This is The First Letter from Provenance. Auspicious moment, for us anyway; maybe one day you’ll feel the same way. When in thirty years, you have a synaesthesic shock from sniffing an old iPhone, maybe this missive will be part of that sense memory. We Live. We Hope.
This, The First Letter, is also designed to say ‘hello’ and tell you that we have started to release records. The ‘records’ bit of the web site address may have inadvertently preempted that news. All things considered, we prefer that you refer to us using the simple sound of ‘Provenance’. The “records” bit is just a signpost, a key indicator, a smartphone glow in the darkness.
The First Record is an actual record. A vinyl plaything, melted with sounds birthed 17,000 kms away from the pressing plant. The First Record is by Medicine Voice and it’s the primal scream, the sturm und drang, the epiphany and epicentre of a transformation. It’s a blast. Literally.
For The Record, on The First Record, Sar Freidman was entirely in control. Oren Ambarchi played guitar and drums. Joe Talia played a different guitar and different drums. James Rushford was on viola. Jessica Chapnik Khan took pictures. Lucy Pierce rendered Sar in pencil. Lasse Marhaug laid everything out.
You can buy The First Record, helpfully codified as PR001 (where the R may or may not stand for ‘records’) and anointed as ‘I And Thou’, direct from our store, in either the afore-cited vinyl or in 1s and 0s, or both, or neither.
Those very nice people at 4ZZZ in Brisbane described it as “a welcome opportunity for a journey of one’s own”. We concur with this sentiment. It is both a welcome and an opportunity. It’s also an offering and an invitation, but they didn’t say that. They did however casually drop names, which we shall put in bold, like Swans, Moon Duo, Sunn O))), Vangelis and Cat Power. All of these sound very nice and we like them too. Thank you Zs.
Happy, a web site with three silent ‘H’s, asked Medicine Voice some very interesting questions and got some very interesting answers.
You can watch The First Record, or at least a visual representation of one sixth of the item, on YouTube. This representation features contributions from Talulah Sistar and Indigo Wolf and it falls on top of itself, again and again and again.
If you buy The First Record, you get The Third Record for the price of Nothing – for a limited time! It has been gifted the convention PR003, or ‘Marks Of Provenance I’. It is a gestural slice through our roster, with love from Paneye, KAIA, Lovely Head, Spartak, Aphir and Kris Keogh. And there is extra love therein from Medicine Voice, a sidestep in the journey.
We have other avenues for you, small rabbit holes, tiny excursions. You can find them on The Soundcloud, The Facebook, The Instagram. But not on The Twitter. That would be useless.
We’ll tell you about The Second Record soon.
And so it goes.
Love always, Provenance.
Postscript: You can subscribe to our mailing list if you’d like to receive our Letters via electronic mail.