Four weeks from today The Masses will be debuting E-Info Age Bookmix (The Second Spoken Arts Record You Can Dance To). Behind the cryptic title lies a collaborative work that combines a media archeology of late 1960s attempts to remediate the paperback book for the television age (by, among other things, augmenting it via LP remixes), and a
live musical performance of The Electric Information Age Book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). The latter has itself been remixed in the freshly minted LP –pure VINYL– The Electric Information Age Album which is about to come out with Inventory Records and Giant Corporate Records.
My
splendid collaborators on this project are Adam Michaels, one of the founders of Project Projects, and the sound artist Daniel Perlin who works at Local Projects and has done some terrific sound installation work at places like the Storefront. Shannon Harvey will be at the keyboard for the live concerts listed below.
The world premiere of E-Info Age Bookmix (The Second Spoken Arts Record You Can Dance To) is scheduled for September 17 and 18 at the Teatro Franco Parenti in Milan, Italy, as a feature event of the MiTo international music festival.
A performance at MOMA P.S 1 will follow on September 30 as part of the New York Book Fair Expo.
Here’s a clip from Visual-Verbal-Vernacular from the forthcoming LP.
Here’s some copy regarding the performance:
Can you dance to a book?
The question was answered in the affirmative by the “first spoken arts record you can dance to”: the Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel record album The Medium is the Massage. The LP was released by Columbia Records in July 1967 on the heels of the mass market success of the first “electric information age” book The Medium is the Massage: a book signed by McLuhan but crafted by graphic artist Fiore and book producer Agel on the basis of McLuhan’s writings on media theory. The book was a remix. The LP was a remix of a remix: a massage of McLuhan’s message for the Mass Age.
So, can you dance to a book?
The question is answered (again) by the “second spoken arts record you can dance to”: a multimedia collaboration between DJ/composer Daniel Perlin, designer/musician Adam Michaels, and historian/performer Jeffrey Schnapp. Perlin, Michaels, and Schnapp have formed the group The Masses in order to remix their recent book about books like The Medium is the Massage: The Electric Information Age Book.
The two MiTo performances will answer the question of how do you dance to a book in the Mass Age?
Twice.
