DO YOU HEAR VOICES?

The listening room is currently accepting submissions.

Music.

We are confused by what is meant by "classical music" unless to specify work composed within the Classical Period. Otherwise, the term is meant either derogatorily – as a signifier of the dusty and irrelevant – or pretentiously – to designate those haughty and cultivated masterworks of the Western canon. Many euphemisms have been employed towards this end, such as "art" music (as if Thelonius Monk or the Beatles were not artful), and "serious" music (which would have to exclude the abundant repertoire of comic and satirical work as well as provocative noise constructions and nonsense music). Leonard Bernstein elected to adopt the phrase, "exact" music, meaning that performers were expected to play "exactly" what was written, but this breaks down when composers ask their performers to improvise.

We ourselves have found the term "notational" to be a useful distinction. This allows one to distinguish between work that has been preconceived and set to paper by a single artist and that which has not, without imposing a value judgement either way. Now, then.

It so happens that we accept both; we respond to music with a strong sense of design, whether that design has been recorded onto a staff or invented spontaneously. We like "experimental" music, in the sense of risk-taking, in the sense of creatively blurring boundaries (such as they are) and of testing the possible. We believe that dissonance is more evocative when set in proportion to consonance than when simply left to itself.

To be clear: We do not want music we could expect to hear on Top 40 radio. We enjoy rock n' roll, but find the vast majority, particularly the current crop of it, insufferably timid and unimaginitive. We love jazz but do not wish to hear reenactments of golden age standards. We are excited by historical forms and constraints but are more excited by novel ones.

Please send us something we have not heard. Send us something deeply felt or completely inane, virtuousic or rudimentary – we are looking for that which inspires thoughts while quickening the pulse.

Radio Plays.

One of the things we really enjoy about words is that you can speak them. First, you can write them, and that's fun, but then you can speak them, and that's funner. And it's funnerer when you can listen to words that have been spoken by someone who is having fun speaking them. And it's funnest when the words being spoken are better understood when spoken than when read, because there is a rhythm and tone, a music, to the speaking, that could not be expressed on the page.

This is a venue for people whose work is best understood when spoken, by a listener who can sit back with his or her eyes closed and take it in.

Sonic Events.

Eavesdroppings. Messages left on voicemail. Short-wave radio discoveries. Lectures. Quasi-musical noises. Non-musical but cool-sounding noises, like a piano being crushed in a compactor. Cosmic microwave background radiation. Creative static.

Who's to say.

All Submissions.

We can only consider works that have already been recorded. Music, radio plays, and sonic events should be submitted on CD format (AIFF, WAV, QT, or MP3) and sent to:

AUDIO SUBMISSIONS
Hotel St. George Press
PO Box 24294
Brooklyn, NY 11202-4294

Please include a brief cover letter explaining the nature of the contents, plus a SASE if you wish us to return your CD. Expect to hear back from us in 4-8 weeks.

Thank you,

Management