & Faber
2011: Editorial consultant on New York fine artist Seth Edenbaum’s Avant-Garde is Kitsch: an Essay on Modernism and Modernity in Politics and Culture, no publisher currently
2006: Production Editor/Advisor to ed.Hatice Abdullah, Departures and Arrivals: Turkish Cypriots who Came to England between 1936 and 1964: 36 Interviews, published by the Turkish Cypriot Community Association
1998-99: Libretto for an opera – Terminatrix TX3 – with director Rae Smith, composer Sarah Collins and actor-dancer Liz Rankin as the cyborg, performed at the National Theatre Studios and the English National Opera Studio
1998: Production Editor/researcher on Fifty Years of the Future, a Chronicle of the ICA, ICA Publications (ICA = Institute for Contemporary Arts)
1997: Editor of Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun for Quartet books
1994: Editor of Eddie Prévost’s No Sound is Innocent for Copula books
(Eshun’s and Prévost’s books both cover avant-garde music in avant-garde literary styles. These were first-time authors with enormous expertise in obscure fields: my brief was to balance highly distinctive creative approaches with the interests of readers unversed in the detail, a task requiring tact as well as robust common sense)
1991: contributor with editorial input to ed. James Park, Cultural Icons: Stylemakers and Breakers since 1945, Bloomsbury
shepherding music-writing anthology to publication
2016-18: Ran successful Kickstarter in 2016 to fund, then commissioned and edited A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: the Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the 1960s-80s, in the words of those who were there: a collection of conversations and essays, memories and commentary from the heyday of British pop music writing, to be published by Strange Attractor in summer 2018.
conference organisation
2015: Ran Underground/Overground: The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968-85 at Birkbeck College.
communication workshops
2008-date: ‘Putting the Tyger Back in the Forest’, a regular communication training workshop for Crafts Council’s maker development programmes (presently named Hothouse).
magazine work
1998-2014: On editorial staff at Crafts magazine, with both advisory and production role (inc.advising development Crafts Council website 2009)
2003-date: Contributing editor at the Freaky Trigger weblog, a topical cultural discussion collective
1998-2012: Contributing editor at Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s monthly journal of record, review and opinion
1994–97: Sub-editor at Sight and Sound
1992–94: Editor at The Wire, influential and pioneering monthly music magazine covering electronic music and jazz, avant gardes, undergrounds and overgrounds worldwide
1991-92: Assistant editor at The Wire
1988: Editor of ‘Other Voices’ section in NME, a section I founded, dedicated to musics other than rock, pop and dance, of significance to NME readers. It died shortly after I left the paper
writing and research
1982-date: in music, film, and the politics of culture, technology and science. Freelance contributor to various publications, popular and academic, including 4columns, the London Review of Books, Sight and Sound, the Wire, Freaky Trigger, Crafts, Tribune, Blueprint, Wasafiri, Film Quarterly, the Musical Quarterly, the Village Voice, New Musical Express (NME), Arena, The Face, the Observer
parallel projects (radio and internet)
2008: Co-devisor and presenter of A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou, a programme devoted to the classic science fiction short story, on air at Resonance Radio 104.4FM
2006-date: Co-devisor of and contributor to Freaky Trigger and the Lollards of Pop, the weblog discussion collective on air at Resonance Radio 104.4FM
2001-04: administrator and moderator at ilxor, a community of internet message-boards including I LOVE MUSIC.
conferences and lectures
2014: ‘These Happy Feet Are All We Need’: some thoughts about dress-up and dance and video, motion and provocation, Adam Ant and us…’ at the ‘Go! Music and Mobility’ conference, at the Experience Music Project, Seattle, April 24-27, 2014: notes on paper viewable here
2007: ‘b-but does it pass the test of SPACE?: Why Rotten Music-Writing Creates Worse History; How the Music this Damages – Not to Mention the Music It Doesn’t – Suggests Ways Writers Can Do Something About It (Possibly); How We Can Bring the Lost Moment Back to Life without Destroying It’, at the ‘Waking up from History: Music, Time and Place’ conference, at the Experience Music Project, Seattle, April 19-22, 2007
2007: ‘All Small Beasts: Diminutive Secular Animism as a model for Democratic Values in the Work of Tove Jansson’, with Dr Victoria de Rijke, Reader in Arts and Education at Middlesex University, at the Tove Jansson conference, Pembroke College, Oxford, 24 March 2007
2004: ‘Blips, Blizzards, Biology: How the Avant-Garde Composer Yannis Xenakis Deployed Hardcore Stochastic Theory to Tell Us What We Actually Already Knew in Our (Ear)Bones (Probably)’, at the NOISETHEORYNOISE#2 conference, Middlesex University, 20 November
1999: ‘Home is Where the Heat Is – When Spacemen Fall to Earth’, at the 19 June Intergalactic Conference, during Space: 1999 – Ten Days that Shook the Universe, a festival of independent community-based space exploration, organised by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA), the independent, community-based space programme, 18-27 June, London, Earth
1998: ‘The Pinhole Effect: How Recording Technology Artificially Created Natural Rhythm – A Study in Unplanned Repetition and the Inadvertent Sophistication of the Mass Public Ear’, at the LOOS Speed/Time-Circle Festival, the Hague, 29-31 October
1998: ‘From Lenin’s Office to Altair 4: a Cultural History of the Theremin’, lecture as part of the Theremin Heaven evening, Lux Cinema, 18 March
1996: ‘Taking Sweets from Unearthly Strangers: Radio Waves, Thrown Voices, Long Distance Desire’, at the THINKINGalien conference, sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Values, University of Lancaster, and the Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, held at University of Leeds, 16-17 September
1996: ‘Music Frees Itself: Leaving the Grid, Before and After the Digital Age’, at the Virtual Future 96: Datableed multidisciplinary conference, Warwick University, 3-5 May
Mid-80s to 90s: research and consultancy on various TV projects and proposals relating to the politics of culture, technology and science
1993: weekly guest lecturer at St Martins College of Art, for the Media Studies section of Graphic Design course under designer and record-maker Jon Wozencroft
education
2nd class degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, New College, Oxford
A-levels in Mathematics/Further Mathematics, Music, Latin