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Artists and Readers Join forces for 9th CD

November 9, 2007

For the ninth issue of Esopus, readers and musicians were invited to collaborate to create 11 new songs on the issue’s enclosed CD.

The project is similar in scope to the “Imaginary Friends” CD from Issue 4, for which subscribers submitted descriptions of their childhood imaginary friends that were used as the inspiration for songs by participating musicians. This time, readers submitted transcripts of their dreams, which were then passed along to musicians, who each picked one to serve as the basis for a song. The 11 musical acts, including White Whale, Ida, Dirty Projectors, Califone, and Paavoharju, chose from over 100 submissions, relating everything from nightmares about spider people to convenience-store liaisons with Yoko Ono.

Transcripts of the selected dreams appear in Esopus 9 alongside the original CD. In addition to the readers’ texts and the songs they prompted, artist Daniel Gordon has created original artworks especially for Esopus. Gordon’s visual point of view on five common dream subjects provides the final angle on these multidisciplinary variations on a theme.

Esopus 9 also includes artists’ projects by Sarah Malakoff, Kay Rosen, and Charlie White; a piece by New York Times cruciverbalist David Quarfoot that walks readers through the construction of a crossword puzzle (one of two Quarfoot created especially for the issue); facsimile reproductions of materials from the MoMA Archives related to “Exhibition X,” a top-secret (and never-realized) project hatched by Museum trustees in 1940; 100 frames from Tsai Ming-Liang’s stunning 2006 film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (with commentary by Claire Denis), pages from WWII P.O.W. Gerald Limon’s journal kept during his 15 months in a German stalag, Heather McPherson’s tale of her tortuous journey from midwestern “nerd” to Japanese taiko drummer, a short screenplay about Andy Warhol by the late filmmaker Jim Lyons, and Angus Trumble’s “1824 in Retrospect.” 

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