"Reading Group is thrilled to release Contradictions (plays 4 writers), the new LP by legendary musician and poet Yan Jun. Yan Jun has been a central figure in the (non-)music, noise, sound, and experimental performance scenes both in his native Beijing and in the global subterranean community for decades. He founded the Beijing-based experimental label Sub Jam in 2000 and has since collaborated with Lionel Marchetti, Axel Dörner, Toshimaru Nakamura, Torturing Nurse, and many more. On Contradictions, Jun “plays 4 writers”––interpreting, across five pieces, the formal, conceptual, and linguistic challenges of literary and theoretical figures as constraints and guides for sound composition and experimental performance. On tracks A1 and A2, Jun “plays” Lu Xun, the early twentieth-century Chinese literary critic and associate of the League of Left-Wing Writers in the 1930s. These two iterations of “behaviors in environment” explore Lu Xun’s contradictory descriptions of sound and silence, forming two seemingly “empty” field recordings as containers for the full silence of non-intentional action. The following track, uses “acoustic mechanisms” to interpret a provocation from post-Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek about the mechanization of sexuality and desire in expanding global capitalism, resulting in a noise sequence indexing the battery-operated commodification of eroticism. On the B-side, Jun “plays Jean Baudrillard” by exploring the “hyper-real” of audio feedback without a manual interface. The final track recalls Jun’s work for voice and speech, interpreting Samuel Beckett by reading through the Chinese translation of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing silently––except for the enunciated floating signifier 我 (I, my, me). In the extensive liner notes by the artist, he sums up this piece in language that provides a clue to the record as a whole: “How about colliding and annihilating everything through the voice of this ‘I’ then we deal with the limit of the form?” Contradictions (plays 4 writers), edition of 200 LPs with handwritten titles. Original liner notes in Chinese and English by Yan Jun. Mastered by Taku Unami and released on October 17th, 2023 by Reading Group (RG29)." -Reading Group
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
