UNORTHODOX RECORDINGS
alessio riccio - april 1998
“The problem is that of pouring into everyday experience, in the social action of each of us, what art indicates in symbolic but real form, furnishing experimentable models
of new relations with people and things.
It would be neither important nor exciting to endeavor to modify art,
to innovate language, if there were not, more than the hope,
the certainty that, modifying art,
the mind is modified, and in this way it is possible to initiate
a real progressive revolution in social behavior,
so as to arrive at changing the world, changing life.”
More than a recording label, Unorthodox Recordings seeks to be the expression and emanation of utopian thought, a propensity to absolute self-determination. It has arisen spontaneously from the fierce desire for the preservation and enhancement of my own musical production, from the necessity of a judicious use of the actually available resources, from the will to be an active protagonist in the creation of a network which is absolutely alternative to the oligopolistic system of the music industry.
Unorthodox Recordings thus combines thought with action, being with becoming, placing the artist in a position of freedom, both with his own capacity for self-determination and as a vocation for independence: finally the owner of his creations, architect of his own identity, he creates a system for himself with the aim of putting properly into circulation consciousness and power, taking care of himself and the music in a way devoid of the traits of solipsism, but aiming at the enhancement of his own strengths, so as to avoid their dissipation in cognitive as well as emotional and existential terms. Albert Camus wrote that political action and artistic creation are the two faces of the same revolt against the world's disorder.
Unorthodox Recordings has taken form also thanks to the words of Gilles Deleuze, when he writes that to ground no longer means to inaugurate and render possible representation, but to render representation infinite. Grounding becomes, then, determining; it is the seminal step for the creation of a practical and intellectual habitus which incorporates the knowing into the doing. It is the expression of a design which no longer tends only to represent something, but also aims at the presence as a sense of exploring-experimenting of the mind that gives itself up to the artistic object, so as to question anew the enigmatic nature of things, to bring about artistic and intellectual growth and renewal.
Unorthodox Recordings is a propositional and activist project. It is an instrument for the regeneration of nomadic practices in contemporary thought. It is a tool for managing history, memory and creativity, as well as a means to adequately manage potential projects. Precisely because of its utopian nature, its expression of activism (ARTivism, as a keen neologism by Giacomo Verde) and radical thought and its being a form of open communication, Unorthodox Recordings will be able to redefine aesthetic form into a creative process: determination and development of the pathways of direction – redefinition of the ethical/aesthetic needs – new multisensorial perceptions.
In 1963 John Cage asked to socialize the activity of the artist, making reference to the social necessity of artistic work: the artist is not dissociable from ethics; he is responsible for what he has done as well as for what he has not done, for his work and its consequences, in both good and bad. The attribution of ethics to sentiment does not simply mean, however, escaping into illusions: it means to choose a path, to look beyond. Gilbert Simondon writes that man frees himself from his enslavement to the finality of everything by learning how to create finality or organize a final whole which he can judge and appreciate so as to not be passively subjected to integration. Man outdoes enslavement by consciously organizing finality.