Footnotes

Author/artist

William Brooks, Stefan Östersjö, and Jez Wells
Publication year

2020
Date

01 Feb 2020
Publishing house

Innova
Cluster

Performance and Embodiment
Series

Collaborative publications
Subtype

LP
Price

€ 20

On the surface, Footnotes is a guitar album that cuts across stylistic and aesthetic boundaries throughout the 20th Century in the U.S.A. But what is this music? Or more importantly, who are the protagonists in this release? William Brooks is a composer; Stefan Östersjö is a guitarist; Jez Wells is a creative sound engineer. So this would seem to be a composition by Brooks played by Östersjö and produced by Wells.

innova Recordings · Cage

We choose to call this album Footnotes because it presents the artefactual results—or, perhaps more properly, the counterfactual results—of a lengthy research process that has led us into various historic documents, recordings, and technologies. The process, in this case, constitutes the research, and it is discussed at length in our chapter in Voices, Bodies, Practices (Leuven University Press, 2019). That chapter constitutes, in effect, our central research output (if output there must be); the six tracks on this album are merely the citations—the footnotes—with which the chapter is adorned.

A brief description of the six tracks follows. We are responsible for many of the names attached to them, which evolved in the course of our work as a kind of shorthand for a collection of artefacts and experiences. It will be evident that a prime motivator for our interest was that each track involves mysteries of some sort, many of which have not been resolved. For a more detailed explanation of our thinking, and of the tracks and their contents, see the publication cited above.