lucky kitchen
sound / art editions
lk001-lk007 1997-2000

 

(text by Aeron Bergman)

In 1997 Alejandra and I moved to New York from Toronto. Alejandra studied art at SVA, I studied art at NYU. In the fall of 1997 I took Peter Campus's video art course where I met Daniel Raffel. We sat together and shared a video camera. We were soon fast friends and the three of us took long walks around Chinatown, Chelsea and the lower east side, making recordings and looking for Borscht, Challa Bread, the human soul and that sort of thing. We soon agreed that it would be a good idea to publish our sound diaries and electronic experiements. Daniel knew a great deal about the industry and had a prolific knowledge of software and internet distribution. We all shared the idea that academic electro acoustic music was too worn out, too formulated, too stylistic and too self serious. We were also not interested to produce anything too marketable. We wanted to make objects existing in more than one genre: our generation has claustrophobia. We added our collective short-attention span, home technology, conceptualism, design aesthetic, non-conformity, romanticism and energy. We worked well together for a few years.

LK001 Suetsu and Underwood. "Find and Use the Hits" CDR hand packaged baby jammies. 1997 At the time, there were not so many audio works focusing on field recordings, family home tapes or non academic electro acoustics. The recordings came from our wanderings around New York, and family recordings such as Daniel's lovely segment from his high school graduation. We both owned portable DAT recorders, and made heavy use of them. Recording fragmented audio snapshots from three people, our cities and families, it was a very early example of folktroniks: maybe better described as "sentimental electro acoustic or something". Also, CDr was a newish medium that seemed to have democratic possibilities, so we wanted to take advantage of that. This was all before MP3. We made 30 copies at first and did another repress of 15 after they sold out. It was funny to see this disc in New York's "Other Music" sitting on the shelf next to their pop products. Oh, and at the time, we were going by the name "suetsu and underwood" for some reason I forget now.
LK002.5 Aeron Bergman "Bostonpopsonreverb-formydeadgrandpa" cassette. 1997 My grandfather was an avid sound collector, but instead of collecting records, he bought them, taped them onto cassette tapes, meticulously typed the song titles and label information on the tape inserts, and then threw out the vinyl. To him, the most important thing was the easy access and storage of the music he loved. Sadly he didn't survive to see MP3 culture. After he died of a heart attack in 1997, I inherited the package seen on the left. It was a box of blank tapes in a brown paper bag, duct taped shut, a rubber band around the whole thing, and a type-written note that said "blank tapes". To commemorate him and his habit, I pulled out a "Boston Pops" record he hadn't got around to taping yet, put a reverb device between the record player and the cassette recorder, and recorded all 20 blank tapes with "Bostonpopsonreverbformydeadgrandpa".
LK003 Blip, Bleep (Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games). Featuring Daniel Beattie, V/VM, Jake Mandell, Blitter Vs. Hrvatski, Marumari, Flexible Products, Aerospace Soundwise, Stupid Lepton, Wheaton Research, Suetsu and Underwood, and more CD hand sewn cover. 1998

We asked people to make soundtracks for imaginary video games. Many of the artists were just starting out and went on to do well for themselves such as Marumari and J. Mandell. It was our first critical hit: Blip,Bleep was a success: we had celebrities sending us emails that they loved the CD, (David Byrne's secretary emailed to say he loved the disc, Jim O'Rourke said he had already bought a copy when we offered him a promo) Rolling Stone magazine came over to interview us (it never got published...), it got written up in the New York Times and the Village Voice. We sold 1,000 copies quickly. Kim's in NYC sold something like 120 copies in their St. Mark's Place store. We could have sold many more, but Alejandra and I lost interest in this kind of project: it was too boyish and marketable, typical pop culture, so the three of us never agreed on a repress. On retrospect, it was a fun project but I am glad we didn't continue down this avenue.
LK004 Alejandra and Underwood "The Childrens Record" CD, hand packaged. 1999 Alejandra and I next decided to make a hard core cut up pop anthropology project. We asked our friends and some strangers in NYC to sing songs they remembered from their childhood. Songs that Americans could remember were always TV shows or commercials, people from other countries such as Taiwan or Spain sang tradional folk songs. (This was our first folk study. We went on to do more rigorous studies of La Rioja and Porto.) Then we made not so focused but energetic and smart remixes from children's music and haunted house noises. This CD sold very well because people were expecting more Blip, Bleep. But the Children's Record was problematic: it was not easy listening, not particularly focused, and it sat on store shelves and caused a bigger rift between Daniel and ourselves and certain unpleasant distributors.
LK005 Family Audio: Featuring V/VM, Daniel Raffel, Todd Carter, Alejandra Salinas, Aeron Bergman, Drew Daniel, Kim Jun Park, and Michael Hartman. 8" lathe cut vinyl 1999 

Next we stepped even further away from the american music market and made an edition of 100 lathe cut vinyl records with hand written credits. (It sold out quickly anyway.) We asked the artists to the left to send us recordings of their families. Drew Daniel's was the most popular: it is a recording of how he came out to his mother on the phone. The big moment was when he says "Yea, I didn't think it would be such a big surprise". There are some other very lovely recordings such as Park's recording of her and her mother in a shopping mall in Seoul, and my recording of the last time I saw my other grandfather before he died of prostate cancer, also in 1998. He said to me "just keep doing what you are doing, you'll be happy."

LK006 Tourist Record: Featuring Tom Steinle, Jansky Noise, Alejandra and Aeron, Suetsu, and Aerospace Soundwise. 7" red vinyl 1999 In 1999 we organized several Lucky Kitchen events in New York, one at the Knitting Factory, and several at Brownie's, (with Etheria records) an East Village local rock bar that we packed with happy electronic music fans. This record is an edit of one of the shows featuring the musicians listed on the left. This is the last show Cologne'sTom Steinle before he gave up on music to manage a very successful pop music label.
LK007 Alejandra Salinas "Home Tapes" 10" white vinyl. 2000 In 2000 Alejandra and I left NYC for London and produced this record from old tapes from her parent's house. In the 1960's her parents emigrated from Spain to Toronto. In order to stay in touch with relatives back home, they sent cassette tapes in addition to writing letters back and forth. On the tapes were unedited snippets of chatter, house noise, folk music and the tv from Spain in the 1960's: a country still under Franco's ruthless fascism. Spain was under the radar, Franco could oppress and murder Basques, Catalans and Galicians, and the world ignored it. This distorted and haunting record captured some of this history, present in the background of every Spanish household.

LK008 V/A
"Find More Hits"
CD 2000

 This CD was our last collaboration with Daniel. We asked artists such as Torococorot and Goodiepal to remake parts of LK001 "Find the Hits" to wrap it all up. We moved to Spain for a new start. Daniel studied to be a vegetarian chef, then back to technology: he programmed a phone-in rap song computer program that was bought up by Yahoo where he now works. We still keep in touch.