JOSEPH CLAYTON MILLS

«THE LETTER»

 

 

 

$5 plus shipping/handling: OUT OF PRINT

 

 

 

«The Letter» is a piece of music designed to approach disappearance. To create it, a single 22-minute recording, incorporating piano, field recordings, electronics, and voice, was transferred to one side of a Maxell Communicator Series C45 cassette. This initial cassette was then duplicated onto another cassette, which was in turn duplicated onto still another cassette, and so on. With each generation of this iterative process, a certain amount of deterioration was introduced in the audio fidelity of the recording. This procedure was repeated until 100 unique artifacts had been produced.

 

This limited-edition release comprises 100 unlabeled, hand-duplicated cassettes, each accompanied by a copy of the score that inspired the piece (“Abscission” 2015), a photograph, and a brief explanatory text. Copies of the release will be issued strictly in sequence.

 

 

 

 

Recorded 1989-2015
Assembled by JCM in Chicago 2015

 

 

 

letter_tree_score

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

The Botticellian Trees

William Carlos Williams

 

 

   The alphabet of

   the trees

 

   is fading in the

   song of the leaves

 

   the crossing

   bars of the tin

 

   letters that spelled

   winter

 

   and the cold have been illuminated

 

   with

   pointed green

 

   by the rain and sun–

   The strict simple

 

   principles of

   straight branches

 

   are being modified

   by pinched-out

 

   ifs of color, devout

   conditions

 

   the smiles of love–

   … …

   until the script

   sentences

 

   move as a woman’s

   limbs under cloth

 

   and praise from secrecy

   quick with desire

 

   love’s ascendancy

   in summer–

 

   In summer the song

   sings itself

 

   above the muffled words– 

 

 

 

 

Joseph Clayton Mills Is a musician, artist, and writer who lives and works in Chicago, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Partial), Sylvain Chaveau, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block, among many others. His recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte. In 2013, in collaboration with Noé Cuéllar, he launched the label Suppedaneum to focus on releasing scores and their realizations.