Fortyone

Monday, 1 January 2007

There has always been a parallel musical universe to the one i grew up with. And more than one. The music we get to hear through the mainstream media and its industries is not the only music!
While roaming through all the music that never gets played on the radio or sold in record stores, I have discovered so much music that I dearly love, that I hardly know where to begin if somebody asks me to describe it.

Take for example Fortyone. I discovered his music on the wonderful “Comfort Stand” Internet label. I wrote him that I loved his work and asked if he had more of it. Well, he had: there are at least 15 CD’s now in my collection with his music. I am not gonna try to describe his music, it is very much like how he describes himself on the Comfort Stand site: “Half musician, half moon man, one quarter nibonium, and half mental case, Fortyone spends most of his time gently collaging samples in the freelove basement with aspirations of becoming a non-practicing mystic.
Known to scream out incoherent (and coherent) gibberish at random and freestyle about monkies, you might call him a nut. He’ll call himself a nut. That’s no problem. Just don’t call him late for an orgy or a remix party. Born in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, raised in Pen Mar Maryland, vacationed quite a bit in Maine and Disney World, he’s now back in Waynesboro living right across the street from a park into which he’ll occasionally Frisbee toss some of his CD’s for some unsuspecting strangers to stumble upon.
Fortyone is really just a rational anarchist-zen-taoist-pacifist-model agnostic-sample collage-artist who doesn’t like such labels but likes you.”
If Fortyone’s music should be labelled anything, I would file it under esoteric cut ups. But if you don’t are a fan already, you better listen for yourself. Here is a track from his recent CD “Spoken Word Duets”.