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Ssg Special

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Ssg Special --- 2011

Posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 This is what Bee Mask had to say about the mix: "There are few things I enjoy more than hearing my tracks in other peoples' mixes (a pleasure which mnml ssgs has already afforded me on a couple occasions) perhaps because it offers the furtive thrill of coming as close as one can to knowing how the work sounds to someone else, or at least what sort of sense they make of it and where it sits in their internal taxonomies. Making a mix like this one, then, seems to me to be about pulling back the proverbial curtain and showing off a bit of the infrastructure -- the dream architecture of half-baked theories about how all these tracks fit together and form preposterous, impossible objects in the mind. Insofar as this mix has a theme, it's that nearly all of the material came my way through trades with other artists and labels, either in person or through the mail. I love having this sort of exchange in my life for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it makes legible a unique and wonderful set of aesthetic connections that do not necessarily appear in any other way. The records that show up on one's doorstep unannounced or are handed off by old friends at shows and parties form an enormous, intricate, and ongoing potlach -- a parallel universe alongside the universes of, say, fifty cent water damaged electro 12"s from West Philly sidewalk sales, bootleg disco singles purchased on the upper levels of head shops, improbably horrendous demos discovered while auditioning every unlabeled cassette in a thrift store, etc, etc, etc. It's very common now for people who care about the culture of records to express dismay at the sense of being overwhelmed by unmanageable abundance, and while I sympathize with this sort of frustration, I'd maintain that we've been overwhelmed by an unmanageable abundance of records for almost as long as people have been making them, and that what's changed in the last ten years or so is more that we've been forced to reckon with the underlying fantasy that we might somehow ultimately be able to hear them all. The real challenge is still what it always was: how do we create ways of living with records that allow us to experience that abundance as a source of joy rather than one of grim obligation? This mix, like every other one, is a snapshot of one among an infinite number of possible answers."