Enjoy the Experience - London

Enjoy the Experience - London

Friday, May 31, 2013

Location:
Rough Trade East
Old Truman Brewery 91, Brick Lane
London E1 6QL, United Kingdom

A jaw dropping look at the All Time Hit Parade of Rejection. The thousands of self- produced albums you never heard of are scholarly researched with shameless awe and delightful respect. This isn’t a depressing book, it’s a catalogue raisonné of joyful failure.  – John Waters

Best-ever gateway to the infinitely peculiar multiverse of self-published phonograph records…the recordings collected here are artifacts of a media universe that no longer exists.  – William Gibson

Rough Trade East, Boo-Hooray, and Sinecure Books present an evening of vinyl celebration to launch Enjoy The Experience, the book that Larry Clark calls “The Greatest Coffee Table Book Ever Made.”

Enjoy The Experience: Homemade Records 1958 – 1992 editor Johan Kugelberg and vinyl aficionado Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley showcased some of the albums and recordings featured in the book, together with the stories behind their making.

From the 1950s through the arrival of the CD in the early 1990s, small record pressing plants across the US helped thousands of musicians capture on vinyl the sounds they heard in their heads.

Often the only audience for their records proved to be friends and family; sometimes they never made it out of unopened boxes in the artist’s garage. This never discouraged all these pizza parlor organists, funk bands aspiring to become the JBs, high school bands performing all of Jesus Christ Superstar, cult leaders who never found the right cult, jazz bands inspired to forge a new stream, these artists committed themselves to vinyl, even though they were rejected by an industry not understanding of the weird and splendidly bizarre.

The records showcased in the Enjoy The Experience book and exhibit are funkier, more psychedelic, more idiosyncratic and more emotionally rewarding than the mainstream music products of the same era. The graphics are often insanely amazing: confusing, crazy, howlingly funny but always providing a true sense of the human hand present. They’ve got that homemade vibe that we constantly crave in these screen-saturated days.

Enjoy The Experience is a snapshot of America in the second half of the 20th century, telling the stories of brave souls who took the plunge and committed their musical vision to wax. A free download card featuring amazing artists from Enjoy The Experience is included with the book. In addition, Sinecure and Now-Again Records produced a companion double LP and CD anthology.

More quotes about ENJOY THE EXPERIENCE:

BBC 6: JARVIS COCKER’S SUNDAY SERVICE
“It’s a mindblower… I certainly did enjoy the experience. It’s a fantastic read and also a fantastic listen.”

ESQUIRE (UK)
“An affectionate overview …of the musically-inclined but record-labelly-declined.”

THE GUARDIAN
“A collective aura of strangeness.”

MOJO
“The world’s mightiest collections of private press album art brought together in a handsome tome.”

JONNY TRUNK, RESONANCE FM
“A magical mystery detour to the USA…this fine book celebrates the music, life, art and history of musicians who made their own records.”

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.