Netaholic Frolic

Life is delineated by small obsessions, in my case they are creating art and poetry, bird watching, gardening, networking and, probably the most essential yet the thing to which I pay the least attention, surviving.

I am reasonably certain that the mesh of the net I use to keep the Blackbirds from devastating the strawberry patch on my garden allotment is not of general interest, neither, I presume, would be the fact that there is no safety net to catch me when I stop paying full and necessary attention to the requirements of road safety and suddenly fall off my bicycle because I had unexpectedly switched to bird watcher mode.

A CD dressed in black came out of the blue. The black envelope was decorated in mail-art colours reminiscent of things produced in the good old days of mail-art when there were Post Offices and postage stamps you had to lick.
The envelope featured my address, obviously, and that of the sender, fortunately, there were the decorations of two strips of several times overwritten black Dymo tape, 2 images from an IKEA instruction leaflet, a red sticker stating VAPORIZED ART MOVEMENT and an artiststamp from PROTALEATORIA and, of course, the official postage… sticker… telling me that the envelope came from Italy and it cost €2,40 to send.
The contents of the envelope were a yellow A4 with stamped texts and images and a CD-R without label.
Why out the blue? Simply because this was the first mail I have ever received from the sender, Stefano Balice of Givoletto which, according to Google Earth, is in the Turin area close to the Alps. I Googled Stefano’s name and discovered he is a member of the International Union of Mail Artists and there I saw that we recently had some small contact through that network, though little more than the exchange of greetings.
On the day the CD arrived it was too hot to be worrying weeds in the allotment and all birds, including the Sparrows that share the terrace in my back garden, were hiding within the cooler shade of thick hedges, so I stopped listening to ‘Sigur Rós play Dave Brubeck’ and put this new acquisition into the tray of my CD player.
What I heard was something of a pleasant surprise, I experienced something close to nostalgia…

Whilst I listened I checked out the rest of the mail that had shared the drop through the door slot onto the mat. There was an envelope containing political cartoons from Alexander from Kherson in the Ukraine, another highly decorated envelope containing an artist book created from a cut up painting by and from the South African artist and art historian Cheryl, a blue postcard from Greek Katerina, another postcard with a painted bird from Kaz in Japan and finally the latest bunch of visual poems from John M. Bennett from Columbus, Ohio.
With the exception of the CD from Stefano a standard mail-art day thus.

The CD, number 1011 in the VEC audio archive, carries 26 minutes of the sounds of spoken text in the form of a political newscast over a mix of concrete sounds and the noise of tortured transistors all in a deftly handled full dimension stereo. The sounds develop into speech cut ups and other familiar aspects of classic audio art. The work is reminiscent of the cassette pieces created back in the early 1980s by MB (Maurizio Bianchi). It had been so long since I had heard these kinds of sounds that listening to it gave me the same pleasure as I would get meeting an old friend.

Eventually I was woken from my reverie by the insistent knowledge knocking at both the back of my head and my stomach lining that it was necessary to wrench myself away from the studio monitors and return to kitchen to bake bread. Just before the mail had arrived I had fed the remnants of the last loaf to those Sparrows bopping on my terrace.

Ah well, back to the real world, but I have placed Stefano’s CD within easy reach, I will certainly listen to it again but for now I’ll give the new Sigur Rós another listen whilst I make suitable answers to all that mail. Hey that’s 777 words and I have only mentioned Iceland once!

Rod Summers/VEC
Maastricht
1 June 2012