Legion, for We Are Many

I have recently rediscovered a recording of a radio broadcast I did some years ago at WAIF 88.3 FM, in Cincinnati, Ohio, under the pseudonym 'Legion, for We Are Many'. The genre is mash-up (this term did not exist at the time), though with deeper roots in the experimental radio of Negativland et al., which goes back at least to the late 1960s, or whenever it was that youth with no talent but with much to say were first, presumably by some slip-up at the FCC, given access to broadcast media. It consists in found and processed sound, and the aesthetic pay-off, such as it is, derives from the juxtaposition of elements that do not ordinarily belong together.

To the extent that it works through incongruity, it is formally closer to humor than to art (see Kant, Critique of Judgment 5:333). But is incongruity humor, elevated to the status of irony, not the default mode of expression of so much of the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? Isn't it in consequence of this that in order to follow so much recent American fiction, you must come to it with an advanced literacy not in literature, but in the sitcoms of thirty years prior? Is it my fault I was born in an era when the distinction between art and humor was no longer so clear?

Anyway, I'm making up for my wasted youth now (which is not easy when your youth lasted more than thirty years), and I'm not here to promote this recording or to condemn it, but only to upload it as a fragment of my soul (or of my soul at one stage of development) that has better odds of living on diffused throughout the internet than it does on the primitive writable CD-R on which I found it, let alone in the fading traces of it scattered here and there across my own highly corruptible carbon-based memory.

Download Legion-1

Download Legion-2

Download Legion-3

Comments

[NadineGould32]

If you want to buy a car, you would have to get the loans. Furthermore, my mother commonly uses a short term loan, which is really reliable.

[J.]

If you want to buy a car, you will need a garage. I find that music by legion is great to clean the garage by.