Greetings from Sunny Anonymity
A mini-interview on my "audio postcards" series
Regular followers of this column are probably, by this point, aware of my additional work / play as a composer, and as occasional backer of other friendly composers and sound artists. Over the past year and a half, via my fledgling Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity label, I’ve begun curating a number of different projects that would provide an immersion in “avant garde” sound without any stylized elitism and without reliance on genre conventions. Some of the projects-in-progress include my “Liminalia” series (several volumes’ worth of recordings inspired by performances that took place in dreamed venues), a multi-artist undertaking to make soundtracks based on “film treatments” for non-existent films, and of course my “audio postcard” project.
The latter has, to my amazement, rapidly gone from “Gee, I hope someone actually submits something for this” status to “I need to hire someone to manage this backlog of submissions” status. With that, there have been an increasing number of questions from interested parties, and some press inquiries as well.
Nicolas Malevitsis, a Thessaloniki-based, reliable backer of the sonic arts, recently posed a few questions to me about the general direction of this series, and posted them on the Greek-language music portal MIC (link is here in the original Greek, for those with competence in that language). The answers I provided are not shockingly new ones for regular readers of my sermons here, but are nevertheless valuable re-affirmations of what I believe and how I hope to convert that belief into some tangible form.
Thanks again to Nicolas for taking the time to do this. Our mini-Q&A is as follows (with minimal edits by me):
- Could you give me some brief information about your new audio post card series?
The FMOA 'audio postcard' series was born out of practicality, but then took on other meanings. It's an initiative I thought up when realizing how absurd the prices are for simply shipping one CD or vinyl from the United States to other countries (in many cases, the shipping is more than the actual sale price of the album).
So the obvious answer to that would be just releasing everything as a digital download or stream-able audio work. But, given that one of the goals for my work is the diversification of experience (and that itself is a prelude to a greater understanding of the inter-relatedness of all phenomena), I still feel that it is valuable for us to have some aspects of our aesthetic experience that occur away from a screen.
So, these cards were a nice way to circumvent economic factors beyond my control, and to give supporters a carefully constructed, tactile "social proof" or their contribution to the furthering of audio culture. Each postcard includes a digital download of new audio work, which is exclusive to this series and not what you might call "b-side" material or "outtakes": I always encourage everyone participating in this initiative to submit material that matches the quality of their output on the more traditional audio storage formats.
They also feature original artwork from the recording artists, and tactile features which vary from card to card - for example, we used a raised silver foil finish to include braille text on a collaboration between Texan artist Skullcaster and myself, and a raised 'spot gloss' finish on the most recent release from Roel Meelkop (i.e. clear text finish which will be fully visible only under certain lighting). I find that, forcing ourselves to work within this very small allotment of physical space, we often come up with more interesting ideas and approaches than when we have fewer physical constraints....it's healthy to avoid this so-called "option paralysis".
- How did you come up with the idea of the series title? I liked it a lot upon reading “Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity”!
"Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity" is the name for my fledgling audio-visual label, and this is a good first project for that label, in terms of embodying what that moniker means to me.
The philosopher John Gray, in one of his short essays, updated Andy Warhol's famous proclamation about everyone being famous in the future for fifteen minutes: he implied that this future was with us now, and now having fifteen minutes of anonymity would be the exceptional condition. The networked world has unfortunately brought us to a place where humans feel like they do not exist unless others have acknowledged their existence, and I think this is the great psycho-pathology of our time. We have elevated public acknowledgement to a sort of survival-level need, and come to believe that your value as a social being can be metrically verified via "follower count", "engagements" on one's social postings, etc.
This has led to previously inconceivable levels of anxiety and psychic stress, and naturally I encourage people to instead seek their fifteen minutes of anonymity. I highly recommend everyone to watch the scene in Orson Welles' great F is for Fake, in which he rhapsodizes about Chartres Cathedral and how it "testifies to all we had within ourselves to accomplish," yet we don't remember the names of the people responsible for it. I am thinking of something along these lines, and have a feeling that the artists I work with are similarly inclined: we, and I think some of the most incredible artists that have existed, act as conduits for some vital force that precedes us and survives us, rather than us being the "superstars" at the center of our own personal films.
And so the postcards are a kind of humble metaphor for the real interaction, exchange, and communication that proceeds when we create not to develop our public / social "identities", but to expand the boundaries of expression and creativity themselves.
- Is it a series you wish to continue or works mostly like a project that you have in mind to run for a limited time?
I think we will keep this going for as long as there's an interest in it, and things are encouraging so far. My plan is to, at the end of a full year's worth of releases, provide subscribers to the series with a box that will contain all of the cards released for that year, along with some additional surprises (for example, a bonus album of additional material from the artists in question). Subscribing to the series is definitely the best "value for money", in my expert opinion ;-)
I will usually release 1 or 2 of these postcards per month, and right now I have enough of a "backlog" to take us into February of next year, with more stuff on the way! I'm also going to be reaching out to some artists who are more known as "visual" artists than as sound artists, or others who just resist an easy classification.