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Expanding on the annual Press Play Fair at Pioneer Works, the

 column showcases independent publishers and record labels that radically build new creative infrastructures.

The Siglio origin story begins in Prague before the Velvet Revolution, with founder Lisa Pearson finding a samizdat copy of exiled novelist Milan Kundera’s 

 in her hands. The penalty for possessing such a document was arrest. It was, as she recalls, “an unbound, mimeographed typewritten manuscript” from a contraband English translation, “as subversive as a thick stack of Communist-era restaurant menus.”

This led her to start publishing, in 2008, the kind of unclassifiable hybrid art-text books that rely heavily on word-of-mouth, the kind of Kundera-like pages that are passed onto the next desperate reader, who is then part of a community of others hungry for revelation. Initially based in Los Angeles, she now operates the press out of a converted barn that looks over rolling green hills in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

Siglio books are all beautifully designed and hard to classify. If a book is a beautiful object full of images—paintings, collages, cartoons--does that make it an art book? Why must I choose when faced with Karen Green’s 

, the memoir of a plucky girl marked for ruin, in the form of a scrapbook, a pastiche of collage, photographs, and art--whether it is an art book or a memoir? Why not call it is what it is: an emotionally devastating work of artistic genius?

As I ran my finger up the cloth spine of Sophie Calle’s newest Siglio book, 

, with its gilded pages and photographs, I wondered if it is an art book. Until the text reveals that this is photo journal of Calle’s experience working as a hotel maid, which allowed her to excavate the private lives of the unsuspecting guests. It is one thing to passively receive photographed images, another to read the accompanying narrative which forces the audience into the role of voyeur and co-conspirators. It’s not just images, not just story, but, like all Siglio books--an experience.

If I want to know what makes a Siglio book a Siglio book, Pearson jokes, her books are those traditional publishing houses run screaming from. In the last fourteen years Siglio has published almost forty books, including dozens of artist and ephemera editions, most recently Richard Kraft’s 

A Card for Everyday of Donald Trump’s Presidency

, a massive, five-volume, fully color-coded 1,622 page catalog of all of the former president’s lies while in office.

Given the pandemic year—now stretching into two—it is remarkable Siglio is publishing two titles this year: 

What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle

 by Nocle Rudick, as well as Christian Marclay and Steve Beresford’s 

A book teaches you how to read it. For me the best kind of book is one that offers an experience that requires me to shift the way that I read, to read in literally a new language. 

 is described as “seeing music in the quiet of the pandemic: a dialogue between two protagonists of experimental music in photographs and scores.”

Pierson’s job, she says, is, “to realize the artist’s vision in the shape of a book and then cultivate an audience for it.” In other words, to enable the artist to publish the purest representation of their vision. This is what gives Siglio books their ineffable authenticity and makes them stand out at small press book and art fairs.

When I ask Pearson what makes a Siglio book a Siglio book, she says it’s very simple. “If I can think of two or three other presses who would be really into this, and love this, it’s not a Siglio book. If someone else is interested, by all means go with it, because I’m not in competition with anybody, and if that’s a good home for your work that’s great.”

“If I can think of two or three other presses who would be really into this, and love this, it’s not a Siglio book. If someone else is interested, by all means go with it, because I’m not in competition with anybody, and if that’s a good home for your work that’s great.”

She is, by her own admission, “notoriously slow.” How could she not be given her role as publisher, editor, midwife, accountant, art director, copy editor, and so on.

“The reason I can do Siglio is because I am good at spreadsheets and managing my meager resources and good at getting my distributor enthusiastic about my books—but it comes at a price.” You can see Pearson doing everything short of pouring over nautical maps attempting to determine what part of the ocean the ship heavy with the copies of the Bernadette Myer’s 

 might be lost, or bribing dock workers to unload boxes.

Historically, it is only white men who, by virtue of gender and needing little but a slap on the back, are audacious enough to even dream of starting their own publishing companies. Given my past working for 

, during the golden age of George Plimpton, the legendary founder and editor of the magazine, I feel compelled to ask, 

Did anyone give you permission to start a publishing house?

