PARADISE SOUNDTRACK

 “ISN’T PARADISE AN APPENDIX OF BOTANY”
LIMITED EDITION VINYL ART SET

I recently made an art object that is one of my favorite pieces: an edition of 10 picture disc vinyl albums containing the soundtrack to my short film “Isn’t Paradise an Appendix of Botany”, with a corresponding set of prints featuring the illustrations used on both sides of the vinyl. The music on the soundtrack is by my musical alter-ego Lo Radiante, and was created exclusively from classical music samples I pulled from vintage records, then altered and recomposed into multi-layered ambient, psychedelic drones. Sometimes they compositions sound like neo-classical ambient orchestras, other times they sound like an choir from outer space filtered through 100 layers of reverb. Making the soundtrack felt very much like I was making another piece of a bigger puzzle but it was only after I finished the “Paradise” film that I conceived of a larger project that included releasing the soundtrack in some form. I had done something similar for another short film I made in 2014 called “The Dream of Roman Signer’s Camera.” I made four numbered DVD copies of the film in hand-silkscreened packaging - after getting a request from Roman Signer himself who wanted a copy for his archives.

The “Paradise” soundtrack/art object is a continuation of an artistic thread I’ve been working on for the past three years, producing series of artwork and multimedia pieces documenting the ecosystems of Mt. Rainier National Park, from the rainforests at it’s base to the alpine meadows in the highlands along Paradise trail. Over the course of two years I went there four times to shoot film and almost all of my best artwork since then was born from those shoots, like the Rainier Botany and Esoteric shadowboxes, the Paradise film, the Subterranean Harmonics prints, and lots of experiments that led to better work.

Making art objects has been in my artistic DNA for a long time. I’ve been fascinated by using multimedia as art objects since discovering Joseph Beuys and his use of Multiples, “small-scale portable and affordable pieces that captured an element of his practice", when I was an art student in university. I was drawn to the idea of how an artist could produce a multimedia article, like a movie film or reel-to-reel tape, then present the images/sounds captured within it as ART. As a kid who made weird super 8 films and experimented with mixing sounds on tape, It blew my mind!! Though Beuys was the first (an favorite) artist doing I found doing this, the concept of multiples had been done by many artists in the post-war era, most notably the Fluxus movement artists of the 60’s and 70’s, though their output was less serious (though no less elegant) than Beuy’s. More recently, Matthew Barney made a series of silkscreened laserdiscs each containing an episode of his extravagantly surreal Cremaster films, usually produced and presented as highly stylized single editions.

The music on this vinyl were all composed for possible use in the film, but ultimately only “Potentially Immortal Beings” was used in the final film. This music will never be re-released or streamed online, so only those that purchased the edition will hear the entire suite of music. The music is meant to be part of the art and as such those that purchase the art are “keepers” of the music in perpetuity.

EDITION INFORMATION

“ISN’T PARADISE AND APPENDIX OF BOTANY?”
Edition of 10
Two-sided, Lathe cut vinyl picture disc, OBI strip, and two 12x12” photo prints. All pieces in each set numbered.

Each vinyl album is numbered in the run out groove, with a Japanese-style OBI and two 12”x12” numbered prints of the illustrations on the front and back of the picture disc. The prints and OBI are numbered with the corresponding vinyl number. Music composed by Lo Radiante, mastered by James Plotkin. The vinyl picture discs were lathe-cut by Jon Niess at Austin Signal.