Art Metropole

#14457

Record Release 12 Inch 4001 - 5000

Price

$33.00

Date

2017

Publisher

Squint Press

Format

Artists' Books

Genre

Audio

Description

The raw material to make vinyl records comes in vinyl pellets, lentil-sized bits of petroleum product (PVC – polyvinyl chloride) that are in an easily transportable form before they get melted and stamped with grooves of sound. This project documents the deployment of these tiny units of potential through an inordinate number of photographs (13284 in total, in two equal series of 6642). To start, pellets were loaded on a scale until their weight reached 180 grams, which is the weight of audiophile vinyl (as opposed to 120 grams which is the standard weight of records). Then, over the course of the last seven years, one by one the pellets were either sold, gifted, or placed in a public space. Each transaction was photographed and paired with a photograph of the pellets arranged in the form of a 12″ record which is correspondingly diminished by one pellet each time. This particular 180 g batch of vinyl added up to 6642 pellets, and the very final one was released on April 5th, 2019. In other words, the record has finally been released (6284 were placed, 301 gifted, 51 sold, 6 sent via mail). For seven years, it was simply in the process of being released.

A record release, like a book launch, usually marks a project’s culmination, this reverses the process, the release is the project. As Seth Kim-Cohen put it, in discussing Record Release in his book Against Ambience (Bloomsbury 2016), “this ‘record’ is a record of social exchange, of site, of time, and of the exploded, diagrammatic construct of its potential for signification.” I would add that it is also a pairing of micro gestures with micro plastics; an examination of the manufacturing process and vinyl fetishism; a staging of sited strategies and furtive mobility tactics; a monument to the tiny and barely perceptible; a study in slow and inefficient action; a merging of depletion with completion; a rendering of sound as conceptual object into image as serial document.

The Record Release 12-inch project was completed in 2019 (6642 vinyl pellets, weighing 180g, were released one at a time over the span of seven years).

The book series comprises 14 books in total. 7″ x 10″ (179mm x 252mm). Full-colour. 112 pages (save for the last 2 which have 72 pages).

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