Here comes Ball of Wax 64: The Music of TELEPHONE

TELEPHONE, as you may be aware, is a globe-spanning, multi-disciplinary art game/project begun by cat-herder extraordinaire Nathan Langston that took place over the course of the last year, and was recently made public in a gloriously rendered and beautifully usable internet exhibit. The basic gist of the project, which ended up including around 950 artists in all, was meant to resemble a giant game of telephone: one original message was sent to several artists to interpret into their chosen art form; their newly-created works were then sent to more artists to interpret (always crossing disciplines, forms, genres), and so on, until the game flipped and artists began receiving multiple works to distill into one new thing, resulting in one final piece of music. Among the poets, video artists, sculptors, painters, dancers, shrinky-dink artists (hi Patrick!) and more, over 100 musicians of countless genres took part. As I clicked through this awe-inspiring collection, particularly enjoying the wide range of music – which included old friends such as Virgin of the Birds, Brittain Ashford, and Johanna Kunin as well as complete strangers (or, as I like to think of them, “new friends”) like Dustin Hamman and Victoria Theodore – I couldn’t help thinking how lovely it would be to have all this music in one collection. Being who I am, and doing what I do, I thought, “well, I guess that’s the next Ball of Wax!” And so it will be.

Ball of Wax 64 will contain (at current count) 77 tracks of music from TELEPHONE, arranged in order of assignment. Similar to Ball of Wax 51 (Long Songs), it will be available as one enormous stream/download (over 5 hours of music); or as a physical package with hand-silkscreened cover, liner notes, and a download code (and a CD-R sampler of random selections for those who really want something to put in their CD player). It will be available for purchase via Bandcamp on Friday, June 4th. A slightly shorter version will be available at all the usual digital streaming places . . . some time after that. Maybe we’ll do some kind of internet release show or shows? That’d be fun. At the moment my logistical resources are stretched a bit thin just pulling this thing together, but we’ll see what happens. In any case, as you can see if you’ve spent even a few minutes clicking through TELEPHONE, you’re in for a treat.