Sonic Wilderness

Unreasonable Records accesses the critical value of weird vinyl records, recognizing their nonconformist acoustics and lack of lyrical boundaries as subversive cracks in normative popular music. These unreasonable songs are resucitated to evaluate their mutinous sounds and alarming worldviews. Intractable compulsions being a magnet for this music, Unreasonable Records explores our psychic entanglements with plants and flowers, human-animal thresholds, and parks and gardens as sites of public order and personal collapse. As a lyrical unconscious revealing impulses and desires buried by commercial music, the warped preoccupations of these records are taken as symptomatic of enduring social, psychological and political disorders.

Mark Harris researches how language, image, and music reveal everyday experience as remarkable. His art and writing concern avant-garde manifestations, including 19th-century utopianism, Surrealism, 60s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, intoxication, calypso, punk, and sound studies. Recent exhibitions and performances have occurred in Vienna, London, New York, and Cincinnati. New and forthcoming writing in Manifold: Experimental Criticism, Small Axe, Divergence Press, Seismograf, Journal of Contemporary Painting, Artforum, Aesthetic Investigations, and Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.