“No one,” she laughs. “It was hubris. Stupidity.” It is far easier to imagine Pearson springing from the head of Athena, goddess of intellect, creativity, and war, in breastplate, with pen in hand ready to do battle, at the knee of some white-haired arbiter of taste. That said, Pearson is quick to cite the influence avant garde artist Dick Higgins. “He is a totemic presence for me in this idea of taking the mechanism of offset printing and trade publishing and utilizing them in this service of the avant garde—to get that work into unsuspecting hands and to disseminate it widely.”

Here a look of barely suppressed subversive glee crosses her face. I can only imagine a similar expression on her face that day in Prague reading those well-thumbed pages of fading purple type. Imagine art passing from hand to hand, for free.

It is in this spirit that Pearson began putting together a “newsletter” before the pandemic. “The Improbable, Issue No. 1 (Time Indefinite)” followed by “Issue No. 2 (Time is Elastic)” published last year. Not a throwaway, but ephemera composed of work by the same caliber of writers and thinkers and pranksters whose books she publishes. Writing that challenges people to think in new ways, to play.

The concept of giving away anything for free feels radical and I can’t help but see it as a challenge to us in the publishing industry to reimagine the ways we can get into the machine of traditional publishing and blow it up, dance in the flames, warming our hands over the smoldering fire imagining forward.

Press Play: Siglio

Dean Allen Spunt was driving in Hollywood in 2000 when a car pulling out of a gas station ran into him. After exchanging insurance information, the driver left; a paparazzo approached Spunt and asked if he knew who the driver was. He didn’t. It turned out to be a member of the Backstreet Boys. Spunt, who plays as one-half of the long-running LA noise rock duo No Age but was then a teenager, eventually received a small but impactful settlement. In 2001, the independent record label Post Present Medium was born.

Twenty years on, the universe of PPM is made up of artists that traverse the boundaries of genre. Its roster includes Behavior, a band with roots in powerviolence that now dabbles in experimental rock. Visual artist Otis Houston Jr. experiments with spoken word laid over smooth beats, like Gil Scott Heron crossed with Wesley Willis. Brontez Purnell, who came up playing in the electropunk outfit Gravy Train!!!!, put out the EP 

, his stylish take on white mod rock, itself an appropriation of countless Black rock progenitors. For Spunt, the throughline of PPM’s acts—many of which are based in L.A.—is passionate dedication to one’s artwork beyond audience or critical reception.

Before his serendipitous car accident, Spunt had already been considering starting a label. To him, it was a natural way of contributing to the punk scene he’d become part of—going to shows at storied venues around L.A., like the PCH Club and The Smell, a small, volunteer-run space known for esoteric, cross-genre shows. Spunt had always appreciated underground record labels and their region-specific contexts, pointing to SST in Long Beach, CA, and Dischord in Washington, D.C., as iconic punk labels that illuminated his path: “Dischord revolved around a scene of individuals, from multiple bands. I thought that was a cool way to be involved in that music world. They're supportive of the people, not necessarily based on the genre of music they were playing. SST was the same way.”

Spunt knew he wanted to channel a similar approach, though he admittedly had little idea what he was doing when he approached the Olympia, WA, political post-hardcore band The Intima, who he’d see at the PCH Club when they toured through town, and offered to release a 7-inch. That would become PPM’s first release, 

. He pressed 500 copies—a relatively big run for the label’s first release—and silkscreened the covers himself, though a sizing miscalculation made the first batch unusable. He sold a few dozen to record shops, saved a few for himself, and sent the remaining hundreds of copies to the band. Though putting out this first record wasn’t seamless, the instinctive, DIY process set the tone of PPM’s twenty-year run.

“Allowing things to happen, and allowing mistakes to just be part of it, has been eye-opening,” says Spunt, whose label’s name is meant to evoke forward-thinking sensibilities. For a while after putting out 

, Spunt shelved the label idea, until his former band, Wives, wanted to put out their own record. Wives’s self-titled EP became the second PPM release, with Spunt repurposing the messed up batch of The Intima covers.

Things have proceeded intuitively, more or less. The decision to work with a particular artist happens mostly organically, through relationships or recommendations from other label artists. “I'm lucky that people I'm working with now are prolific and they're making lots of music with different friends,” he says. “I’m able to focus on a DIY world of music that's spread out all through the country.”

Spunt first heard an unreleased CD by one of the label’s more recent artists, Otis Houston Jr., through his friend Jacob Robichaux, who works with Houston as a gallerist. Released in March 2020, the 15-song album plays like a freewheeling rap session. Houston’s poetic spoken word comes across as brilliant, spontaneous utterances, with lines like, “they want me to be dull, don't want me to use what's in my skull.” Over simple, pre-recorded 90s-hip hop style beats, Houston combines autobiographical fragments with uplifting incantations and blunt evaluations of social ills.

