Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. He began his career at the  NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including  The Face,  Arena,  Tatler,  Uncut,  Sight & Sound,  The Wire, the  Guardian, the  London Review of Books and  City Journal. He is the author of the collections  Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998),  It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019) and Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023).