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After the bedroom, or, on exceeding demand

"The unplugging of electronic music presents an occasion for new social arrangements for the production, circulation and audition of electronic music, electro-acoustic practice and sound art."

So begins the Articles of Incorporation; an impudent document composed on the founding of a new political-aesthetic organization out of the restructured remains of the audio activist group Ultra-red. The sphere of the bedroom has ceased to function in the economy of electronic musical sound and value. If the bedroom once laid bare the quivering membrane between public and private, the record offers a new site for militant inquiry.

While neo-liberal discourse held aloft the bedroom entrepreneur as an ideal agent for the imagined world of resolved economic crisis, our current age of military discipline and accumulation through war has exiled the bedroom as a site of market sublimation. Crisis is not the state of exception, it is the state. The bedroom only ever attempted to dress this fact in libidinal naïveté and not to resolve it. With breathable air now reserved for anthems of moralism and bribery, the libido has been downsized. The bedroom shuttered.

Networks for the sharing of tactics and knowledge about specific sites of contest have been the order of militant struggle since the disintegration of the new economic fantasy. Markets stand in the way of building and nurturing such networks. A fact that has reached even to the level of the subcultural: Who does music affect? Who can read its syntax? And who enjoys its excess? These questions have come to suck the air out of any market idealism -- sub or supra.

In response to this circumstance, a vital component of the restructured Ultra-red organization is Public Record, a web-only archive for the distribution of work by its members and allies. Public Record will develop through the social processes engaged by its contributors and users. As an archive, Public Record incorporates that fundamental question of how the record of a specific time and place can be activated in the present for collective struggles toward possible futures. Public Record occupies the entirety of that process. Less a compendium of political and artistic victories, Public Record assembles contingent communities infused with an audacity to feel, imagine and practice those futures.

The record only exists in its excavation. The record demands to be used. And the record exceeds the demand.


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