In May, PPM will release a limited edition lathe cut 7-inch with Houston, which will include a silkscreen by the artist. Though they're divergent in sound, Spunt likens the drive of Houston to that of a band like Behavior. If there's an ethos connecting all of PPM’s releases, that is it: “When people are working hard on a singular vision, and they're just obsessed with it,, that's what I'm drawn to.”

Scenes emerge out of necessity. We're just trying to do stuff in the midst of all of this collapse, to make sense of life.

Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, who has worked with PPM as part of the experimental punk bands P22 and Purity, calls the label an “open space” to articulate creative ideas, and appreciates the sense of community it has helped create. In November, she was part of PPM’s twentieth anniversary showcase at Zebulon in L.A. Bands and artists from the label’s past, present, and future—including the Texas band Chronopage, who will be putting out a record with PPM later this year—played sets over the course of two days. Spagnola said the show felt generative, bringing forth a sense of kinship and inspiration: “I feel like I'm motivated to respond to what's being produced in a positive way.”

The longevity of PPM is ultimately a testament to the web of friends and collaborators that have coalesced around the label over the years. “I owe credit to the integrity of the artists that I've been working with,” he says. He also praises the supportiveness of the artistic community he’s part of in LA, where friends have stepped in to help with mail orders when Spunt’s touring with No Age. “I feel very fond love and kinship for people out here and the support that everyone gives each other.”

Playing in bands for years has also taught him how to treat artists. For him it’s never been about numbers; to date, the label has put out 75 releases, a slow but sustainable pace. PPM may operate on a smaller scale, offering perhaps less financial support than larger labels, but it does offer creative support and a platform to reach more listeners.  “There's a sea of noise,” he explains. Labels can be a navigational tool; if you like or respect a label’s choices, it will likely lead you to peruse its other offerings. In the digital age when there is a glut of music available to stream, that is perhaps one of the most meaningful roles of labels today.

Though Post Present Medium has evolved from how it started, Spunt still connects to the desire to do things yourself. “Creating your own world is an important thing to remember, especially if you’re playing music or making art,” he says. “If you wait to get into those doors, you could be waiting forever, so it's important to just do what you do. And by any means necessary just make your art and go it alone if you have to. You’ll find people who are like-minded.”

Spagnola agrees. “Scenes emerge out of necessity. We're just trying to do stuff in the midst of all of this collapse, to make sense of life.” ♦

Press Play: Post Present Medium

In January 2021, Suzi Analogue tweeted an audio clip of a cassette tape recording she made when she was only ten years old. In the recording, young Suzi is excitedly talking about the future: “I’m trying to be a girl, I’m trying to grow up, I don’t need a boy bossing me around. I could be the next Ricki Lake. I could be an actress, talk show host, scientist, math… no, not mathematician. I HATE math!”

In her post, Suzi reflected on the recording lovingly. “Shout out to being 10 years old,” she wrote. “Shout out tape recorders. Shout out my bayang. Shout out to this girl who knew what she wanted in life.” It was a rare, endearing Twitter moment from the vocalist, producer, and label founder, who has been touring the globe and releasing records since the late 2000s. The tweet also spoke to a larger truth: Suzi Analogue has long used technology as a means of mapping out her dreams and building herself a new world.

A creative child early on, Suzi was born in Baltimore, and grew up singing gospel in church choir and performing in the theater. In the 90s, consumer-grade cassette recorders were plentiful and like many young people at the time, Suzi would write and record her own songs to cassette tape, an early engagement with technology that would foreshadow Suzi’s work today.

“It wasn't until recently I realized my obsession for putting things together and technology prob came from my dad's side of things,” she reflects on a Zoom call. “He was an engineer and I always downplayed his genetic contribution but I think that type of rationale had a lot to do with how I pieced the early ideas together. From my mom, I got a love and understanding of the culture, Black arts movement and poetry.”

While attending Temple University in Philadelphia, Suzi continued making beats and recording her own songs. In 2007, a Myspace message from emerging, sample-based producer Knxwledge—who was also living in Philly at the time—would spark a working relationship that challenged Suzi to expand her own individual sound while diving deep into the joys of collaboration.

