curated by Gen Ken Montgomery
Sound As A Form of Tranportation

Master Cactus presents a special edition issue curated by NYC sound artist Gen Ken Montgomery, founder of New York’s first sound art gallery, Generator, in 1989.

Ken’s audio roots run deep. For the last thirty years, his own experimental audio practice has involved synthesizers, cheap toys and, most notably, household appliances, such as an ice maker, radiator, refrigerator, muffler, and his beloved laminating machine. Ken was mega into the cassette and zine culture circulating the international underground via cassette zines and tape trades. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Ken forged penpalships spanning continents, eventually housing his ever growing cassette collection in what became New York’s first dedicated sound art space: Generator Experimental Music Gallery.

For the next two years, Generator hosted installations and performances from sound artists like GX Jupitter ­Larson and If, Bwana. whose most recent works you will find in this issue. Above all, Generator offered a stabilized, physically ­manifested supplement to the inherent placelessness of the cassette mail scene— tossing an anchor to a culture whose very essence was transitory in nature. For Issue 3, Gen Ken invited artists he’s been corresponding and exchanging music with since the Generator days.

What you hold in your hand is the sonic work of artists who lived in the far away world before the internet: where if you wanted to share what you made, you put sounds on a cassette, took it to the post office, and waited two or three weeks or more to get a response. That's Sound As a Form of Transportation.

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Released in conjunction with the relaunch of Generator Sound Art Gallery by ALLGOLD at
MoMA PS1 Print Shop, Dec-Jan 2015.