In groups we become stronger
Wires are crossing. Scenes are building. Can you feel it?
When we first started working on Metalabel, we imagined a hypothetical situation for how groups like the ones we were thinking about would start:
Imagine a group of newsletter writers who cover the same topic. They get tired of competing against each other for likes and attention. One day decide to start making projects together instead…
Lo and behold, this vision has come true. This week a collection of musicians who publish on Substack are releasing a new project on Metalabel that closely mirrors parts of this journey. As Miter, the organizer of the group, told us in an oral history of the project:
“I first learned about Metalabel on Substack and immediately connected with the model presented of collectives and labels finding mutual support through the release of creative material. The zine that Metalabel put out called “New Creative Era” really spoke to me, especially the image that shows collectives coming together from individual creators to build a creative ecosystem… Metalabel has given the collective a place to stand… I’m thrilled about the possibilities for the future.”
The past two years Metalabel focused on establishing these ideas through releases like New Creative Era to help people see a new path ahead, as Miter describes.
This year and moving forward, Metalabel is focused on providing tools that help people practically take these steps together, just as Miter and the group are now doing. Through these tools you can:
Create a label around whatever kind of output or scene you wish
Bring together collaborators to put out work together
Release and sell physical work, digital work, and bundles
Split earnings between contributors and the label according to percentages you set
Build an audience and catalogue of work around your creative values
These tools combined with the untapped energy all around us can ignite a new creative era. Week by week, we’re getting there. Every label and every release is a step towards the culture we wish to be part of.
This week we’re humbled to spotlight the work of a radical experiment and the people behind it, as well as celebrate a spectacular Metalabel-enabled collaboration IRL in NYC. Wires are crossing. Scenes are building. Can you feel it?
Featured Release
Salon du Monde, Fremont: The Soundtrack
Format: Cassette, MP3s, video
Logline: A concept album based on a fictitious TV show and world
50 editions
A “concept album” is a work of music in which the individual parts add up to more than the whole. The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the canonical example — the album is more than a collection of songs, it’s a self-contained world.
Salon Du Monde, Fremont is a musical project like this. The music and accompanying films are set in a fictitious world where an MTV-like ‘90s variety show features music. This is where the many contributors to this project — musicians spread around the world who came together for this — brought their own voices, ideas, and aesthetics to build an imaginary world together.
The output is a wild tour through a collective imagination, and a bold and fun experiment. You can learn more about how it came together in this oral history of the project.
This Metalabel release offers the soundtrack available in cassette and MP3 forms and bragging rights for accepting your own role in this universe. Bold and inspiring. Yes, this!
REVIEW: Goodnight Sweet Thing
We invited the writer Whitney Mallett of The Whitney Review of New Writing to attend and review the live performance of Cristine Brache’s Goodnight Sweet Thing — a book of poetry performed as a spectacular three-act work of performance art that we haven’t stopped thinking about two weeks later.
Goodnight Sweet Thing
Directed by Cristine Brache and Sigrid Lauren
Featuring Emily Allan, Betsey Brown, and Joshua Weidenmiller
New York City | May 11, 2024
By Whitney Mallett
Goodnight Sweet Thing has the hazy logic of a dream, the familiar discomfort of childhood capitulation, and the cloying excess of overripe fruit. It adapts Cristine Brache’s book of poetry by the same name into a work of experimental theater, directed by Brache and Sigrid Lauren, which finds three performers (Emily Allan, Betsey Brown, and Joshua Weidenmiller) in a state of Lynchian hypnosis across three acts: a jello wrestling match, a therapist’s office, and a shoo-bee doo-bee stage show. Costume changes are worked into the onstage choreography. A referee is unmasked. A Young-Girl stamps her feet at the prospect of putting on a frilly period-piece dress. The performers begin stage right, they transition to stage left, and they finish in the center, the nostalgia of their singing and dancing bittersweet, and the final act’s simulation of balance and symmetry never quite achieving a sense of resolve. It’s a performance that gnaws at you. Throughout, trauma is recounted with a deadpan affect, and certain phrases are repeated enough times that their meaning is turned inside out. One such sticky line recited over and over: “I can look into anybody’s eyes and borrow the ache and promise of a daydream.”
«Continue reading the full review»
On Rotation
What we’re into this week:
Cristine Brache’s poetry book Goodnight Sweet Thing, which soon begins shipping
Whitney Mallett’s third issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing, which has been landing in mailboxes this week
Autonomous Worlds N1 and its prospective internet futures
Moment of Zen
Francis Ford Coppola embodying the ideal creative life in a clip from Cannes:
We’ll explore Coppola’s American Zoetrope — an especially ambitious and inspiring label — in a future message.
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Metalabel
So excited for what Metalabel will grow into!