Various/Artists is a New York based record label specializing in hand-made lathe cut records by artists working across a wide range of media. Recordings by filmmakers, poets, electronic composers, broadcast media artists and more are planned into the end of 2019 including recordings by Lary 7, Bradley Eros, Blue Jazz TV, Ka Baird, Victoria Keddie, MSHR, Tidal Channel, MV Carbon and more.

For our inaugural event, we will launch a set of three 7” records culled from E.S.P. TV’s “Lifestyle Guru” performance for live television in 2017. These records will be available for purchase at Printed Matter St. Marks.

Directed and programmed by Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan, “Lifestyle Guru” occurred as a one-night performance inside the office set of their exhibition “WORK”. For WORK, E.S.P. TV made Pioneer Works’ staff the subject of a six-week performative, televisual installation by relocating the organization’s entire functioning office to a studio set in the main gallery. The staff’s “daily grind” was mixed live, on-site, with custom video effects and hourly commercial interruptions in the space. Far from peddling in the sensational tropes of reality TV, WORK instead turned banal, day-to-day office routines and patterns—the movement of a chair, a co-worker getting coffee—into the improbable, playful content of a serial TV program on New York cable TV and online.

Record #1 “Colony”, features Ian Hatcher presenting a crowd-sourced vision of utopian offworld colonization. Record #2, Ben Vida’s “Soft Systems Music”, uses facial recognition software as a compositional tool and record #3, “How to Survive a Psychopathic Presidency” by Jill Kroesen, is well… pretty self explanatory. Each record is a unique handmade object, laser etched in gold with accompanying material designed by the artists. We will also release Ben Greenberg and Joe DeNardo’s 2016 live audio/visual collaboration at Pioneer Works with UNIT 11, a mobile studio and residency from a former newsvan focusing on transmission-based research and practice. Loud, hypnotic and unrelenting, this 30 minute VHS tape release features a re-mastered audio mix to the original as previously aired on E.S.P. TV #101.