The Florida sound artist joins us to discuss 'Kicking A Dark Horse,' a modular album bound into a hardcover book, with each half composed to fill the silences left by the other.
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This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Florida sound artist Josh Mason.
Mason’s new album, Kicking A Dark Horse, is out now on greyfade as a hardcover book paired with modular synthesizer music, the two built to zipper together rather than stand apart.
We talk about the punk rock roots underneath all that circuitry, why only the album's first and last tracks have a fixed place, and what Cortázar's Hopscotch has to do with any of it.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Jash Mason's Kicking A Dark Horse)
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00:00 Introduction
00:57 The title: a mashup of idioms
01:58 Florida as both a state and a state of mind
04:29 Horseshoe politics and common ground
05:11 Punk rock as ethos, not genre
06:27 Music as a reason to reach out
09:40 The stage as a barrier
11:24 The book and the album, zippered together
13:39 No real beginning: how to read it
14:36 How the FOLIO came together
16:56 Modular synthesis and the man-machine interface
18:13 Reading every manual fifty times
19:35 The pen of animals
21:00 Teaching himself electronics during COVID
23:08 Hopscotch, The Unfortunates, and nonlinear narrative
25:49 Chance, chaos, and spinning plates
27:24 Writing by omission
28:47 A graphic designer's ear: color theory in sound
32:13 Sequencing, splice points, and loops
34:10 What comes next: words without music
36:01 The QR code and the pairing he couldn't fully protect
38:34 Closing
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Visit Josh Mason at https://joshmason.info
and follow him on Instagram → https://instagram.com/primitivecoastalelectronics
and Bandcamp → https://j-w-m.bandcamp.com
Purchase 'Kicking A Dark Horse' (FOLIO hardcover + digital) from greyfade → https://www.greyfade.com/catalog/012
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