MUSIC
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As escapism from corporate banality turned the corner in the ‘90s, a new generation of vibrant, software generated soundscapes emerged. Communal access to the internet propagated the new hive mind of ideas online, giving way to smoother, stress-free textures. The PC revolution opened the gateway to ray-traced playgrounds of color and light, allowing for visions of utopic proportions to manifest themselves on screensavers far and wide. Boot up your machine, load the software on this floppy diskette, and drop out of a reality bounded by the physical laws of the universe.
Numero 95 is the soundtrack to the screen saver fever dream we’re all trying to climb back into. Eight droplets of proto-vaporwave, synthesized in vinyl (or digital) form, fresh from Numero’s archive of forgotten sounds. Are you looking for that half way point between smooth jazz and new age? Mac and PC? Quantum Leap and the X-Files? This software is for you.
Housed in a replica floppy diskette, Numero 95 explores an early computer music unbound by scene or region. Eight solo pioneers vibing out at home in their headphones, traveling as far as the sound card would allow. This is music that barely escaped the hard drive and yet percolates at the edges of the algorithm 30 years later.
Welcome to Numero 95.
As the rift between academic jazz, new age, and pop narrowed in the 1980s, DI.Y. practitioners of metronome driven riffs found new growth in a burgeoning managerial middle class, a commercial audience held captive in dentist offices and waiting rooms across America. Session players took to midi-banks stocked with every instrument imaginable and delivered on a road rage-induced demand to stay cool, relaxed, and focused all at once. The extra-wide cuts packaged here will be mint for years to come. Go ahead, break the seal on a fresh pack of Nuleafs. There’s only one sensation this smooth.
About the Cabinet of Curiosities:
For Numero, taking time to explore the more esoteric possibilities of our creative practice provides a deeper understanding of the resulting piece of work. This curatorial exercise, usually relegated to mix tapes and oddball DJ nights, has allowed us to see the connections between our most far reaching corners.
After years of whittling away at the art of compilation, this part of the practice came to the foreground, and an alternate view began to emerge. The outlines of a context beyond time and place, individual and scene. Threads sewn through the fabric of music history that tell a story primarily concerned with intentionality, psychic connections, and vibe.
To tell these stories an equally symbolic medium is required.
In order to create an object that can emote the value of the like minded yet distant relationships therein we looked to the world of commercial production running parallel to these musical subcultures. The treasure chest of artifacts made during the 20th century’s post-industrial free-for-all may be the only conceptually appropriate talisman for this music, the ability to bring the studio home was after all made by the same mechanism that brought on the consumer gold rush.
The consumer experience embodied by the secondary market, dog eared, footnoted, taken apart and tinkered with. The cabinet is a simulacrum of the lost and found. Our commercially nostalgic spirit-animal, redressed to be a more accurate representation of our emotional experiences with these objects. Less concerned with function than with the memories we associate with them.
The Cabinet of Curiosities is Numero’s tribute to the origin of the DIY museum, with our curatorial focus as always on the heroically home-made, the expanding fan universe, the suburban studio sublime.