A Brief History of Widémouth Tapes
brought to you by their sponsor:
Widémouth Tapes is a label that includes 3 series of audio tapes & 1 of video tapes (or, as I prefer, vaudeo &/or vaudio). The 3 audio series are the founding one: Widemouth; its successor: démo; and the most recent one whose name combines the previous 2 names & creates the overall umbrella term: Widémouth. Periodically, WdmU publishes samplers from groups of previous tapes. As such, démo K7D is the Widemouth Sampler; Widémouth tape #002 is the démo tapes sampler; & Widémouth tape #020 is currently planned to be the sampler for the 1st 19 WdmU tapes. Widemouth Tapes was originally called such as a reference to Widemouth jars since they're also known as Mason jars - making a pun off of the founder's name: Chris Mason. I was involved basically from the beginning thanks to my being Widemouth's 1st reviewer.
Below are the introductory notes to the Widemouth Sampler:
"Widemouth Tapes was founded in the later half of 1978ev in BalTimOre, as a part of the Merzaum Collective, by writer/performer/etc Chris Mason. The Merzaum Collective included such sub-units as the performance group "CoAccident", the publishers of "pod" books & "e pod" magazine, the music group "Svexner Labs", "Desire Productions", etc.. The name "Merzaum" was contructed by combining the dadaist Kurt Schwitters' "merz" with the Russian futurist Alexei Kruchenykh's "zaum". This combination was meant to be expressive of the collective's political & lingual historical sympathies. Of particular interest to most members of the collective were sound & visual poetry, "language-centered" writing, improvising, & alternatives to capitalism & hierarchies - such as through collaboration.
The 1st 8 Widemouth tapes, all produced by Chris, were fairly clearly aligned with Merzaum activities - 5 were directly from members & the remaining 3 were by people supported by it &/or supporters of it. Steve Benson, eg, came from California, staying with Mason, to perform & read as part of Desire Productions' "Festival of Disappearing Art(s)"; while cris cheek came from London & stayed with Kirby & Ro Malone, other collective members/founders, to also perform & collaborate extensively - again sponsored by Desire Prods.
The next 4 tapes were produced, at Chris' request, by an entity going by the name "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" - a collaborator/activist with another BalTimOre grouping with social concerns similar to those of Merzaum's. This grouping, sometimes known as "Balti-Media" (mainly in retrospect), was involved with catalyzing anarchic interaction within large groups of people who probably never would've come into contact with certain esoteric theory & practice otherwise. The 3 dominant areas of their activity were a sort of guerrilla "theater" done under the names of B.O.M.B. (the BalTimOre Oblivion Marching Band) & Crab Feast, large open-ended social events (such as "fashion shows", parties for people from the future, a sort of "fake" science fair, etc), & a network of interactive phone stations known as the B.U.T.N. (BalTimOre Underground Telectropheremonic Network). The 1st of these latter was "TESTES-3". This phone station received as many as 150 calls daily - ultimately involving the participation of thousands of people in the BalTimOre area. Given tentatively, a convenience's desire to further propagate this type of underground populist mass-media, the TESTES-3 material was chosen for publishing.
By late 1980ev, the Merzaum Collective had disintegrated to a major extent & Chris was moving to Amsterdam for a year. Having long since tired of the responsibilities of running Widemouth, he handed it over to Patty Karl (another ex-Merzaumer) & tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE [in June or so of '81]. Chris had managed to finagle a $2,400 grant for the production of 6 specific tapes which were due out by July of '81, but, having lost momentum, had failed to do so. When convenience & Karl were given the "business", it consisted of a couple of completely disorganized boxes full of crumpled papers, box-less cassettes, rubber stamps, a checking account, 1 tape recorder, a couple of missing "masters", & the unfulfilled grant obligation.
Patty & tentatively, being, perhaps, not remarkable well-suited to this job, took quite some time to make sense out of the mess. Procuring deadline extentions, the tapes that Chris had committed himself to in order to get the grant - those by Pablo & the New Mexicans, CoAccident, Bruce Andrews (which became "Public Language"), Beth Anderson/Gayle Hanson, Charles Bernstein/Charles Stein, & Franz Kamin - + Dutch sound & visual poet Great Monach's "Zwevingen/Floatings and other works" were finally published - but not to the satisfaction of the N.E.A. Thus, the grant wasn't renewed.
