2003 ZH27 Annual Report

This last year was a banner year for the ZH27 label and it's online presence at zh27.net. Never before has the label and website been so scrutinized and improved. The covers received the royal treatment of updates and full redesigns with hundreds upon hundreds of colorful and exciting designs completed in 2003. This sounds like a late time to say this but I'm still thrilled to be able to have high resolution color covers and designs available to anyone whose online worldwide. How long I suffered with print catalogs instantly out of date and forever out of print before the boon of the internet arrived. So I for one don't take it for granted that I can e-mail new people in Croatia, Singapore, England and Australia, as I did last year, and they can instantly visit my website to see what I've been up to for the last 20 years in the world of free audio. And they can camp out and explore my extensive lifework there. 2003=1985 In my first full year of label activity, 1985, I completed 44 new releases: quite a few compilations, the beginning of many collaborations with Minóy and Ken Clinger, works by still active projects like Zanstones, Zanoisect, Masters of the Ungentlemanly Art, the Prostitution of ..., the Twists and Turns of the Loved and Hated ..., and so forth. 2003 in turn has seen more Masters, Prostitution, Zanoisect, Zanstones, Twists and Turns, along with new installments of other popular ongoing projects such as Bodycocktail, Here Be Monsters, You, Me, Us & Them, Zantrip, Creamy Porn Stars, Asa Nisi Masa, Zanguts and even Jake Hobo's return. All told 44 new releases in 2003. As with the past few years much of my productivity has been fueled by the collaborative recordings that I get when I bug the devil out of all my e-mail contacts for 15 one minute pieces. Many new contacts begin with me this way and older contacts who I've not worked with in a while will submit new works for me to play with. Each time I take care to approach projects with new mindset and angles. I'm not putting out a lot of releases so that they all run into each other for sameness. I want to surprise myself and do the widest range of experimentation that is viable and this year on that count was awesome. The pure range of works of unprecedented uniqueness in 2003 is wicked - from Asa Nisi Masa > Gas Cake for Jay Walking Asteroid Belt Makers at the end of the year to the ultradense You, Me, Us & Them experiments of the winter and spring. The ground covered with Your Life Has Been ... For You or The Prostitution of ... this year alone in eight releases few artists would be able to do in years of effort. Lots of new recordings from my experiments and from new contacts keep things fresh and interesting so if you only heard this years works and nothing else from me you'd be mighty impressed I hope. 8.6 days or 8.3 days One of the infuriating charts on my website deals with the average number of days it takes to put out a release. It seems there would be two ways to measure this information that's meaningful, and I've chosen the more difficult one to compute for my chart. Thus it may only be infuriating for me to keep it updated. One measure would be averaged over the life of my label how many days it's taken for me to make a release. This is the one I've chosen as it shows an interesting trend. Another way to measure is within the year how many days on average it took to finish a new release. By the former measure since 1984 it's taken me 8.6 days to put out a new work, by the later measure I took me 8.3 days to put out a release in 2003. I've updated the chart page in question as well as added monthly productivity charts to the years where meaningful data is available on the releases by year listing on my website. These changes are often driven by my own curiosity of how this information looks over time. I can't demand that I sit down every 9 days and finish off a release, but over time I've developed systems that makes it easy for me to put out releases so that the system itself doesn't hamper productivity. And I look at my own creativity on a yearly basis and I do feel that if I don't do 36 releases a year I'm slacking and aside from this there are no targets for productivity. Need I mention this for the millionth time that it feels great to have an excellent new release finished and that's enough motivation to bother alone. Then there is the positive feedback I get from my trading network which motivates me to continue. And finally once this juggernaut is set rolling along I get the feeling that the people who know I'm a productive madman would feel let down if I didn't turn in a good performance each year, so no stopping it! Lots of effort was made in conjunction with Jeff Surak in 2003 to take my story to a higher level and I owe him massive thanks for his support, enthusiasm and general arse kicking. Thus thanks to him I'm on my way to my next solo Zanstones Eurotour, this time to Belgium and Holland with Peter Zincken as my host and tourguide. And that's the fine note that I ended 2003 on.

January 1, 2004