Decoder Magazine

Living Room Visions is a prolific, international multimedia arts collective that holds its meetings on facebook, uniting a disparate network of home experimenters and fringe composers from Johnstown, Pennsylvania to Spain's blandly contested exclave Melilla on the coast of Morocco. Through a series of associated and equally prolific imprints, the group makes itself known. Having already said prolific twice, I hesitate to say it again, but these labels are prolific. The group's most active imprint is Sunup Recordings, who've loaded themselves down with what must be hundreds of releases in almost no time - check out their bandcamp if you don't believe me. Others, like Ailanthus Recordings, operate on only slightly smaller scales. The more recently founded Illuminated Paths can still go either way. Regardless of the volume of their output, these imprints distinguish themselves in that the boundary between personal art project and "entrepreneurial project" is invisible. These projects enshrine the utopic vision of one of the most fegund group of idealists we've ever known and they've been a pleasure to cover this last year via Decoder, particularly since the highly successful release of their first entirely collaborative effort, a double cassette mixtape that collects tracks from all the diverse partisans of Living Room Visions, running the gamut from oblique sound collages to hyper melodic pop. We couldn't be happier to have made it our first contribution to the Free Music Archive's collection.

In addition to the Living Room Visions Summer 2012 mixtape, we've also uploaded a recent release from Ailanthus, Melillan composer Afrika Pseudobruitismus' album Waikiki Kosmos. His work to some extent matches the whole range of Living Room Visions, sound collages with buried melodies and moments of pattern that emerge from his mostly improvised compositions. Download the mixtape here.

To round out our first batch of contributions, we picked Gums, the new EP and third release from Sacramento born visual artist David Mohr, who moonlights as electro-pop band FAVORS in addition to running a small imprint called Future Push. Like Living Room Visions, he is a fundamentally kind and considerate operator; humble but so talented you want to tell him to stop. Download Gums here and listen to a little below.

In any event, we'll probably be adding plenty more nonsense soon. Thanks for reading and thanks for caring enough to support a site like FMA!