THIS EVENT HAS BEEN PULLED FROM THE FESTIVAL BY THE ARTISTS
APOLOGIES FOR ANY INCONVIENENCE

Seth Kim-Cohen [The Music and Packaging of "Anthology of American Folk Music"]
with Jarrod Fowler
6 October 2010
Pixilerations Festival
Cable Car Cinema, Providence RI
(four hours, fifty-two minutes, and fifty seconds)

The Music and Packaging of “Anthology of American Folk Music,” questions the Anthology’s status
as the origin of American traditional music and musicians’ subsequent fidelity to its authenticity
as a founding document. Seth Kim-Cohen and Jarrod Fowler will place themselves in absolute
proximity to the “text” of both the recordings and the packaging, attempting to convey the
contents as faithfully as possible, with minimum intervention or mediation.

Needless to say, they will fail.

In performance, Kim-Cohen and Fowler will encounter the "Anthology of American Folk Music" –
edited by Harry Smith, and originally released in 1952 – for the very first time. They will attempt
to recreate or retransmit the contents of the Anthology, live and in real time as they experience it.
Seth Kim-Cohen will listen to the entirety of the recordings on headphones: four hours, fifty-two
minutes and fifty seconds-worth. As he listens he will perform the songs live on an assortment of
instruments, doing his best to keep up with what he is listening to for the first time. At the same
time, Jarrod Fowler will similarly retransmit the text and graphic design of the Anthology's packaging,
recreating the supplemental materials that accompany the recordings. While the Newport Folk Festival
crew (just down the road) portray their deviations as reverence, Kim-Cohen and Fowler locate the
irreverence always already present in the act of homage, in the thought of love.

They accept as inevitable the corruption of their affections.