What is an object? What is a thing?

What is an object?
What is a thing?
Something that I sweat for.
A thing I think and think
about
A sound that reflects an
object, an object that
reflects itself, a repetition
A reflection
Paper, ink, petroleum,
REPEAT.

What is production?
Mass produced, massively
productive, products on
a massive scale.
My hands.
A symbol.
defeat
or
triumph.
DEFECTIVE.
Handmade space.
A home erected for an object.

A record needs a home, a
sound needs a place to go.
Something that I've touched,
an object that you touch,
HEAR.
An objection,
A question I raise,
an institution (label) has
no function anymore.
A sound still needs a home.
An object needs space.
An object serves its purpose,
The sound remains,
objective space.

- B. Torst, n.d.

Ce texte figure à l'intérieur du chouette packaging du nouvel album de No Age - An object

(Sub Pop, 2013).

*

*      *

A propos du packaging, le groupe s'exprimait récemment en ces termes, interviewé par Pitchfork

Pitchfork: You decided to take this record into your own hands by manufacturing as much of every CD and LP as possible. How did that happen?

DS: I don’t sit around and play music on guitar or drums around my house. To me, music is a medium that I chose-- or chose me, maybe-- to express myself. After "Everything in Between", we were trying to write, and it was going nowhere. I started thinking about how to make a record and why I wasn’t able to make a record and why I wanted to make a record. It was a starting point for me.

RR: I said, “You’re crazy. I don’t want to fold a bunch of fucking records.”

DS: We kept talking about it, and eventually, Randy said, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.” We started writing music a little bit and recording it, and it went a lot faster after that.

Pitchfork: What did Sub Pop say?

RR: “You’re crazy!”

DS: Just like every record we’ve done, at first, they say, “Why do you guys want to make it so difficult?” The original idea was to make an unlimited edition, and we would continue to produce them until the end of time. But that would mean that if we were on tour, or something happened, we wouldn’t be able to produce the record, and it wouldn’t be in stores. But Sub Pop is in the business of selling records, so they’re not really into conceptual ideas of how to fuck with records as an object. So we decided to do a limited edition of 5,000 LPs and 5,000 CDs, which, in any sense, is not that limited. I wanted the number to be absurd, because the point was to see if we were able to do this thing. And we did it.

We physically made everything, cut everything, printed everything, boxed everything and shipped it to the printing plant. We couldn’t press the record ourselves because there is a lot of legal liability, and we’d have to get a job at the pressing plant, basically. We would if we had time, but we weren’t able to. We physically touched them all and stamped them and wrote on them and sweated on them.