“I was recording over Madlib beats and stuff and he was like, ‘this is dope, I want to link with you,’” Suzi recalled. She grew up in chat rooms, so she was used to making connections this way. “He was staying in Center City at the time and I just came over to jam one night and then he invited Ringgo [Ancheta, a.k.a. Mndsgn] over and it was just very organic. We were chatting with different producers from everywhere, and then devonwho chimed in, and we were like, let’s put it all together.”

What Suzi, Knxwledge, Mndsgn, and devonwho “put together” was Klipmode, a radical production collective who—alongside West Coast kindred spirits like Flying Lotus, Ras G, and Samiyam—formed a vanguard of Dilla-inspired hip hop producers whose sound would point to the future of electronic beats and sound. During their time together in the late aughts and early 2010s, the music that Klipmode and their peers made would lay the groundwork for the global instrumental hip hop movement that would eventually be branded and mass-distributed as “lo-fi.”

After collaborating with Klipmode, Suzi spent five years touring the world as a solo artist. Both experiences informed what she’d do next: building a platform for her own work as well as the like-minded creators that she crossed paths with. Founded in 2014, Suzi’s label Never Normal and its ancillary, Never Normal Soundsystem, has supported a diverse range of artists including RaFia, Queens D.Light, EZRAKH, and more. From JWORDS’s dreamy, synth-guided opus, 

, to Suzi’s own explorations of everything from footwork to ambient, the label has established a well-earned reputation for pushing electronic music into exciting and unpredictable places.

“Never Normal is about bringing together people from all sorts of backgrounds and not discriminating by placing these set-in-stone music industry standards on artists.”

Suzi describes Never Normal Soundsystem as “a decentralized collective of rotating members who are all Black technologists making music, visuals, and everything in between.” The concept of both the label and the broader collective grew out of her own industry experiences––looking back on the dates of Klipmode and asking herself, “

what was it that we needed then? Why did we need each other?”

With a desire to highlight and collaborate with friends and up-and-coming acts, Suzi embedded an open and egalitarian ethos into Never Normal’s core philosophy. The label not only provides a home for artists’ projects, she explains, but also seeks to shield them from the exploitative practices that are all too common in the music business.

“Never Normal is about bringing together people from all sorts of backgrounds and not discriminating by placing these set-in-stone music industry standards on artists,” she says. “Or expecting them to know everything, or taking advantage when they don’t know everything. So it’s about education as well. Never Normal is the label, that’s the business, distribution, the tapes, and merchandise, but the community is the Soundsystem. The Soundsystem is all of us coming together, making this wall of sound so that we can determine what we can do as Black artists to innovate change and transform experiences.”

Suzi had long been inspired by niche underground labels, but none of them “spoke to the quantum experience of Blackness and culture” that she and her peers lived everyday. “My goal from the start was to highlight innovators, especially Black and Brown,” she continues. “Sonically, everyone who is a part of Never Normal makes electronic-based music, but for some reason people don't want to recognize hip-hop as electronic music too. It always has been, so Never Normal gives space for us with that know-how to navigate our styles and releases.”

In 2015, Suzi traveled to Kampala, Uganda, as part of Next Level, a hip hop cultural diplomacy initiative sponsored by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Suzi lived in Kampala and taught beat-making workshops that allowed her to tap into the creative potential of Uganda’s blossoming hip hop scene. Upon arriving in Uganda, Suzi was determined to bring some of U.S. beat culture to her students, showing them that they could perform electronics live like Low End Theory in L.A. or the Beat Society in Philly.

“I led a class of like 20 young dudes,” she says, laughing. “I went there with the mindset that I’m going to put them on to what’s good. I tried to show them that you don’t have to be a studio producer. Back then, everybody’s concept was like, a producer just stays in the studio and you just work by yourself and you’re not collaborative and you don’t play out. I showed them that you can perform your own productions out and can have fun with it.”

When Suzi left Uganda, she maintained ties with many of the artists she had met there, establishing a firm foundation for when she returned in 2019 for a residency that would eventually lead to 

(roughly translated as “It bangs/it slaps” in Luganda). This compilation was created in collaboration with ANTI-MASS, a collective made up of the artists Authentically Plastic, Turkana and Nsasi that stage multidisciplinary, queer, feminist happenings in Uganda. With ANTI-MASS, Suzi hopes to create a lasting connection between Black artists in the West and on the African continent.

