This month’s installation features the work of online tape collective and music label, Mouth of Heaven. MoH (full name: Thee Mouth of Heaven Recording Collective and Pressing of Tongues) is a loose group of musicians releasing artistic sound projects digitally and physically – often through cassette tapes with one-of-a-kind pieces of literature and art. This tradition doesn’t show any signs of dying off, with the label offering up unique postcards along with music download codes.
Spawned by one of the label’s more recent releases by Sick Hundred Sisters, the dispenser is adorned with an aged, old fashioned postal advertisement from a place that never existed. This sums up much of the label’s output. Is it something familiar? Something foreign? Or does it all lie somewhere between the two? MoH’s output seems to regularly dance within the realm of hauntology, quickly flicking between warm nostalgia and cold strangeness.
The idea behind Sick Hundred Sisters’ visual style is based on a kind of alternate history where Britain colonised parts of Antarctica, which eventually fell into austerity and ruin, leaving these hopeful industrial towns at the end of the Earth. It’s interesting to wonder how culturally, linguistically and emotionally the people there would change to the landscape. With the dispenser we wanted to simulate a kind of Antarctic pen pal advertisement, and I think seeing something so odd be present in physical space is fascinating… well, to us anyway.
Mouth of Heaven is primarily run by Virginia Aveline, a musician and artist based in Richmond, Virginia, and Gorge Lee, a writer and musician based in the North of England. Each with their own output, the two have fostered a place for their close circle to collaborate and share their pieces of sound art.
Mouth of Heaven can be found on Bandcamp here or Instagram here