Conveyor

Gold Robot Records

Conveyor’s Prime – Out July 15, 2014 on Gold Robot Records

Conveyor is a band. Currently based in New York, NY, the band is composed of electric guitars, bass guitar, drums, voice, and the four members that manipulate these instruments in order to perform the songs. The body that comprises their work currently includes: a string of self-released EPs, a cassette, one full-length album, and a number of 7” singles. The music is best described as melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, predominantly major-key, and adequately fits under the categories of rock and pop, with additional associations, more or less strong, to related sub-genres.

Prime LP Liner Notes:

What is the point of this exercise?

What you are holding is a totality.  It is composed primarily of paper materials and polyvinyl chloride, but also: sound (conceptually and in the form of physical waves cut into the PVC medium), artwork and the lines, symbols, letters, words, and text that comprise it, the ink that denotes it, and meaning- a totality that under any other circumstances or in any other arrangement would not be as such.  It is the result of the combined, concerted, timed, composed, and remunerable efforts of a number of individuals, and even as you hold it you too participate in its existence.  What is it?

To define an object is to define its relationship to the objects around it- it can be placed in a network of other singularities that, in tandem, form a reality around it, and within this reality it can be said with some amount of certainty that it exists.  But the act of defining the object or being supersedes the full experience of that being; even its definition becomes a part of that network, separate from the object itself, a sort of frottage  that reveals the negative space which is presumed to be occupied by the object in question.

The most effective way to define this totality, to approach the asymptote that is this object, might have been to place it in the context of the people or things involved in its creation.  But this is the problem: just as those people and things can be placed in its network, so can it be placed in the networks that define other objects.  The singularities form series which in turn become fields, every thing eventually exists in relation to everything else, and you cannot define a word by using that word in the definition.  Meanwhile, as we struggle over the definition-of-the-object as an object, the original object passes by us.

Like a blind spot in our experience of being, whatever we choose to focus on becomes invisible to us, and we miss it.  Such is the case with ideas, which are in being only for as long as they can be regarded, which regard robs us of the experience of the idea-in-being.  In many ways, what you are holding is a historical record of an idea-in-being.  What are left in the present, now in front of you, are artifacts, vestiges, fingerprints of the beings who have contributed to this greater thing, symbols, indicators of meaning, a physical aggregate of singular ideas that existed differently in different minds, successes and failures, unique traces of different pieces of electronic equipment, hints of potential both inherent in the object and in your experience of the object, and it is these and other things that make it more than just a historical record.  How does it feel?  What does it look like?  What does it sound like?  Have you tried listening to it at different times of the day, on different pieces of stereo equipment, or under different circumstances of consciousness?  All this is to say is that it is important to remember that what you may think it is isn’t it.  So what is it?  It is.

And what is the point of this or any exercise?  Simply, the exercise.