Last week Katie braved the heat and visited librarian Dr. Abbie Weil at Swarthmore College’s McCabe Library. What fun: Together Katie and Abbie pulled and listened to poetry records from the library’s amazing spoken word collection. This fall the Consonant Collective will cut records of student poetry for a literature class, and beforehand we will play records from the collection for the students to enjoy. Dorothy Parker, Nikki Giovanni, the Dial-a-Poem project, Allen Ginsberg, Sidney Poitier reading "Poetry of the Black man" in his beautiful voice, Vachel Lindsay (what a character!), Sylvia Plath at Harvard—there is a lot of cool stuff here to inspire the students (and us). Thanks for the experience, Swarthmore!
Reykjavik Art Book Fair
In the latest installment of our ongoing love affair with Iceland, we went back to that incredible country to attend the Reykjavik Art Book Fair, and we had the most beautiful time. Great conversations, tons of interesting work on display, a few pieces of Hjónabandssæla (happy marriage cake) … what more could you want? Here are a few shots of our table and of the other exhibitors in Hafnarhús, the hall at the Reykjavik Museum of Art where the fair took place. Many thanks to Edda, Joe, Agnar, and Einar for organizing the event!
Philadelphia Inquirer article about zines
Katie was interviewed for this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about zines, which ran a couple weeks ago. It gives a nice overview of zine culture in the city and beyond. Have a look!
Live record cutting at the Athenaeum
Last week we did our first live event with our Rek-O-Kut Challenger, the ~1950 lathe cutter we use at home to make records. We packed up the machine and all its components and brought it to the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, where we made cuts of people’s voices and digital recordings onto records for them to keep. While they waited, the workshop participants created album art :D
The event went pretty smoothly and taught us a lot, and it was lovely to see and share in the participants’ excitement at having their music or voice made into a record in the moment. We hope to do many more of these. Thank you to the Athenaeum for hosting our first one! (Uncredited photos below taken by either Katie or Joe.)
Photo: Alexa Perillo
Photo: Alexa Perillo
Photo: Alexa Perillo
Photo: Lena Tran
Photo: Lena Tran
Mini zine fest at Kelly Writers House
We stopped by a small zine fest yesterday at Kelly Writers House at Penn. It was organized by Kayla Romberger, the instructor of a class called Pixel to Print, and the exhibitors were students who were sharing their zines and prints, likely for the first time. We had fun eating snacks and checking out the work on display (and left a few of our own zines to share).
Katie especially enjoyed the zine “Love,” for which creator Kepler Boonstra made symbols representing several friends and excerpted text conversations with them in which they used the word love. Another favorite is the zine “I Can’t Bake You a Cake But I Can Draw You One” by Yune Kim, which extols the wholesomeness of celebrations that involve decorating and sharing cake. In a different way, this zine is also about love. It has nifty features too, including a sheet of decorations you can cut out and add to one of the cakes, and an envelope pasted to the inside back cover for storing them.
We also love the zine “promises: blue” by annie su, and the quote from it that is photographed below. It reads:
“ok! ~ sparkles in eyes ~
we have to do our best to make every
week different so we can slow down time
as much as possible!”
Highly relatable. Love the Writers House. Great to see what these young folks are bringing to zine culture. Thanks, everybody!
Cat Party! Release Party
Last week Katie announced her new book, Cat Party!, an anthology of stories and art by more than 50 contributors, and Joe made a cat-shaped record with a cat-themed song he and collaborator Chris Baldys wrote for the occasion. Tattooed Mom’s, aka the best bar in the city, was kind enough to host us for a launch party, and a whole bunch of people came out, including several contributors to the book. What a fun time. Thank you for supporting us, everybody!
Dark Nature: The first release in the On the Record series
Consonant Collective is very excited to announce its newest collaboration, On the Record Poetry, a series of poetry chapbooks and accompanying records curated by Katie & Joe. We will put out 6 record/chapbook releases this year, with the full roster to be announced very soon. The projects are deeply rooted in collaboration between the collective and the authors.
Dark Nature, a horror story told through poetry from Joe Carlough, is the first release in the series.
About the Poems
What would you do if you found yourself alone in the woods and everything seemed just a bit...off?
That's the story of Dark Nature. The story-in-poems follows a person who's warned not to go into the woods, but their curiosity proves too much, finding themself watched, stalked, and eventually driven mad by the woods themselves, more-so through their own carelessness than that of any of the myriad odd occurrences and creatures they encounter.
