Jocko Weyland

“Crackle, Hiss, and Scrawl”

Cassette Tapes, their Wrappings and Listings, 1980-2005

Opening Reception tonight at Ever Gold Gallery, 7-10pm

An audio barrage of mixes, compilations, one band or one album exclusives, recorded onto Memorex, TDK, Scotch, Maxell and BASF 60 and 90 minute tapes off of phonograph records, playing continuously in no particular order on a fifteen year-old auto-reversing Sony boom box. Leaning towards an era-specific (i.e. they were made shortly after the original records came out) documentation based on a catholic definition of “punk,” from Amebix to the Zero Boys to the Birthday Party and X-Mal Deutschland, this surround sound experience also features mainstream inclusions such as Black Sabbath and The Who, with not-infrequent forays into the outer limits represented by the likes of Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects, Test Dept., and Charles Ives. Alternatively abrasive and soothing, some still radical after all these years, some embarrassing curiosities, a non-stop, unadulterated wall of sound. Visually, for the eyes while the ears soak it all in, every handmade and store bought cover of the approximately 200 cassettes “made” or acquired from roughly 1980 to 2005.  These  ‘3-panel’ 4×4” tape case inserts with their attendant folded lyric sheets and pleated pieces of paper listing bands and song titles will be arrayed on the walls of the gallery. Altogether, a riot of decorated and stickered card stock, resplendent with cursive, printed, typed, and drawn script, adding up to a now-historical semi-hieroglyphic index to the magnetically chronicled cacophony.

Jocko Weyland is the author of The Answer is Never – A Skateboarder’s History of the World (Grove Press, 2002), The Powder (Dashwood Books, 2011) and has written for The New York Times, Apartmento, Vice, Cabinet, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, and other publications. From the age 15-17 Weyland edited and published, in Colorado and Hawaii, the Xerox skate/punk zine Revenge Against Boredom. In 2003 he began making the serial publication Elk, which spawned Elk books and the eponymous Elk Gallery. He has showed photographs and ballpoint pen drawings at FakeSpace in Beijing (2009), magic marker text pieces and photographs (with MK Guth) in 2010 at Franklin Parrasch in New York, and paintings at Kerry Schuss (“Scruffy” with Sadie Laska and Chip Hughes, 2011). Weyland is represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York, and lives in Tucson, Arizona where he is curator-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson