december 28th, 2017
hello friend and user of the WWW,
if an album drops on the internet and like three people download it . . . did it make a sound?
if you spend your time alone with a screen, following links, literally whichever way, to a divine moment . . . then what?
an impression is just that; lots of time tomorrow to move on.
enter “hardly relevant”: a medium for meaning in the digital age. please join me in a year-long exercise in long-distance friendship, musical discovery, and shared experience.
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starting january 1st I’ll be making a weekly “mixtape” to document and share my musical life. the tapes might include anything: songs by others, my own demos, field recordings, poems, etc, etc. they’ll be equal parts musical diary, release medium, and handwritten letter. this project is a little attempt to create a personal musical experience in our depersonalized digital culture. music is a social phenomenon, so stop streaming that algorithmically chill playlist, whip out the tapedeck, and pop in my deranged mix.
the tapes will be handmade for a different person each week. this recipient will be on my mind while i’m putting together the mix, but i don’t plan to curate based on their tastes. instead the tapes will reflect what i’m excited about at a given point in time. i’ll post digital versions online, but there’ll be just one copy of the physical tape. if you’d like to receive one, all i ask in return is that once it arrives you send me (1) a photo of “you and the tape,” loosely interpreted, and (2) some “handmade” item of your choosing. this could be another mixtape, a photograph, a letter, a drawing, a poem. . . up to you. i just ask that you put some intentional energy into making it a personal object. the idea that this energy can create relevance and ward off obscurity is the focus of this project. let’s see what we can do.
fondly yours,
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note: got banned from youtube :( you'll have to download the files!