untitled demo (c. 2005 - 2015)

The Infraction label is looking for some help

Dear Listeners, Greetings from the south of Spain! Joseph here, this time from Blanca, Murcia, where I am among the artists in residence this month at Centro Negra. Please pray that my travel grant comes through, or feel free to become a paid subscriber if you can, to continue supporting my work. In any case, I’m a bit behind this week, still recovering from the holidays and currently suffering from a splitting headache. Luckily, we only recently wrapped our end of 2024 / 2025 preview season, so there’s no much to compile in our regular newsletter. I will be sending out my own personal Sound Propositions best of 2024 feature in the coming days, but until then I’ll leave you with this post that’s been in my draft folder for a while.

Infraction is an ambient label from Ohio that’s released records from some of my Italian friends—Matteo Uggeri, Enrico Coniglio—as well as records from the likes of Offthesky & Pleq, Bartosz Dziadosz, Pausal, Celer, Kiln, Andrew Liles, Aidan Baker, Parks, Colin Potter, and many others.

Late last year, Infraction posted this plea for help via Bandcamp:

I'm looking for some help.

Infraction has been in existence since 2001. Over the years, there have been a number of submitted demos, releases, reissues and proposals for release.

This recording was found in a box, with no title written on the CDR. Any information about the artist, track titles, year, etc. could not be extracted from the disc. It was a demo submitted and the original paper with all of those details was inconveniently separated, or was never there to begin with.

The audio archive of the internet was tapped, the usual app suspects (Soundhound, Shazam) trialed and failed. It all remains a mystery.

There is a certain mystique in having no idea who is behind the music. Like hearing a clip on a radio in years past, and really no resource to lean on to. Listening in a vacuum is a nearly impossible task these days, except when something like this slips through.

Here is what is known - the original demo was 6 tracks long (there are 3 tracks made available here). It is ambient. It is, in my opinion, really good and very well done.

It was probably submitted sometime between 2005 to 2015. I do not own the copyright to this, but would love to know who is behind it. This is crowdsourcing in a much different way I suppose. Please help identify, or let me know if you just have a hunch.
Thank you.

PS - If/when the artist is identified, this release will be taken down, proper credit will be announced and we'll go from there.

infraction.bandcamp.com/album/a

So is this for real? The cynic in me always has to wonder, but this plea seems to be made in earnest. Still, it’s an opportunity to think through some scattered thoughts on anonymity. Anonymity can have justifiable advantages, conceptually and otherwise, can often be abused as marketing ploy, at best, or straight up cultural appropriate, at worst.

When we launched ACL at the beginning of 2012, we seem to have been in a zenith in the anonymity cycle, as several early favorite artists, including Black Swan and Hummingbird, were the result of anonymous producers. The year before, Spectrum Spools had released a record by Jean Logarin aka Temporal Marauder with an elaborate backstory purporting to be a lost early gem of Kraut/kosmische-inspired Belgian electronic music from the 1970s. But the press release, which claimed that “if Jean Logarin did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” and further described the album as a “vanity project within a vanity project” cast enough doubts that the story was always suspect. It also named the artist Raglani, almost certainly the author of these recordings, as a collaborator within this (concocted) narrative, giving some conceptual weight to the project without being outright deceptive or malicious.

Other artists have used anonymous aliases to produce work outside the spotlight of their usual work, such as Richard Skelton’s Imperial Valley project. Such examples as Imperial Valley and Temporal Marauder are notable then in that they reveal themselves. Others raise more complicated questions of cultural appropriation, such as Abul Mogard, who was eventually unmasked as Italian artist Guido Zen pretending to be a Serbian factory worker. This fact especially annoyed many of my Balkan friends, as the project got a lot of attention. Guido Zen has never apologized, as far as I know, and many fail to see the harm, but consider what it means when an outside pretender gets more critical praise and press attention than someone actually from that place and lived experience. One might compare this to the phenomenon of the “Pretendian,” in which a fake or questionable native identity is used for advancement, taking resources away from those who actually need it.

Anonymity has other uses, of course, and much of the promise of DJ culture and early techno was based on decentering the cult of personality that had accompanied the image-centric development of popular music in the age of mass media.

This was one of the reasons that when Zev Love X reinvented himself as MF DOOM following the passing of his brother, he began covering his face, eventually settling on his famous mask. He later explained the reasoning behind the mask in an interview:

Things from my point of view
Started going more to
what things looked like
Opposed to what things sound like
Ya know what I mean
Before we aint know what emcees looked like
until we went to the party and seen em rocking
You know so
Most times you saw em rock at a show
Before you even knew
Know what I'm saying
Before videos, pre videos
You really was going off the sound of the record
Straight skills
See once it started getting more publicized
And you know
It started being, hip hop started being more of a money making thing
Then you get these corporate ideas
Where you want to put what it looks like
To sell what it sounds like

The politically militant second-wave of Detroit techno is best represented by the sprawling anonymous collective Underground Resistance, founded by luminaries “Mad Mike” Banks, Jeff Mills, and Robert Hood, and their anonymity at the time therefore had political justifications.

There’s a freedom in the invisibility, then, though it must be pointed out that it is almost always men who deploy anonymity, and it’s worth thinking through why that is. In my conversation with Megan Mitchell aka Cruel Diagonals, she stresses the importance of centering her image and her embodiment: “These are not disembodied forms, I’m not just a sample pack to make your track sound better. There’s a body here, there’s something behind this.” Here, Mitchell is explaining the decision to prominently feature her image on the cover of Fractured Whole, while problematizing the idea of #femalevocals. She points to the Rialavox Ladies plug-in suite, a “female vocal” sample library that went viral for all the wrong reasons. Rather than functioning as an anonymous “female” flourish, such disembodied vocals quickly fall into the uncanny valley. Owing to their embodiment, vocals are often gendered in a way that other instruments are not. While male artists can mask themselves (sometimes literally) and hide behind anonymous monikers and white label releases, there are different pressures on female-identified artists.

And when women do hide behind pseudonyms, they seem to inspire desperate attempts to unmask their true identity. Consider the Italian writer Elena Ferrante, whose anonymity inspired (male) journalists to effectively try to dox her, partly out of a deeply ingrained cultural misogyny, and partly sparked by jealousy at her international success, effectively circumventing the old boys club that is publishing.

On that note, I’m reminded of something billy woods, who blurs or otherwise obscures his face in photos and whose real identity is a secret, rhymes in “Trivial Pursuit”:

I got recognized at the Butcher, like
"All due respect, are you woods or you not?"
(I'll take the lamb chops)
Said he recognized the voice from somewhere
Listened to the tape and compared, over the years
I forget white people is born police, impressed (Yup)
I guess I need a new place to buy meat (Yup)

That’s all I’ve got for now, but if anyone recognizes this Infraction recording, do get in touch with them and let them know.