“Uganda has one of the largest youth populations in the world so there’s just a freshness and a pulse there,” she says. “I went back and lived in Kampala for a month and met other producers and DJs. From those people, Authentically Plastic and I really kept in touch over the last few years. During the pandemic they came to me and asked about collaborating with artists in Never Normal Soundsystem. I thought that was a wonderful idea because now we’re really creating a bridge between the continent and the diaspora.”

The music that Never Normal and ANTI-MASS have made together is a dynamic mixture of electronic sounds that are teeming with the power of the global Black musical experience. The first two singles from 

 are “Make It Shake,” a collaboration between Turkana, Suzi, and Oakland rapper Queens D. Light, and “Desserts,” which brings together US producer Safiyahh and Ugandan musician Nsasi. Both tracks combine house, footwork and East African rhythms into a holistic sound that is rooted in our shared experiences and socio-political conditions. When asked about 

, Suzi gets to the heart of the project’s purpose. The sound and the technology behind it are key, but it is ANTI-MASS and Never Normal’s approach to collaboration that opens up a new space for Black liberation:

"We’d meet in the midst of the night with the music thumping and smoke in the air. That’s where we would meet to free ourselves.”

“It was important for us to share sounds from our environment and cultures. It really is the story of the African diaspora. Y’all are over there struggling and we’re over here struggling too. We had riots and protests about our presidency and they had them too. Where would we meet now? We’d meet in the midst of the night with the music thumping and smoke in the air. That’s where we would meet to free ourselves.” ♦

Press Play: Never Normal Records

After years of Myspace-era punk touring and self-booked four-band bills, Scottie McNiece was feeling burnt out. Tired of pop punk monoculture, when he stumbled into Chicago’s jazz-adjacent improvised music scenes, he was engrossed by the level of craft he heard. “It was the punkest thing I'd ever seen,” he recalls. “These people are doing this incredibly difficult music, and they're so dedicated to it that they don't give a fuck what you think. I was very drawn to that.” The shows were life-affirming, but when he looked around, it was often just him and a few middle-aged men in attendance. “My instinct was, I need to get more people here,” he says. “There’s this whole world of people out there who want to hear new things, and are looking for new things. But people need entry points that are appealing.”

That has since become a mission statement of sorts for the label he co-operates, International Anthem, one of most compelling hubs for jazz and improvised music in recent years. The label itself prefers a more open-ended definition, calling itself a “recording company that produces and promotes progressive media.” Since 2014, it has released celebrated work by free jazz drummer and beat experimenter Makaya McCraven, the avant-garde and confrontational trumpeter jaimie branch, spiritual jazz clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, and improvising protest collective Irreversible Entanglements, to name a few. The label specifically aims to expand audiences for its constellation of artists, helping bring new, uncompromising sounds to uninitiated listeners.

International Anthem is an intriguing case study in the value of an independent record label in the year 2021—in the role that labels can still play in connecting dots between scenes, framing new music in ways that draw listeners into the work, and rooting new music in a sense of place at a time when music discovery feels increasingly placeless. It’s a testament to the way the label grew out of physical show spaces. Years before its first release, McNiece was bartending, and he began running a series at the restaurant where he worked. The owner was willing to give him $300/week as a guarantee to the musicians. He didn’t have any trouble booking out the calendar. At the time, in the Chicago improvised music scene, that was a good gig. (“Unfortunately,” he clarifies.)

Still somewhat of an outsider in the jazz world, part of how McNiece enmeshed himself was by putting the same care and attention into these shows as he did when his own band was touring. He started up an email list, and every week would write about who was playing at the restaurant. He’d CC all of the musicians who had played the series before, plus some friends, family, and co-workers. He’d see the artists play around town, research their work (and the historical context this work grew out of), and craft thoughtful write-ups: “Who knows, maybe some people hated the way I wrote about them, but a lot of the musicians were like, ‘Man, I really appreciated what you said about the music, thank you for listening.’”

Another thing he did for the show series—which he says was directly inspired by his own days DIY touring—was to make sure everyone was fed. For his first show series, a meal would be provided by the restaurant, and after the gig, everyone involved would sit for dinner. For his next series, he and his partner at the time would make food together and bring it to the venue. When he reflects on that time now, he thinks about how that was a service-industry hospitality job, and in some ways, still feels like that’s what he’s doing: “I think of myself as someone who needs to act in service of the music.”

