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November 2000

Seminal ‘Plunderphonic’ Audio Works Made Available Anew

2000-11-21 / [From detritus.net]: Between about 1979 and 1989 John Oswald, in the guise of The Mystery Lab, released a series of home-grown cassettes called The Mystery Tapes. Essentially an ever-evolving window on works in progress that he and his associates were engaged in, each of the tapes went through several different versions, some sounding completely different than earlier ‘releases’ of the identically-titled tape.

Thanx to Detrivores Lloyd Dunn and Wobbly, Detritus has obtained several of these amazing proto-plunderphonic studies and is now able to make them available to you in mp3 form. Each Saturday in November, 2000 there will be a new Mystery Tape available here for download. Since the tapes have never had much documentation, we provide them on their own, letting the sound speak for itself. However, for a little more information, be sure to check the plunderphonic site.

Listen to mp3s of these Mystery Labs works.

Visit the site devoted to Plunderphonics.

2000-11-20 / New Travel Photos. Well, it’s certainly true that I have been back from my visit to New York for over a week, but that does not mean that I’ve forgotten all about it. I have pictures, and you can look at them, too, if you want to.

Let me bore you with my travel photos.

Tape-beatles Participate in Creating Infinite Work, times 162

2000-11-16 / We received a curious object, with an Amsterdam postmark, at our address the other day. It appears to be (in fact it is) a 12-inch vinyl recording that features — we counted them — 162 separate tracks. What makes it even more unusual is that each of the tracks is, at least potentially, of infinite length. That’s right — this record has a track sequence of nothing but locked grooves! Further, one of the tracks (imaginatively entitled ‘untitled’) was contributed by The Tape-beatles, and can be heard (so far) nowhere else. Also included are tracks — or should they really be called ‘ruts’? — by D.J. Spooky, Pauline Oliveiros, Big City Orchestra, Merzbow, Carl Stone, |||, and many many many more (some artists have more than one ‘rut’).

Entitled LockERS, the LP is the output of the ERS label, which ‘ … is dedicated to the new and undiscovered. ERS is seeking viral ubiquity, conceptual quality, unapproachable source, and the opposite of each of these … .’ So all the bases are covered, anyway. Contact information for ERS follows.

ERS Records, P.O. Box 11453, 1001 GL Amsterdam, The Netherlands; E-mail: ers@staalplaat.com; Tel. 31 20 625 4176.

Website: http://radiantslab.com/ers.

2000-11-15 / Site Note. You may remember a day last September when we obliquely recommended in passing one company’s web browser over another — but only in an effort to enable you to see all our site has to offer. Now, with the release of Netscape 6 (still far from perfect), standards-compliance is, for most purposes, at parity among the most widely used web browsers. We therefore retract our earlier recommendation.

2000-11-12 / No thing to report. We hope you’ll forgive us this lapse in updates, but there really hasn’t been much news. This situation has become so dire, in fact, that I am left doing a verbal tap-dance to keep the audience occupied, while behind the scenes, my colleagues scratch their heads for something to say or do. Something will no doubt come to them, eventually.

A-ha! Here’s something. Ralph recently did a presentation at Mills College in Oakland having to do with the impermanence of sounds. He evokes the spirit of Edison in a ghostly drama that unfolds in the form of a Flash animation.

You can view it, if you want.

Hmm, here’s another thing. Lloyd recently completed a ten-day trip to New York to visit friends and get a feel for what life is all about on a busy island cut neatly into rectangular sections. While there, he stayed with Foomedia partner and sometime Tape-beatle collaborator Geoff Seelinger. You’ve really got to see the work of his group — it’s loads of fun and well worth the clicking.

Geoff’s work is at www.foomedia.com.

Another thing that happened — and we mean that in the best possible way — was that Lloyd presented works by the Tape-beatles in a class on computer art at the School for Visual Arts, lead by former Thaw film festival co-organizer Jarryd Lowder. So, in other words, we got our work ‘out there’ and helped to indoctrinate a new generation.

All things considered, November looks to be one of our quieter months, although we have plenty of projects in the works that will some day see the light of day. We are not at liberty to discuss them however, if only because they may inspire false hope in our most ardent ‘phans’ should their objects never materialize; but if you keep coming back here, you will be among the first to know about them when they do.

In the mean time, here’s a cool site we found.

2000-11-06 / Note. The CD Matter, which has been temporarily out of print for the last few months, is now once again available.