Listening Session
December 4, 2011, 7pm
The idea is mental freedom: transformation of the familiar. Primrose Hill, Staten Island, Gospel Oak, Sao Paolo, Boston Manor, Costa Rica, Arnos Grove, San Clemente, Maida Vale, Studamer: Stay busy, out of phase, in love.
– Jon Savage
In the summer of 2011, Junior Aspirin Records (Andy Cooke, Dan Fox and Nathaniel Mellors) produced a series of four themed listening sessions, or "Audio Annotations", for Dexter Sinister's Serving Library residency at The Banff Centre, Canada. Designed to encourage thinking away from the printed word, each hour-long session was comprised of a commentary woven into a playlist of songs, each one chosen for its associative links to a topic. Whiskey was served and the sessions were played at high volume in total darkness. The Banff Annotations were themed around narrative, taste, materiality and community.
For Artists Space, Dexter Sinister have asked J.A.R. to produce a new session themed around "Identity", presented by Dan Fox, and an accompanying text for the latest issue of the journal Bulletins of The Serving Library. The listening session will inaugurate this second issue of Bulletins, the house journal of The Serving Library that continues the trajectory of its forerunner Dot Dot Dot. The new issue has grown out of two physical incarnations of The Serving Library in 2011 – first at The Banff Centre in Canada over the summer, and now at Artists Space.
The individual "bulletins" that comprise this issue include "Everything is in Everything," "It is the Outsidedness Flavor of it," and "If Things are not Quickly to go Pear-shaped." Advance copies of the journal will be available on the night for $15. As with all the issues, the whole is freely available to download from www.servinglibrary.org, as well as the first four J.A.R. Annotations, which will be made available online after the event.