There’s this whole world of people out there who want to hear new things, and are looking for new things. But people need entry points that are appealing.

The first releases came about when he started recording some of those live shows he was booking, with help from his friends David Allen, who eventually co-founded the label with him, and Dave Vettraino, who is also involved with the label. One of the label’s first records, Makaya McCraven’s 

, was created from live recordings made at various performances in the same restaurant over the course of a year. In the cracks of the recording, listeners can hear glimpses of people eating dinner, talking to each other. The space itself seeps into the sounds. A small strip of paper wrapped around each copy described it this way: “

Nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows - culled, cut, rendered and remixed into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music

From the beginning, every International Anthem release came packaged in a Japanese-style obi strip printed with a short bit of writing about the recording. “We were inspired by catalog labels, and we loved the aesthetic of them,” McNiece explains. “But also thought, it’s a little intrusive to expect every artist to have cover art that looks kind of similar. Well, what if it's removable?” That packaging style has since become a staple of the label’s output, and as time has passed, the writings on the packaging have become more creative. On the strip included with the most recent Irreversible Entanglements album, 

Ethereal, dynamic & expansive free jazz meditations manifest coruscating portals of aqueous regeneration; a collectivist ultra-sonic healing conveyance.”

“Writing those blurbs for those obis is one of the few slices of uncompromising joy I have in the world,” McNiece says, laughing. “To be able to think about poetry and how it can be part of the package, I think it’s incredibly important. With the right words on the cover there, you can really draw people in. If you think about the experience of flipping through bins at the record store, it’s not every day that you see a stanza of verse describing the music on the front of the record.”

Ultimately, those brief cover-package writings are part of a bigger project, expanding the context on the records in ways that invite new listeners into the music—especially ones who might think this type of music is not for them. In the view of International Anthem, complex, instrumental music is for everybody, and simplicity is not a prerequisite for accessibility. “This music is played by people who approach music in a very ancient way, where it’s about the music, and it's about performing it, and being as adept as you possibly can be on your instrument, so that you can be as much of yourself as possible, without having to mimic something else.” There’s an inherent humanness, despite the technical complexity, that he believes most listeners have the capacity to connect with.

“I don't think that music that is creative or challenging needs to be relegated to the fringes the way that music industry mechanisms often do,” he continues. “When you think about the people who have the most gatekeeping control over what's happening, there's a whole lot of underestimating happening. Accessibility for me is a refusal to underestimate the average person. Instead of just assuming they're going to only listen to Shawn Mendes or whatever. This person can like anything, you just have to find a way of connecting with them.” ♦

Press Play: International Anthem

In 1944, an Egyptian composer named Halim El-Dabh created his piece, 

, using a borrowed radio station wire tape recorder to capture the sounds of a women’s spiritual healing ritual. El-Dabh took the recording to the studio and transformed it into a ghostly and enrapturing piece with the women’s voices pitched down and processed. The sound artist Fari Bradley has described how in doing so, the composer used the “moveable architecture of the Cairo radio studios'' to create “a window into music from the streets.” 

 is likely the world’s first purely electronic composition and the first known example of the practice that would come to be known as sampling—capturing a piece of existing audio for use in a new musical composition. Yet far too often, writing around the origins of sampling and electronic music in general have overlooked this contribution, focusing heavily on the work of European academics like Pierre Schaeffer instead. 

presents a key challenge to these prevailing narratives.

Establishing a more nuanced history of sampling as a cultural practice is part of what New York-born and based artist, label operator, DJ, and educator GENG teaches in his class 

which he first hosted last year through The School Of Making Thinking, offering spots to BIPOC learners on a sliding scale. The class also focuses on the theory and technical aspects of sampling. “I begin with the origins of sampling, and try to speak on it wholly,” he explains. “Beyond the standard Eurocentric academic narratives of Call & Response originating in English churches in the 1600's and Pierre Schaefer revolutionizing tape music, especially not when Halim El-Dabh predates him by four years.”

