MEMORABILIA Steve Stapleton
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Research > MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS SOUNDS WITH… Steve Stapleton WITH… MEMORABILIA. COLLECTING SOUNDS WITH… seeks to break Steve Stapleton through to unearth and reveal private collections of music and sound memorabilia. It is a historiography of sound collecting that Perhaps the best way to understand such an enormous and prolific figure as reveals the unseen and passionate work of the amateur collector Steven Stapleton, a major player in European experimental music for the last while reconstructing multiple parallel histories such as the forty years, is his obsession with accumulating and collecting. Sounds, evolution of recording formats, archiving issues, the collecting references, influences, unclassifiable musical oddities. And cacti. market and the evolution of musical styles beyond the marketplace. 01. Summary Each episode in the series is accompanied by an additional programme featuring an exclusive music selection by each of the Steven Stapleton has always been linked to collecting records, oddities and collectors. unclassifiable music memorabilia. Nurse with Wound’s first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, included a list of 291 artists, composers, bands and easter eggs that had contributed in some way or another to shaping the original spirit of the trio (formed by PDF Contents: Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak). Almost forty years later, the list is still a must for collectors of unusual music (in 1979 and, in many cases, still 01. Summary unusual today). A bizarre shopping list for music lovers of the unknown and 02. Playlist slightly unorthodox. Like Stapleton. 03. Related links ‘I wasn’t too keen on pop music, country music or reggae. But pretty much 04. Credits anything else…’ Stapleton uses this bold statement to describe the foundations 05. Copyright note of his obsession for collecting. A passion for accumulation that, like his artistic career, transcends musical genres, media, scenes and eras, while embracing all cultural artefacts remotely connected to the multiple parameters of his palette of Produced by Genís Segarra. tastes and interests. Like the catalogue of United Dairies, his record label, or the discography of Nurse with Wound, his main vehicle for musical propagation since 1978, Stapleton’s personal record collection is a puzzle of the unusual, a Genís Segarra is a musician. Since 1996, he has been the public monstrous assemblage of events and expressions, a tribute to sonic diversity and face and artistic mastermind of Barcelona-based collective and to the eccentricity underlying each and every one of his productions, designs and record label Austrohúngaro, and a member of the groups Astrud sculptures. Or his very collection. His multiple collections, in fact: records, cacti, and Hidrogenesse. He has produced, remixed and released rare found objects, all accumulated in his peculiar farmhouse in County Clare, projects by independent electronic pop groups that exaggerate Ireland. The sum of his collections forms a larger collection that might, with luck, all the strengths and weaknesses of consumer pop music, except help us understand and approach a character that seems incomprehensible by one: business. www.austrohungaro.com nature. This episode of Memorabilia is not only an open window onto the obsession for collecting of one of the living legends of experimental music. Stapleton’s testimony is, once again, an approximation to the act of collecting, classifying, filtering and discovering. Passionately obsessing over some specific thing, and then unleashing that obsession. As Stapleton says in the programme: ‘It’s something that never leaves you. Once you get that collecting bug and that fascination with music… And I’m still going back to the sixties! And I’m still going back to between ’68 and ’72. I thought I’d heard everything. Ten years ago I thought I’d heard every single album, every obscure record from that time. Now I realise it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much stuff out there.’ 03. Related links Nurse with Wound website www.nursewithwound.co.uk Nurse with Wound bandcamp page nursewithwound1.bandcamp.com Page about the list of the first album of Nurse with Wound nwwlist.org Interview/documentary www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw1OFOJcZ4g http://rwm.macba.cat MEMORABILIA. Colllecting sound with... podcast series: rwm.macba.cat/en/memorabilia_tag/ 04. Credits Produced by Genís Segarra. 05. Copyright note 2015. All rights reserved. © by the respective authors and publishers. Ràdio Web MACBA is a non-profit research and transmission project. Every effort [Steve Stapleton] has been made to trace copyright holders; any errors or omissions will be corrected whenever possible upon notification in writing to the publisher. http://rwm.macba.cat .