cozy mysteries
electro-acoustic duet series

The "Cozy Mysteries" series from FMOA is a new undertaking that will focus on duos performing electro-acoustic work, either together in real time or with creative re-organization of one another's source materials. In most cases, we will aim to feature pairings of artists that have not worked together previously.

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The series title is a kind of "re-purposing" of a publishing industry term - mystery novels in which the murder or other unpleasantry takes place without any discussion of the gory details (compare with "hard boiled"). This, of course, has nothing to do with the material we're releasing, but somehow that name fits when ripped out of context. This has to do with the paradox of our feeling "at home", comfortable even, when working with ideas and materials that have some very significant "unknown" component to them. Sound sources may remain a secret, for example - or motivations for creating may only become revealed after hours of collaborative sonic exploration. Put simply, the music and a-musical audio released in this series is an homage to "not knowing exactly," and how it can sometimes have a superior ability to expand human expressiveness when compared with the simple trumpeting of declarative statements. 

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Each release will be limited from 100-300 copies in its first run, with hand-assembled packaging: all will come in standardized black matte mailers stickered with track list and artist info. The CDs and cassettes (format will vary by artist) will feature "reversible" artwork or artless and empty designs which open up onto something much more colorful and evocative. 

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A full listing of artists and releases will be made available on this page. In the meantime, we are open to outside submissions! 

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• Contributions should be, ideally, a minimum of 23 total minutes of original material (i.e. material not previously released), up to an hour's worth of total material.

• Please send any material to be used in uncompressed form, preferably .wav or .aiff format - either 16 bit / 44.1khz resolution, or 32 bit / 48khz (all in stereo).

• ​Please also include an artist bio of about 50-250 words.

• Preference will be given to work done in an electro-acoustic / acousmatic vein, but won't be limited to this if the music fits the very ambiguous series theme. 

• No overtly political themes / agit-prop, please. 

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Feel free to contact us with any additional questions, or to submit work.