Current in the Pacific, creating its own ecological island through just going with a flow. In the future we need to move forward and change Apparent Extent into a “Regenerative Assemblage.” Sustainability is not enough.
APPARENT EXTENT Volker Zander apparent-extent.com
Based in Cologne, established in 2005
Johanna Billing, Ruth Buchanan, Karl Holmqvist, Christian Jendreiko, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Mika Taanila, Hannah Weinberger, Emily Wardill, Franziska Windisch…
VOLKER ZANDER — APPARENT EXTENT
Apparent Extent is a label for artist records. I always work in the realm of public art institutions. It’s always this triangle: artist + art institu-tion + label. “Making public records” is what I do. I started Apparent Extent in 2005. I had moved from Kassel to Munich and I had given up my job as landscape architect to be a full-time musician. I was touring and I had a surplus of time. Time is an important resource. Just be-ing in a tour bus travelbe-ing the world wasn’t enough for me. I basically started my label out of boredom. I felt disconnected from my friends and I wanted to reconnect. Bring home gifts and souvenirs.
By “small niche,” you mean the field of artist records, right? Everything in the art world is a niche, limitation and limited access is maybe what drives this cultural field, that we call the arts. In 2005 you could see that the world of music would crumble. The CD became a dying dinosaur, and vinyl production atomized to the size of private press-ings. Two sparks were important. First, naming the label Apparent Extent after a concept used in the nineteenth century by the British architect John Nash. I found this term by chance in a lecture compi-lation by my favorite city planning theorist, Joost Meuwissen. Once I had the name, Apparent Extent became a metaphor and the magic spell to propel my work into a different space. The second spark was meeting the work of the Swedish artist Johanna Billing in 2006. By chance I saw an exhibition by Johanna in Frankfurt am Main at a pub-lic non-profit gallery called Basis. The music in her films stuck and I knew I had to release her soundtracks. More importantly, there was more than just music in her music. I think that is important. I found her through her website. She liked the idea and suggested we con-nect the releases with other public galleries, to release them as “pub-lic pub“pub-lications” you could say.
Through Johanna Billing’s records I garnered the interest of progressive curators like Kathleen Rahn (then in Nuremberg and today in Hanover) and Anja Casser at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. Kathleen Rahn saw the liberating potential of Apparent Extent as a public label and made the connection between me and the artist Christian Jendreiko in Düsseldorf. And through Jendreiko, whose practice is creating social
A medium is sometimes not what we think it is.
Even our music consumption, something so simple and basic and very historical, is filled with very specific hows, whats and whys. And especially, we read and study how we should do this consumption.
I started to dub tapes and sell them, because it was the cheapest thing to do back then. And tapes sold better than CD-Rs.
However CD-Rs where even simpler to make. So sometimes I did choose to burn a CD-R.
My favorite medium is early eighties budget pressed classical music vinyls (you know, those very thin records with way too many minutes of sound on each side). Everything sounds super com-pressed and almost aggressive. Another favorite of mine is listening to positive island music on a rundown sound system. Since it makes me think of situations. Of specific places, memories, but also of politics, stories, people, nature, etc.
Because sound is romance. It’s maybe the most romantic thing there is, since our ears and hearts are different, and we can decide how and why.
Media is so overestimated. Please do remember, a lot of the vinyl and tape “warmth” is invented. Because a generation is getting close to, or is already in its midlife crisis. So it goes out to spend money to seek fast comfort, on objects that give them this comfort.
Is this wrong? No! Is this artistic? …?
Lieven Martens
Cassettes as a medium for the dissemination of music have taken on a new meaning and weight in the internet age. At a time when everything is digitized and instantly transferable, the idea of releasing sound as an artifact, sound as or on an object, into the public space carries this significance: this is an object that, in order to enter the digital environment, has to be processed, transferred, converted.
Cassettes (and of course vinyls) have the rare distinction of being alien to the internet, languages that do not synchronize with that which is principally spoken (binary).
In the internet age, things which don’t fit into it take on a different, magical quality.
Vinyl shares this distinction with the cassette, which brings us to the other reason these nice little boxes are so interesting at this point — most composers who are making interesting work are, of course, financially destitute, because nobody listens to interesting work anymore, though lots of people make it. Record labels will only release safe bets, guaranteed to fit into some metaphorical box or other (though not necessarily, in the Spotify age, a literal box). These financially destitute avant-garde renegades can seldom afford the heavy costs of a deluxe, full-color gatefold sleeved vinyl with inserts and stickers. Cassettes are the affordable alternative and, when all the supercool kids realize it’s time to get off the Internet and create a new underground, I believe cassettes will be the place where it happens.
Ergo Phizmiz