It’s easy to underestimate the continued efforts that certain people sink into not only their own art but everyone’s art; what they do to keep their scene alive, what influence their championing and curating have, what wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for them. Scott Kindberg is certainly one of them. Not only has he steadily been working on an impressive oeuvre of his own work, he has also invested endless amounts of finite resources (time, money, energy) into empowering and spotlighting others. One of his recent endeavours was a variation on the popular HNW tape swap, for which he teamed up two artists each for every month – one from Europe, one from the US. They would collaborate on a tape, of which they would each distribute 11 copies to the other participating artists from their side of the ocean.
For this tape swap, I was paired up with Jacob Thomas, who these last few years has been chiefly active as the excellent Tyrant Flycatcher. In March 2022, we got off onto a start that was more than exciting when we began exchanging ideas and concepts through e-mail. It quickly became apparent that we’d have no trouble finding common ground to explore. We were both keen and excited to dive into the conceptual side of our prospective tape, finding inspiration in esoterics, philosophy and mathematics, among many other things. There was evidently infinite potential and it was a major challenge to not get too carried away. When life started to intervene on my side, our project began to run into some delays. Amidst everything, with definite efforts from my side but most certainly sustained efforts on Jacob’s side, we did manage to record our walls and find the time to remix and reassemble our recordings to meet our joint expectations.
It ended up being an endlessly interesting project, even if we (and I must certainly take the blame here, for the delays were pretty much entirely my fault) did not realise all of the ideas we had for it. Somehow, however, that fits this tape, which ended up being called Statica, an intersectional exploration of physical, spiritual and mathematical interprations of static interactions: homophony, cacophony, polyphony and antiphony. It is, without meaning to be pretentious, wildly ambitious, of course: a tape that attempts to connect a truly wild array of concepts by its approach to sound, by equating ((re)interpretations of) (literally) audio engineering (acoustics, physical effects, etc.) to Lacanian psychoanalysis, mathematical concepts of infinity and a myriad of pathways into and out of spirituality. It seeks to redefine or recast terms such as homophony and antiphony in the context of explorations of static. I think we (meaning, perhaps again, I – I wish to give Jacob all the credit in the world for his lucidity and intelligence) almost got lost in the endless meanings we could instill our work with. That it ended up, against all initial plans, a simple tape in a simple case with a simple J-card, is, then, probably apt. More than that might only destract from all it tries to say.
Collaborations are always challenging, especially those in which a true meeting of minds is pursued. In the past few years, I’ve successfully begun a handful of such ambitious collaborations, some of which most certainly managed to get to advanced stages of progress, but which, as of yet, have not been completed. (Splits, of course, are usually a lot easier.) Two of the these projects that progressed furthest and will hopefully see the light of day at some point I undertook with, respectively, Paul Kervegan and James Shearman. For now, they remain somewhere in that ambiguous area of semi-existence, in flux, indefinite and full of potential. It will be interesting to see whether they, if they are someday realized, will fullfill that potential. Statica, I think, certainly does.
S V E N K A Y 