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Radio/Guitar
Thrum
Lanthanides Series
2004

Table of the Elements
[Holmium] SWC-LP-67
Phono LP, silkscreen

Radio Guitar is fantastic music and noise utilizing radio sound and electric guitar as realized by artists Peggy Ahwesh and Barbara Ess respectively.

Filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh came of age in the 1970's with feminist politics and the experimental film underground. She started working with Super-8 film in her teens and went on to make feature films, including Splice This (1999) and Girls Beware (1997). Her work has recently been shown at Rotterdam, Osnabrook, and The New York Film Festival. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the NYSCA Film Production Grant, Jerome Foundation Grant and a grant from Art Matters, Inc. She is presently teaching at Bard College.

Barbara Ess has been performing music in NYC since the 1970s w/ such famed no-wave groups as The Static and Daily Life as well as ensembles led by Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, and Y Pants, a trio of women playing music on toy instruments. Most recently she has been a member of Ultra Vulva. She has also worked as a publisher of Just Another Asshole—a series of anthologies of artists works in various formats. She concurrently works as a visual artist making and showing large-scale photographs. A book of her photo work, I Am Not This Body, has been published by Aperture to resounding critical acclaim.

This exquisite, limited-edition disk is only their second release.

“Radio Guitar is a triumph, not a tentative venture. Constructed, as the title suggests, from "radio sound and electric guitar," the tracks sound like field recordings. They crackle and hiss. They sound ancient even as they sound alive, yet theirs is not the sound of a bygone era—'the old weird America'—or a distant cultural enclave. It's the sound of another dimension, neither ancient nor modern, a sound with exceptional extrasensory depth.

“Its faux documentary effect is, of course, the result of painstaking collage. Location recordings are overlaid with found sound and lost memories, filtered through six degrees of separation, screened with random ambience, cut up, looped and layered, and bounced off an abandoned satellite. What's remarkable is not so much the method as its net effect, which is electric. For all their technical wizardry, these recordings still feel authentic, as if you're overhearing events in real time. Listening to them is like eavesdropping on ghosts.

"It's an astonishing experience [and] a thrilling vision—not because it glorifies the familiar, but because it animates the unknown. Radio Guitar sifts through sonic detritus for signs of life and stumbles on another dimension. It may be a house of the spirits or a tower of Babel in some far insect realm. It doesn't matter. What makes this record remarkable—moving, even—is its fresh sense of absence, its longing for meaning and the ingenuity with which that longing is expressed. Not a word of explanation. Not one single hint. The imagination is invisible."

The Wire

"The two components of Radio/Guitar—since their element, holmium, oxidizes rapidly in moist air—quickly change their valence on Thrum. Former no-wave toy player for Y Pants, Barbara Ess makes her guitar gurgle between lost transmissions and atmospheric interference. Similarly, Peggy Ahwesh attunes knobs to pick up both shortwave and shore waves, the two ladies playing like buoys between pirate stations and fog-ensconced ships."

Village Voice

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OWN THE ARCHIVE

(Posted by Within Things, May 18, 2023)

From 1993, US recording label Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise. It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider sounds.

The label’s carefully cultivated archive now contains over 15,000 CDs and LPs, an impossible quantity to logistically or financially maintain. Rather than “recycle” the majority of these modern sound and design artifacts, Table of the Elements is making them available to the public via Within Things.

From rich bundles of obscure recordings, exclusive printed material, and limited quantity “holy grails,” Within Things is excited to help connect this important archive to the public. We’re very honored to collaborate with a label that helped define a path and inspire what we do, long before our store even existed.

Click the image above to be taken directly to the Table of the Elements section on our site, and stay posted for the announcement of limited offerings via our newsletter.

~~o0o~~

"The supremacy of Table of the Elements as an unwavering outpost of ultra-experimental strains can be attributed to its concomitant adherence to valiance. Most of the Table of the Elements catalog has no broad commercial appeal, and many of its projects are risky ventures, even with respect to the experimental marketplace. Yet, this philosophy of risk works because everybody associated with the label feels like they're doing important work releasing important records, and they're willing to go for broke to make it happen.”

—Pitchfork

"The music made and cultivated by such artists as Tony Conrad, Captain Beefheart, John Fahey, Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Charlie Feathers, Dock Boggs, Jim O’Rourke, Faust, Derek Bailey, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Keiji Haino, Arnold Dreyblatt, Charley Patton, Harry Smith, and scores more, is at once among the most radical and deeply rooted of the 20th century, transcending time and place through the agency of the vibrating string, the resonance of the drone, the terrifying beauty of electric amplification, the hypnotic power of repetition, and the revelatory genius of cranky individualism. 

"How does someone begin to represent that in a visual manner? The trick involves some old-fashioned alchemy. Everyday commodity has to be constructed as both miniature museum and theater. No longer a mere object, it now becomes a site in which one can endlessly indulge a sense of wonder, love and, yes, obsession. It’s not often that someone can cast an influence on a broader design aesthetic — think Blue Note in the 1960s, with its hip Reid Miles album covers — but as this sizable body of work took shape, that’s exactly what happened.”

—Steve Dollar

“The hallmarks of this New Archivism [are] beautiful and innovative packaging, elaborate and idiosyncratic liner notes, rare and obscure recordings ... Working with graphic designers such as the Grammy-winning Susan Archie, [the label] produced a collection that combines varied textures, lavish finishes, and period details with art from the era of the original source recordings. Their treatment of Robert Longo’s late 1970s photographs for Rhys Chatham’s releases could, for instance, measure up to what’s on view at most contemporary art centers. In addition to its archival endeavor, TotE also releases the new work of its avant-garde heroes and their devotees. TotE’s active support of the work of sonic pioneers ensures that theirs are living traditions – not ossified museum objects.”

—Art Papers

Tony Conrad: Completely In the Present
A Film by Tyler Hubby

"Hubby's film captures Conrad in all his facets ... broadly as a man determined to make 'abstract art funny, happy, energetic, joyful.' Conrad lived long enough to see his early recordings, barely or never released, get the reissue and the attention they deserve. ... [Completely In the Present] is a sharp, sweet, eloquent documentary about the merriest, most artistically expansive minimalist on record. His work and his life asserted the importance of listening for the sounds nobody else has heard."

—Chicago Tribune

“Joyous, exhilarating, and transformative, Tyler Hubby’s documentary is essential viewing for anyone involved in the history of music and visual art.”

—Artforum

"Conrad was 100 percent badass. Without Tyler Hubby’s documentary and Table of the Elements ... one of the great stories of American music and art might have gone underappreciated.”

—Henry Rollins

All contents ©2024 Table of the Elements ®2024 Table of the Elements Archive. All Rights Reserved. Related media from the Table of the Elements Archive published courtesy the estate of Tony Conrad.

Since 1993, Table of the Elements has staked its claim on a massive enterprise. It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century -- and beyond. The label’s 150-plus releases are a vital contemporary chronicle, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider sounds.

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