This release is the result of about 6 months of work, most of it having nothing to do with recording these tapes. They are snapshots of my road to transition, capsules of subjectivity shared with friends and slowly introduced to the world in other ways. Material artifacts of a practice and a person in transition. These recordings are translations–– approximations of the features, with some significant details missing.

It fills my heart with joy that in my personal archive of this project, two friend's names needed to change to accommodate the spectacular growth of their signifiers. Truly stitch!

I started this project by making 11 sound collages on a Tascam Portastudio 414mkii, probing the properties of the 4 track machine, which accomplishes 4 track recording by writing to all 4 lanes of the cassette (side A and side B) simultaneously. Once my collages were done, I started making mixtapes out of them and sending them to other artists. I wove in field recordings and other tapes from my collection.

Abby, Helena, and Mah Nu have 4 track machines of their own, so I attempted to build some interactivity into their collages. All of these tapes can be used as interactive pieces of music, but also as instruments. If you put them into Audacity, you can interact with them too. The speed at which they were recorded for this collection is arbitrary.

ENERGY was performed on September 13, 2020 to accompany a remote self-tattoo session by Output.live connecting artists from San Francisco, Moscow, Nairobi, Berlin, and LA, documented for this collection, and sent to Mah Nu, a noise artist in Chicago.

The contents of some of these tapes have been released already in several ways, and themselves contain other releases.

Non-exhaustive list:
- Intentionally documented miracle
- Lee's Memory Palace
- Columbarium
- Buried in my hypertext eulogy to Tvordis Veeler
- As a Notion archive document shared with friends
- Output.live performance: tinyurl.com/goblinaxpang


The most important way they were released was into the hands of other artists, as an object which will be performed differently each time it is played, depending on the machine used to play it back.

I argue that we translate music every time we listen regardless of medium. A core aim of this work and An Exploded Composition is to prove by algebra that recording is translation, but no more or less so than perception and communication.

The way it was released is as important as the work itself.

Like my other work in and outside of sound media, this resembles a documentation of phenomena more than a release by an artist to be categorized in the genre of recorded music.

Those who pay for this work will receive access to an database in progress of source and performance tapes along with archival material used to record the tapes.