From Francisco López, February 2016

Sensitive audio-artists of the world:

CDs/CDRs are really disappearing! Soon it will impossible to find anyone who can “burn” a CDR or even playback a CD. This might be your last chance at creating and preserving an easily exchangeable home-made physical container of your sound work that can also simultaneously have a little something else with your personal hand touch.

Perpetuate for posterity a humble but crucial physical personal remnant of your touch along with your sound work: send us a home-made, hand-written, modest-but-proud CDR:

• A home-made audio CDR with your sound work and your handwriting (words/signature) on the surface of the disc itself.
• No guidelines/restrictions in additional hand-made “design” (sleeve, case, container), if desired.
• No deadline (other than the format’s eventual disppearance).
• Send to:

Centro Cultural Puertas de Castilla
Fonoteca SONM – Ref. ‘Before the Apocalypse’
Avda. Miguel de Cervantes, 1
30009 Murcia – SPAIN

We will preseve, document, catalog, and make accessible your work for posterity both physically and through streaming listening: http://www.sonmarchive.es

SONM – Sound Archive of Experimental Music and Sound Art is a non-profit initiative that already contains a large number of home-made releases on all kinds of formats. This project is a new effort to reinforce the main goals of the SONM Archive: preserve, document and disseminate the work of all kinds of experimental audio-artists from all over the world.

In addition to that, to lead by example, and in the spirit of audio exchange, all contributions will receive in return a copy of a special home-made, hand-signed, not-for-sale CDR release I have put together exclusively for this project, with sound work of mine from the past four decades.

‘In pure techno-theological fashion, but well beyond the simple metaphor, one could think of the CD as the martyr who first brought the digital gospel and then sacrificed his body for the eternal salvation of the digital audio files dwelling in cloud-heaven today.’

[F. López – ‘Music Dematerialized?’]

Indeed: vilified, underestimated, unjustly scorned and ostracized to the darkest uncool fringes of the digital dominions, after heroically surviving in the minuscule refuge of the “experimental” realm for much longer than anticipated, the once-glorious CD and its wilder and once-proud little sibling the CDR, seem now finally on the verge of looming extinction. Mind you: this is one example of the digital with body; and unbeknownst to many, one very significant past harbinger of DIY, industry-bypassing, individual creation and exchange through CDR labels and equivalent initiatives. So there is a historical role to be recognized here. And, of course, one never knows when a future cycle of retro-nostalgic coolness will bring back –one more time- a once-scorned format.

Regardless of whether or not that ever happens, a tribute is in order here. Before the apocalypse comes…
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Before the Apocalypse (Open Call)
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