Josh Mason: Punk and Circuitry, Zippered Together

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Florida sound artist Josh Mason.

Mason’s new album, Kicking A Dark Horse, is out now on greyfade as a hardcover book paired with modular synthesizer music, the two built to zipper together rather than stand apart.

We talk about the punk rock roots underneath all that circuitry, why only the album's first and last tracks have a fixed place, and what Cortázar's Hopscotch has to do with any of it.

(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Josh Mason's Kicking A Dark Horse)

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Dig Deeper

Artist and Album:

• Visit Josh Mason at joshmason.info and follow on Instagram and Bandcamp
• Purchase Kicking A Dark Horse — Bandcamp (FOLIO hardcover + digital)
• European orders — Soundohm
• Kicking A Dark Horse — full catalog page, credits, and press

Label and Format:

• greyfade
• The FOLIO format — greyfade's hardcover book music edition; Kicking A Dark Horse is the third release
• Josh Mason's greyfade artist page
• greyfade listening platform

Collaborators:

• Joseph Branciforte — greyfade founder, co-producer, mastering engineer, and FOLIO interior designer
• "In Conversation: Josh Mason & Joseph Branciforte" — the long-form interview at Branciforte's Patch Notes, covering the gear, the writing, and the punk ethos in Mason's own words

Instruments and Method:

• Xaoc Devices Leibniz subsystem — the binary-logic modular system the record was built on, which Mason has called "the final boss… in terms of instrument design that made no sense to me"

Literary References:

• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar — the 1963 novel with an alternate scrambled reading order, translated by Gregory Rabassa
• The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson — the 1969 "book in a box," 27 unbound sections with only the first and last fixed
• How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy — the songwriting book Lawrence cites on writing by removal

Art References:

• Mark Rothko at Tate Modern — the Rothko Room, hung according to the artist's own lighting stipulations: "The light, whether natural or artificial, should not be too strong"

Selected Press for Kicking A Dark Horse:

• IGLOO
• PopMatters
• Brainwashed
• Textura
• 15 Questions
• Foxy Digitalis

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