GENG positions sampling as a part of a tradition of vocal articulation that goes back to humanity’s earliest forms of musical expressions. In his course, he opens by going back thousands of years into the dawn of human creativity, and then draws a line up to contemporary musical forms. “That first day is about animals sound-imitating their environment, then indigenous or original peoples taking on that ritual, into oral and musical/rhythmic traditions from Sub-Saharan Africa, and how those ideas developed through the hands of Afro-diasporic people enduring forced migration,” he explains. “And those musical traditions which arose in North America as work songs, spirituals, and then the blues, jazz, and rock and roll. That's how I get to hip hop, beginning with Kool Herc, by the end of that first two hour stretch.”

The history of sampling is long and well-documented, and there are histories within those histories still. In hip hop specifically, sampling emerged as a direct outgrowth of DJ culture. As hip hop grew as a recorded medium, sampling began to be used as a more efficient and precise way of extending musical grooves in the studio, similar to the way that DJs would extend them manually at parties using two turntables and a mixer. Later, sampling would be used as a means of creating elaborate new compositions from snippets of older, previously-existing recorded material. As a direct result of hip hop’s cultural influence, an entire generation of young people have grown up with sampling as a key component of their music-making process. 

GENG is a part of that generation. With roots in hip hop and current projects in the realms of hardcore and noise, his sounds conjure otherworldly textures while sacrificing none of hip hop’s weight and driving rhythmic pulse. With PTP, the artist collective and self-described label for “weaponized media and information” that he launched in 2009, GENG explores his musical, design, and curatorial endeavors, with a distinct appreciation for lineages and legacies that the work fits within. PTP is short for Purple Tape Pedigree, a reference to Raekwon’s influential 1995 debut album 

, which was originally pressed as a purple-tinted cassette. A highly celebrated album that dominated the streets in the summer of ’95, in hip hop circles the purple tapes were the pressings that were deemed the most “official”. GENG and PTP’s use of the name for their crew and the records that they release is meant to evoke innovation, quality, and authenticity.

Since its earliest releases nearly a decade ago, PTP has been involved in some of the most thrilling and powerful contemporary underground music from GENG’s own releases as King Vision Ultra, to the acoustic soul of YATTA’s Spirit Said Yes!, to the daring sonic experiments of Saint Abdullah’s Stars Have Eyes.

Since its earliest releases nearly a decade ago, PTP has been involved in some of the most thrilling and powerful contemporary underground music from GENG’s own releases as King Vision Ultra, to the acoustic soul of YATTA’s 

, to the daring sonic experiments of Saint Abdullah’s 

. Today, PTP operates as a loose collective and label with members amani, dreamcrusher, dis fig, YATTA, sour spirit, and others. GENG explains that rather than operating as a formal organization, PTP “takes cues from graff and the fluidity of throwing up the flag when you feel it’s right to do so.”

The broad aesthetic of GENG’s varied musical projects—as well as the ways that he works with sampling across styles—reflects his upbringing in Manhattan in the 80s and 90s, inundated by hip hop during his formative years.

"I came up at the sort of bubbling point of a lot of the countercultural movements that were happening at the time,” he recalls. An influential older cousin put him on to dubbing tapes when he was ten, setting him on the path. “We literally took the boombox, had an internal microphone off another system and just recorded out the speaker, just like how a lot of cats used to do this shit back in the day, making pause tapes.” It was a time when the radio was super-charged; during the day, he’d hear Prince, Michael Jackson, Cherrelle, Cameo, plus Phil Collins, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, and the type of  freestyle then big in New York. “Rhythm was a big thing for me,” he says. “Rhythm hit home for me quickly.” 

As rap music began to further permeate popular culture in the 80s, the music was spread in markets nationwide through the invention of late night radio mix shows. In the 80s, legendary shows like Afrika Islam and Donald D’s 

, Special K and Teddy Ted on WHBI (a/k/a The Awesome Two) and Mr. Magic’s show on WBLS ruled New York’s airwaves, while 

with Bobbito Garcia on WKCR 88.9 showcased the most cutting edge underground hip hop of the 90s. These mix shows were formative for GENG—a key reference point for his future approaching sound—with their dynamic mixes bombarding the airwaves with dense, unrelenting rhythms and sonic chaos.  

“I would just cruise the dial, trying to find shit,” he says. First he was drawn to the college stations. “Then I found KISS FM and then I found WBLS on a Friday or Saturday night. I had a walkman and I would just sneak the shit… THAT’S where it started. Some cats grew up with the park jams outside their window but for me it was locking into that.” 