I’m really excited to announce the launch of my new semi-irregular label and press, <blink>, with two related releases.
I’ve been hesitant to really make this ‘official’ for some reason, but it’s happening now and I’m excited for what’s in the works.
First, a little about the concept for <blink>:
<blink> comes out of my desire to have a community minded label that isn’t just about selling records, is open to different genres and media, and operates from a base of mutual support and excitement. Over time we’ll release music, sound art, artist multiples, books, software, and things I can’t even predict or imagine yet.
Each piece has sound at its core, even if that’s not music or a traditional recording. Releases will follow a basic format: sound + writing + image/video… the format of those things will range from limited art multiples to purely digital free/open object … mp3’s to executables.
I’m taking inspiration from some examples of cross-media artist presses like Art Metropole, squint press, Fluxus, early net-art …
For the first release on we’ve got a new sound + book project that comes out of my recent exhibition A Path. The release has two components: a recorded excerpt of the four channel installation ‘Breath from Breath’ and a limited edition artist’s book ‘Paths’.
‘Breath from Breath’ is a generative sound work where my voice, deconstructed into individual phonemes, seeks out and speaks stuttering reassembled words, iterating through gibberish and nonsense to find small moments of fleeting meaning. In response to the voice a soundscape is built out of the scraps of field recordings, old music, and em/rf frequency recordings.
‘Paths’ is a book of code, poetry, and collage thinking about the overlap between computation, language, and mysticism. It’s a 30 page poetry zine taking inspiration from 80’s programming manuals.
Both works were part of an exhibition this spring – A Path, which you can see documentation of here: A Path - 2021 Master of Visual Studies Thesis Exhibitions, The University of Toronto
Any purchase of the print book comes with the ‘Breath from Breath’ audio, and purchasing the audio comes with a PDF copy of the book.
I hope people find the concept of both the label and the piece interesting, and I’m always happy to answer any questions or chat about process/concept.
Links to all the things: