Reed First Pages

7. Mail Art, Tape Technology, and the Network 1. Fluxus and UFOs Beyond the localized industrial music sites discussed here, there were dozens of other important artists and developments early in the genre’s history. Patrick Codenys of the Belgian EBM act Front 242 recalls, “You have what I called the ‘UFOs’—like Crash Course in Science from Philadelphia . Severed Heads from Australia. "ey came out of the blue like that. "ey were isolated in the eighties, small units, self producing.”1 But the isolation in which most of these UFOs operated was merely a geo- graphic one; a vital connection exists between early industrial music and the global network established through the Fluxus art movement, its outgrowth of mail art, and the cassette and small press cultures that arose in the late 1970s. "ese are the surroundings that we might take to be this network’s techno- cultural geography. "is global communication system existed years before the online communities a#orded by today’s internet, but nevertheless was in many ways an international virtual scene—one whose virtuality indelibly shaped the music it produced. An important origin of this network lies in the democratizing art movement Fluxus. George Maciunas, whose family immigrated to the United States from Lithuania a$er World War II, studied art and design at some of the %nest schools in the country, focusing in particular on the history and interaction of modernist movements. Driven by the belief that art can be more than merely the one-time manipulation of a stable physical medium by a single artist for a discrete audience, Maciunas turned his attention to the questions raised by John Cage’s writing and music. With a solid grounding in Dada and the movements connected to it (as well as a correspondence with some of its original progenitors, now much older), Maciunas and a growing cadre of intellectual troublemakers began organizing multimedia Fluxus “happenings” in New York, at the short-lived radical Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and across Europe (Maciunas had a job in the early 1960s at an American Air Force base in West Germany). Out of a desire to bring art to new audiences in non-elitist, 110 /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& short Reed_Assimilate.indd 110 3/2/13 5:37 PM mass-produced means, members of this network began to exchange what they called mail art. Instigated in 1958, chie&y by New York artist Ray Johnson, mail art isn’t merely art sent via post to a speci%ed recipient, but it takes the epistolary act as its artistic locus. Mail art might be a handmade collage postcard sent to a friend, or a single-printing fanzine of cryptic phrases passed through the post to a dozen recipients from one to the next, or it might be mass mailings of doll parts to entire streets of strangers meant to bewilder and shock. "e act matters as much as the artifact, and an audience’s interpretation of the art is almost neces- sarily di#use, with each sender, courier, or recipient possessing a partial under- standing. By duplicating and forwarding art, adding names to ever-growing mailing lists, and incorporating new details—suggestive stamp arranging or ad- dressing with “Do Not Deliver To”—the line between artist and audience eroded. As discussed in Chapter 3, a variety of ideas from Fluxus in&uenced early industrial music, but the particular importance of its mail art wing cannot be overstated. It’s worth noting that mail art historically coincided with and was empowered by certain key technological developments Media scholar Paul "é- berge reminds us that “electronic technologies and the industries that supply them are not simply the technical and economic context within which ‘music’ is made, but rather, they are among the very preconditions for contemporary musical culture.”2 In the case of Fluxus, mail art, and industrial music, the pre- conditional new technologies include the photocopier and the cassette tape, which were developed in 1959 and 1962, respectively. (Signi%cantly, this is also a period during which popular music—especially hard bop and rock ‘n’ roll—attained more power than ever before to congregate youth subculture.) "ese reproduction technologies enabled the consumer-level mass distribution of images, written ideas, and recorded sound. Artists could create postcards, collages, and homemade pamphlets with visual panache using photocopiers and also new instant cameras—the folding Polaroid 100 series was introduced in 1963. By 1966, the con&uence of rock music and all this technology allowed the self-produced newsletter to break out of the underground nerd network and into the public “cool” with the rags Crawdaddy and Mojo Navigator. Most of the early readers of these zines were obsessive fans in science %ction and garage rock communities, largely unaware of Fluxus, but artistic and radical le$ist gangs had their own publications too. Independently printed specialized publications in art and politics date back more than a hundred years, but copy "e %rst mass-market cassette recorders didn’t hit shelves until 1964. "e medium began to be used regularly for music only around 1970. M a i l A r t , T ape T echnology, and the N e t w o r k 111 short /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& Reed_Assimilate.indd 111 3/2/13 5:37 PM shops allowed faster, more anonymous, more parodic, and more radical zines and lit mags. In fact, the movement’s name is taken from Maciunas’s own Fluxus artist book, which made extensive use of Xerox techniques. 