Avril and Sean in Camden, by VLK

Avril and Sean in Camden

by VLK

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Cassette + Digital Album
Yellow C57 cassette. Edition of 25. Continuous mix on each side.

Includes unlimited streaming of Avril and Sean in Camden via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Sunrise at Walt Whitman Service Center 04:29	buy track
2.	Affirmation Hymn 04:28	buy track
3.	Hannitic Jurisprudence in a Licentious Age 03:37	buy track
4.	Contra 03:45	buy track
5.	No Child Left Behind 03:20	buy track
6.	Smooth Limburger 03:41	buy track
7.	Privatize the Library 05:07	buy track
8.	Swiftboats on the Delaware 04:53	buy track
9.	Mugged by Hyperreality 02:38	buy track
10.	Sirius Moments 02:37	buy track
11.	Life's Like This 02:42	buy track
12.	So Rich as Honesty 03:10	buy track
13.	Blovi8or Boi 05:04	buy track
14.	Lucky 07:26	buy track

about

Avril and Sean in Camden is constructed entirely out of processed sounds from a) Avril Lavigne's debut album, and b) conservative talk-radio hosts from the mid-naughties. To draw, specifically, from precocious, Canadian, proto-emo skate-pop and far-right, moralizing, authoritarian resentment-peddlers was not arbitrary.

In the summer of 2004, VLK undertook temporary employment which primarily involved being a passenger in a car that was driven around Camden, New Jersey. Though the job description was undemanding, it arose that a key responsibility for this role was to engage the driver/employer in conversation, thus enhancing the work environment (a Toyota Camry). Regretfully, it became soon evident to both parties that this personal objective would not be achieved, and the driver, activating his contingency plan, put into use his preferred auditory stimuli, i.e. conservative talk radio broadcasts and the glove compartment's lone compact disk, Avril Lavigne's Let's Go. In Camden, the birthplace of modern convenience food, the home of the first Church of Scientology, a city beset by the poverty and crime not uncommon in post-industrial American small cities, VLK spent two months in silent shotgun, bombarded with the pleas from Lavigne and Hannity for simple answers to the increasingly complicated world outside of the Camry's windows.

This kind of prolonged auditory experience, one can imagine, could leave the listener with some degree of lasting psychological damage, though keeping with the spirit of the Goldwater rule, it would be inappropriate for us to speculate on this particular case. We can report that this album sees VLK connecting his conceptual sample collages to personal experience, and distilling that into a hazy, beat-heavy, absurdist electronic melange.

credits

released July 4, 2017

license

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Strategic Tape Reserve Neuenbrook, Germany

The Strategic Tape Reserve, headquartered in Cologne, West Germany, is a fully independent (non-aligned, secular) organization dedicated to the dissemination and responsible management of ferric cassette material and content.