Trevor Jackson

300 Words is a 12" by Trevor Jackson, recorded at the Barbican for Doug Aitken's Station to Station: A 30 Day Happening. The Vinyl Factory pressed it there. Aitken's project had crossed North America by train in 2013, and in the summer of 2015 it took over the London arts centre for a month. VF ran a studio and a mobile vinyl press inside the building, so that sessions could become records on the spot. Jackson's contribution is a conceptual piece in which text, voice and sleeve design form a single work. Every copy is different from the others.

The words came first. The design collective Åbäke, who held one of the exhibition's two design residencies, wrote 300 words. They then made 300 sleeves by hand, each carrying a single word from the track, drawn in Tipp-Ex with Emma Berit Smit, Vincent Humeau, Jonas Meier and Tilly Thompson. Smit read the words aloud over Jackson's own music and instrumentation, and Tom Furse of The Horrors added found sounds. Side A is 300 Words with her voice. Side B is the same track as an instrumental, the piece without its text. Jackson wrote and produced it and recorded it live at the Barbican. The release followed Format, the album VF published in February 2015, his first in fourteen years. Its 12 tracks were spread over 12 physical formats, from 12" and cassette to VHS, minidisc, DAT, 8-track and reel-to-reel. Both records ask what a physical release is for. 300 Words pushes the question onto the sleeve: the buyer gets one word of the 300, while the record holds the whole text. Graphic design is part of the content of the piece here. That fits a project like Station to Station, where the Barbican's design studios printed covers in the rooms where the music was recorded and pressed.

This is the standard and only edition, VF202: a 12" EP at 33 1/3 rpm on black vinyl, pressed on The Vinyl Factory Press. Each copy comes in its own hand-made Tipp-Ex sleeve by Åbäke carrying a different word, and the edition is limited to 300 copies.