Phone-Dream by Jared Thomas Friend

Sometimes you hear a record and it instantly and without warning
builds a world in front of your eyes, a place of vivid color and strange sensations, of surprises and revelation around each bend. Hearing Jared's poetry tape for the first time took me to a place I very much wanted to return to, and in fact did--playing it on repeat for five or six hours before realizing THIS would be the cassette to launch my writers record label. It was everything I wanted the label to be--audio recordings of great writing backed by music that is original, smart, and at home in its singular and incandescent vision.

Backed by music from Gogo Erlandson and Death Ribbons, Jared Thomas Friend's poetry is relevant, important, and both funny and absolutely crushing. The music weaves in and out of the background, crumbling into noise and static and fuzz, rearing up strong and dark like the Velvet Underground or Arthur Russell or softly corroding in gentle repetitions like Basinski's Disintegration Loops. It feels like stumbling upon some otherworldly, fucked-up noisy radio station where the on-air personality comes to you in a dream of phantasmagoria, as the walls and structure fall or decay or collapse right before your eyes and new architecture rises up from the sun-filtered depths like some lost Atlantean city. The writing is writing of our time, of our people, the grit and struggle of American life in the midst of a dying empire, the anguish, joy, and solace of love and friendship. It is relatable and it is human.

Phone-Dream was recorded live to analog tape at a great and much-lamented Lincoln, Nebraska arts space called Loser World. As a result there is a life and spontaneity here you rarely find in studio recordings. This is a magic moment, the kind that happens when the right people are in the right room together at the right time. I love this weird, beautiful, vital, dreamlike cassette and I hope you will too. -Adam Gnade

A record label releasing audio recordings of writers' work. Poems backed by noise. Novels as audio books. Stories on cassettes. Curated by Adam Gnade. Currently accepting submissions.