From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
There was no mail today. There was no mail today! There was NO mail today. Isn't it the worst feeling in the world? There was no mail today. How dare you make me care! How dare you encourage my expectations! How dare you enter my life! Please come into my life. Please send me mail. There was no mail today. Why is the post office holding my mail? I must have done something wrong. Fuck you! Stay out of my life! Fuck the postman! How dare he come so late and leave nothing in my mailbox. I keep looking in my mailbox. I keep looking in my mailbox. I know it's empty, but I keep looking in my mailbox. I'm always thinking about you! I'm always thinking about you...
It was 1980 and I was ready for something new to go with the new decade. I took a new name: Minoy. I was winding down my activities in painting and super-8 filmmaking after almost fifteen years. I seemed to be at a dead end. There was no progress. I came across a copy of Artweek and saw an announcement for a mail art show: open theme, all media, no fee, all works shown, no returns, documentation to all. What's this? No rejections! Must be a joke. I had nothing to lose, so I sent a drawing on a postcard and pretty much forgot about it. Some time later I received a xerox listing of all the participants in the show and a few examples of the artwork sent. But there was something different here. Addresses were included with the names. It was an international list. Who were all these people? I saw more announcements, so I entered more and more mail art shows. I began to notice some of the same names reappearing in the documentation.
I started sending mail art (postcards, xerox art, drawings, photographs, poems, etc.) to some of these people, not really knowing what to expect. In a short time my mailbox was full of responses of every shape and size. I started receiving contact lists, invitations to more mail art shows and projects, and letters from people I hadn't even written. I was ecstatic. I was hooked.
As the exchange of art, communication, and ideas continued, I started making friends with other mail artists and learning more about "the eternal network." How had I missed all this for so long? Mail art had been in full swing for nearly thirty years! At first I felt cheated and left out, but soon I was too busy to think about that. I was suddenly in contact with the whole world! All the doors were opened to me; all I had to do was knock.
The communications became more personal, with longer letters, telephone calls, audio letters on cassette, even video letters a bit later. I began to see some of the mail art shows in person and started meeting other mail artists. I started contributing writing and artwork to mail art zines and periodicals like Thermos, Photostatic, ND, Arte Postale, Commonpress, Velocity (now called Estudio), ISCA Quarterly, Level, Japan AU, and Newark Press, among many others. Some were one-time-only issues, some lasted for years, many continue to be published. People come and go, drop in, drop out, and drop back in, but the network always remains.
By 1982 I had become deeply involved with the "home taping" of original electronic music on audio cassettes. I won first prize in an electronic music competition sponsored by KCRW in Santa Monica. I was interviewed on the radio and my tape was broadcast. That was the dramatic beginning of an obsessive involvement with cassette culture that continues today.
Getting deeper into mail art, I discovered other artists were also working with sound, so we began trading cassettes. My name got on contact lists, and I discovered a whole cassette network similar to the mail art network. I was reading Op magazine, and noticed that they regularly reviewed independent cassettes. It dawned on me that anyone could send in a cassette and it too would be reviewed. Finally, in the very last issue of Op (in 1984), my first release (A Place of Shades) was given a favorable review. Things exploded from there. When Op folded, two magazines, Sound Choice and Option, took up the slack, and both continued to cover cassette culture.
I released quite a few tapes in a short period of time and started my own label, Minoy Cassetteworks. I started getting on compilations and doing collaborative work through the mail, hence the name mail music. DK in Canada, John Hudak, Richard Franecki, Al Margolis, Zan Hoffman, Deaf Lions, and Das were among my first contacts. Zan was the first person I collaborated with, and subsequently we have released over fifty cassettes under the name Minoyzannoy.
I frequently send cassettes to mail art shows, and they are enthusiastically received. There is even a trend toward audio documentation of mail art exhibitions and projects in addition to the traditional visual documentation. Although there are many crossover artists involved in both mail art and mail music, the two networks remain largely segregated. Many mail artists have no idea about the enormous growth of cassette culture in the eighties. Many people working with cassettes are unaware of the parallel network of mail artists. I fully expected these two disciplines to merge closer together in the eighties, but it hasn't really happened.
I feel that I have the best of both worlds and am anxious to break down the barriers between the networks. If the Berlin Wall can fall, surely the nineties can provide the cooperative cultural atmosphere for an explosion of media synthesis.
Minoy can be heard here, excerpted from the Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD/K7
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