A group for "Audio-Mail-Art" enthusiasts

[Manuh Graciano]

Well,

I'm a bit of newbie among you people, and maybe I haven't searched properly on this website, but I've been looking for any group here dedicated to audio-art within mail-art and couldn't find any (only comments and posts reffering to specific projects here and there, most of them by the luminary Rod Summers), which is kind of strange because much of what is called sound-art has its origins in the experiments with spoken word/recorded sound by mail-artists during the 1970's and 1980's. 

Some would even argue cassette-culture was born in part because of mail-art (http://livingarchive.doncampau.com/about/a-brief-history-of-cassett...). 

Klaus Groh, for example, donated four hundred of his audio-cassettes to artpool mail-art archive in Budapest and, frankly, it seems like pretty much everybody who was participating in mail-art back then attempted at least once to play/work with audio.

It feels like (well, it's evident) audio is no minor deal in mail-art's history. Yet, I see little to no discussion about it outside blogs and websites of mail-art audio practitioners (and they're not few).

Even more recently, according to other posts here, there have been mail-art projects around/using audio. So I wonder, why there's no audio-art group here? 

I'm an undergrad visual arts student working mainly with audio and phonographic media ands ince January~February I've been researching about audio-works by mail-artists, everything because earlier this year I stumbled upon a few cassettes by mail-artists (Klaus Groh, José Vandenbroucke, Raffaele Cuomo, Lenir de Miranda) in my uni's phonographic archive.

I felt like I had found some kind of distant unknown relatives and I was quite surprised to learn that mail-art has a sound-art history of its own, and I was equally surprised to know that there's some litterature on the subject (thanks Lander & Lexier).

Since then I've been trying to understand these artists' interest in working with sound (do they have any conception behind it? was it just a sort of experimentalism? do they see themselves as musicians when working with sound or do they avoid a musical conception of sound? etc etc etc...). Haven't had much success on that, yet... but maybe by talking with other audio practitioners of the mail-art community/net I could understand (at least partially) the works I'm dealing with here. 

So, I would like to know, would people be interested in discussing this subject here at IUOMA? After all, mail-art and sound-art do stem from the same conceptualist branch (well, I feel like they do or that's what I interpreted from the books). 

Not sure if I should just create the group, but if some of you are interested, please let me know :)

Below, two of the cassettes found at UFPel's phonographic archive and the dusty drawer where they were found:

[MH//ANTIPODE]

Hi! I've sent you a friend request so I can send you a DM regarding this topic.