Punctum Records: a community-focused analog and open-access publisher of music and other sonic forms that take creative, forward-flying leaps, tarry in the archive of sensible forms, build pleasurably noisy pandemoniums, and seek to make sound an interventionist medium of both disruption and connection. Sound as connective tissue, tactical media, ambient rain. Punctum Records is an experiment in b
ringing together cultural theorists, musicologists, sound artists, and musicians as lovers and fighters in the ruins of the arts and humanities at a moment when information-noise overload meets a flattening out of channels and platforms for the sustainable dissemination of music, sonic art, and theory. Punctum Records is placing a wager on the label, or publishing house, as an important domain for a collective-activist experiment in the construction of what Ivan Illich called “tools for conviviality,” and for developing sound-styles that would “give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of … personal energy under personal control.” [1] In affinity with punctum books’s commitment to fostering para-academic shelters for the cultivation of open, vagabond publics, punctum records is bent on “pressing” an unruly crowd of sounds into the ventilating system called the cultural commons, and on playing the shadow-demon-parasite-prod-supplement to the so-called “music industry.” Sound label as field of play, wandering group house, rogue frequency. Punctum Records invites theorists, musicians, and sound artists (or any combination thereof) to propose singles, mixtapes, EPs, LPs, audiocasts, soundscapes, operas, discographies, acoustical memes, noise art, sound waves, librettos, samplers, wave emissions, soundscapes, audio channels, sonic fictions, field recordings, fugues, listening devices, radio broadcasts, digital sound exhibits, sonic archaeologies, audio-loops, acoustic manuals, ambient backgrounds, echo chambers, musical algorithims, mashups, soundtracks, live recordings, sound/spoken word poetry, sound-walls, earworms, interstellar messages, improvisational sessions, digital concerts, transcriptions, busking performances, and sonic-theory compositions of any kind. Contact us at: [email protected]
[1] Ivan Illich, Tools for Coviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
