Future Reference by Levon Henry

All music that can be heard, or has ever been heard, was *already* "produced" upon arrival — how it was ever heard in the first place. When we speak of music production and music producers, it is as if once the music wasn't and then with magical swiftness it was. Whenever and wherever music is being performed, whether by human or electronic bodies or a collaboration between the two, it is actively being produced, then and there. When we speak of production, the deliverance into reproducible media, it's re-production we mean. This process is endless, really, suffused with version history in its inversions and revisions, coverage by other artists, resampled across all manner of analog and digital formats. Reproduction of all kinds. The notion of an original version of anything, especially in a reproducible format, is dubious.

This album is not about that —it was not about anything in process, in production— yet it necessarily *becomes* about that compared to what it is generally taken to mean to declare any collection of recordings an album. This is not a sketchbook, nor is it a simulation of one, nor is it something prevented from sounding like one either [as albums generally are via the formality and gesture of "finished" versions].

In all mediums and forms, we see this ridiculous exercise play out often wherein something is [(reproduced!)] rendered as/distorted to/reduced as purely aesthetic, although it has a functional allowance that the aesthetic is a byproduct of. This is not necessarily an unpleasant byproduct, otherwise isolating its aesthetics would not be such a pastime. But to focus the terminus on the aesthetic we forego a beautiful function.

This album is not some aesthetic fetish for the diaristic, but rather a savoring of its non-exclusion. Immediacy has merits as functional as not obliging oneself to reproduce with polish what might already suffice, or what might risk losing something else through reincarnation. Valorizing aesthetics of the voice memo needn’t enter into it, as diaristic allowance shouldn’t require a focalizing conceptual framework to let live. Sometimes the demo can't be beat, but then again sometimes it can. Maintenance of the both/and. This process is reproducible, you and you and you can let yourself do it too.

saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist and songwriter from Los Angeles, now living in New York City. In addition to recording and performing his own music, Levon works as a saxophonist/clarinetist for the ~likes of others.

levonhenry.info