The beautifully-rendered chapbook, presented with the poems imposed on full-color, high-resolution plant images, was designed by Joe and printed by Fireball Printing right here in Philadelphia. Accompanying the chapbook is a leaf-shaped 7" record with a 5 minute reading of the full chapbook by the author, recorded on vintage analogue technology to match the dreamy, lost nature of the poetry. The B-Side of the record features a reinterpretation of the reading by Icelandic sound artist and composter Íris Thorarins.
About the Record
The audio of the poetry was recorded directly to cassette using a late 1960's Sony F-98 Reel to Reel Cardioid Microphone with a mid-1980's Panasonic RQ-2709D tape player. The cassettes were then digitized and the audio lightly mastered. The records were embossed using a sapphire stylus on polycarbonate using a 1937 Presto 6DSP record lathe.
The record and chapbook can be purchased here.
Princeton Zine Fest
We had a blast at the Princeton Zine Fest. Thank you to the organizers at the beautiful Princeton Public Library for organizing it! We met lots of lovely humans, shared our work, and acquired a stack of interesting zines for our collection.
So many good zines!
Zines and Fair Use at Swarthmore College
Yesterday we had the pleasure of leading a zine workshop at McCabe Library at Swarthmore College. Several enthusiastic students came out to work on zines using typewriters, collage, and other methods. In honor of Fair Use Week, we talked about the importance of fair use of intellectual property in creating works of parody and critique, both of which are crucial components of this kind of punk rock self-publishing. Thank you, Swarthmore College and librarians Abbie Weil and Maria Aghazarian for inviting and hosting us!
Cousins by Choice
We’re excited to share that we’ve just begun working with Ifeta Mešić and SirahHaris, aka Cousins by Choice, two talented young artists who we met last summer at the Fanzineist Vienna Art Book & Zine Fair. The Cousins are spending the next three months in NYC and working on a graphic memoir about their experiences there. We’ll act as their mentors as they create their book. We’re thrilled to be working with them and can’t wait to see what they’ll create.
Here’s a bit more about them and their project, from the Cousins themselves:
The international duo “Cousins by Choice” are in NEW YORK CITY! These Bosnian creatives first met in Rotterdam during their Illustration studies at the Willem De Kooning Academie and have since then founded their collective “Cousins by Choice.” Just like cousins, their work is related and similar but not the same. Their family of art is an energetic culmination of fun and moving images, poems and zines! However just like family, it can be chaotic and wild, but at the end of the day you return to them for comfort. Now that you know the cousins, you might ask yourself “what are they doing in New York City?” They are here to work on an exciting publication all about the city and the surrounding area! In this scrapbook-esque publication, they will feature out-of-the-box articles, inspiring artist interviews and personal accounts of their time in NEW YORK CITY that take the form of comics, sketches, and more!
Ifeta Mešić
Ifeta Mešić
SirahHaris
Ifeta Mešić
SirahHaris
SirahHaris
InLiquid Exhibition: beLONGING
We have shared a selection of zines and books from our collection that focus on gender, queer sexuality, feminism, and LGBTQIA+ identity for the upcoming exhibition beLONGING. The show features the work of artists Carmel Dor, THECOLORG, Abbey Muza, and Meg Wolensky and has been organized by InLiquid, an arts organization that has supported visual artists in Philadelphia since 1999. Included in the show is a reading room installation where visitors can sit and read the zines on loan. We are proud and happy to share these priceless publications in this way.
As InLiquid writes, beLONGING is part of (re)FOCUS, “a collaboration among over 25 of Philadelphia’s visual arts institutions to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of FOCUS, a milestone exhibition of American women artists, held in Philadelphia in 1974. In revisiting FOCUS, (re)FOCUS includes a new generation of diverse artists working around themes of gender, sexuality, and intersectional identity.
“Moore College of Art and Design Galleries is the lead institution with participation from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, African American Museum of Philadelphia, Woodmere Art Museum, University of the Arts Galleries, Tyler School of Art, University of Pennsylvania, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia Mural Arts and others.”
January 5, 2024 – February 24, 2024
Wednesdays - Saturdays, 12-6 PM
InLiquid Gallery
1400 North American Street, Gallery 108
Philadelphia, PA 19122
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