2. A History of Tape Trading More directly relevant to industrial music is the huge network of cassette-based musicians and record labels that developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s all around the world. Nearly every active industrial musician in the world from 1975 to 1983 participated in this network. Although Northern England, Ber- lin, and San Francisco were geographical centers of the style, industrial music boasted a sparse, covert ubiquity nearly from the start. Its makers contributed to and were inspired by this underground cassette scene, itself the crossroads of cassette tape technology with the mail art submovement within Fluxus. It’s important to understand how this network came into being, because it’s not merely a question of mail artists making music. Fluxus questions the %xity of art objects by allowing events and acts to be living, social art, but the rise of tape exchange networks began independent of Fluxus, like the rock and sci-% zines mentioned above. "e actual medium of the cassette inspires politicized networking. "e core idea of this—that an artistic medium exists to be ques- tioned, to be manipulated, and, as the site of communication, to be shared— resonated strongly with the work of Maciunas and Fluxus, and the movement’s cross-pollination with tape technology is a seminal moment in industrial music history. Reel-to-reel magnetic tape recording as we know it was invented in 1933, but as previously mentioned, the portable and convenient cassette wasn’t developed until thirty years later. When that happened, hi-% enthusiasts quickly learned how to copy music to tape from the radio, LPs, and other cassettes. Secretly taping concerts was now an enticing possibility to many fans. Overlapping signi%cantly with the rock fanzine crowd, the bootleg circuit was coming alive. Into the 1970s, many bootleggers paid to have recordings cheaply pressed to vinyl by small manufacturing plants, in some cases packaging them to look o'cial so as to fool completist fans into buying them. But in the networks of tape traders—Grateful Dead fans serving as the most famous example—there was no subterfuge as to what was going on: as soon as London’s Camden Mar- ket opened in 1975, tapes with hand-scrawled labels were sold alongside new major-label releases. America had done its part too, with a 1971 congressional ruling that amended copyright law to allow home taping, which meant a boom for the blank cassette industry. "e entry of the Japanese brand Maxell into the 112 ASSIMILA TE /50s5.#/22%#4%$02//& Reed_Assimilate.indd 112 3/2/13 5:37 PM tape market in the early 1970s was also a major turning point, as they o#ered higher-quality media, raising the bar for sound quality. Not all tape mailing was musical: many people in the 1970s %rst received or mailed tapes during the Vietnam War, when some soldiers found cassettes an immediate, durable, and personal way to communicate with their families. "e cassette letter became a phenomenon widespread enough that in the Nether- lands post o'ces sold tape-and-envelope kits for the equivalent of $1.50.3 In other parts of the world such as India, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, translocal and sometimes clandestine networks exchanged tapes of poetry, political speeches, and religious instruction. In the 1978 Iranian revolution, for example, this was instrumental in spreading the words of Ayatollah Khomeini to largely illiterate populations. "e cassette’s most immediate appeal was personal empowerment: it could immortalize a user’s experience and preserve the sounds and ideas of people’s lives. As with audio letters, early cassette music bore intimate personality. Tape scene veterans Rich Jensen and Robin James write that the cassette invites people to “record things that have never been recorded before,” and in doing so to forge a “new form of literature, beyond the illusion of theater and into reality.”4 Among the %rst self-distributing cassette-based musicians was Nashville na- tive R. Stevie Moore, who as the son of Bob Moore, bassist for Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, had grown up with access to recording technology.

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