OK, there hasn’t been a lot of activity on this news page in some time. The irony of that statement, however, is that I’m more busy personally than I have been in years. It seems like just yesterday that I was planning on limiting my already minimal public presence to absolutely nothing, and dropping my involvement in both writing and sound production. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure what I would have filled the time gaps blasted open by such an abandonment of activities that have busied me for decades. It probably wouldn’t have been anything too savory.
I still have plans to publish a fifth book this year, although it’s not easy serving two masters, and my activity with the “critique of authenticity” book has been temporarily reduced to just a few odd notebook scribblings per day as the “music” stuff gets revitalized.
On that front: I have not one, but two, collaborative albums brewing. One being a full split album with my friend Yin a.k.a. Reverse Image, a taster of which already exists here. Then there will be a three-headed collaboration between the two of us and Maurizio Bianchi, known to most as the Italian post-industrial pioneer M.B., but participating in this recording session with his Sacher-Pelz alias. I can say already that both of these albums are shaping up to be better than I initially expected, with clever nuances / subtleties sprinkled over torrents of massive sound.
I’m also making some efforts to turn my “Fifteen Minutes of Anonymity” vanity label into a forum for fascinating artists other than myself. One of the first projects with which FMOA will test these waters is a series of “audio postcards”: limited edition, nicely designed postcards with exclusive artwork, whose purchase will come with a download code for anything from a “single” to a full album’s worth of new sonic material. I’ll be releasing the first of these in the coming month. Though I had wanted to do the entire series on postcard-sized rectangles of etched metal, I eventually returned to consensus reality and concluded that this would be ridiculously expensive. Another one to take care of when I become independently wealthy, I guess.
With the inauguration of FMOA I've also coined the term "camo-acoustics" for the particular intense brand of acousmatic music created by my betters, my peers and myself. That is to say, music / organized sound in which the sense of confusion or incomprehensibility somehow manages to both be an aesthetic experience in its own right, and a tool for listeners to subsequently craft their own generators of aesthetic experience and meaning. There will be an official FMOA t-shirt forthcoming (also a "vehicle" for downloadable music), and then a full compilation of friends and collaborators that I feel are particularly talented in achieving the above.
So, all told, I seem to have woken up on the "keep going" side of bed more often recently than the "just give up" side. I think this will eventually produce rewarding dividends beyond what I, or really anyone else, expected.