In the meantime, convenience produced 4 more tapes relevant to B.U.T.N. (2 VD-RADIO tapes, 1 (301)962-0210 tape, & "Accumulations/Great Moments in Oddball Sports") & a tape from 2 "doktor bands" from the then blossoming Church of the SubGenius. Karl produced the "Laughingstock" compilation as her final contribution before dropping out. Deciding to treat the Widemouth tapes as a finite series, tent ended it with a summary tape of the activities of Chris Mason's & Chas Brohawn's group "The Tinklers" & moved on to producing a new series called démo tapes - still keeping the 26 Widemouth tapes available. From time to time, particularly wjile he's away from BalTimOre, convenience has been helped with the new hybrid label Widémouth Tapes by friend & collaborator John Berndt.
Throughout the majority of this time, Widemouth has been such a shoe-string operation (despite the grant) that even keeping 2 working tape players available to dupe with has been a struggle. 1 tape recorder was stolen in a burglary, 1 was a piece of junk to begin with, some broke, etc.. - Until access to John Berndt's duping deck, the decks used for copying were usually at slightly different speeds from each other - resulting in speed fluctuations between the "masters" & the tapes for sale/trade. Smoke damage from a major fire didn't help the condition the materials were in either. Add to this unintentional technical amateurishness &/or deliberate philosophical rejection of making such concerns 1st priority at the expense of radical content + the frequent preference for loud distortedness & the result is often, but not always, a low-fidelity product.
Nonetheless, Widemouth's importance as a label representing an extremely broad range of experimental thinking & action from the late 70s to the early 80s that few, if any, other recording publishers would have anything to do with overrides petty technical considerations. The work presented covers revolutions in language, performance, bogus religion, & underground communications systems often inadequately quasi-documented elsewhere - if at all."
As an announcement of the démo tapes series I wrote something like the following:
"EXPLANATION OF WHY
SINCE IT'S UNLIKELY THAT WIDEMOUTH TAPES WILL EVER HAVE THE MEANS TO GIVE ITS PUBLICATIONS THE EXTENSIVE EXPOSURE THAT WE AT WIDEMOUTH THINK THEY DESERVE, I - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - HAVE DECIDED TO START A NEW CASSETTE SERIES/SET WITH THE EMPHASIS ON A MORE PRACTICALLY REALIZABLE INTERMEDIATE FUNCTION FOR WIDEMOUTH CALLED démo tapes.
WHAT ARE DEMO TAPES?
THESE démo tapes ARE NOT ONLY DEMO TAPES IN THE USUAL SENSE OF DEMONSTRATION TAPES GIVEN TO OTHER PUBLISHING COMPANIES FOR CONSIDERATION FOR LARGER EDITIONS & DISTRIBUTION BY THOSE COMPANIES BUT ARE ALSO PRODUCTS FOR SALE INDEPENDENT OF THAT WHICH CAN POTENTIALLY EXPLORE THE FOLLOWING AMBIGUITIES:
démo CAN BE:
DEMONSTRATIVE, DEMOLISHING, DEMOBBING, DEMOBILIZING, DEMOCRATIC, DEMODED, DEMODULATED, DEMOGORGONIC, DEMOGRAPHIC, DEMOISELLISH, DEMONIC, DEMONETIZING, DEMORALIZING, DEMOTING, DEMOTHBALLING, DEMOUNTING, démordre, démouler, démultiplicateur, démuni, démuseler.."
The below is a quote from the démo tapes sampler notes. The emboldened & font-size increased section is a change I've chosen to make here to highlight an important philosophical point.
"The 28 tapes of the démo series were published from app. '85 to '91 as the successor series to the 26 Widemouth tapes. These démo tapes are simply quasi-documentary residue from the audio projects of myself & friends of mine from '76 to '91. These recordings aren't marketed as "must-have" accessories for the latest life-style fashion(s). I cho(o)se to publish this material because I think it's interesting. Of course, I hope you do too. I prefer to hype it no further."
to write to us, for trading or dering, etc..
to V.C. home page - to KNEEHIGHS home page - to S.P.C.S.M.E.F home page - to N.A.A.M.C.P. home page
to Widémouth Tapes home page - to Widémouth Tapes Catalog - to Usic Essays home page