Gen Ken Montgomery

Gen Ken Montgomery ran a tiny record shop and sound art gallery called Generator in downtown New York — one of the first such spaces in the city — and it was from here that his practice took shape. A self-taught autodidact with no formal training in music or art, Montgomery built his first tape in 1981, Gen Ken and Equipment (150 copies), from cheap synthesizers, toy instruments, household gadgetry, and electric machines: an ice crusher named Icebreaker, an aquarium pump, a refrigerator, a shoe-shine machine, a hand massager, a laminator. The tape entered the international cassette network and the replies kept coming: Merzbow, Maurizio Bianchi, CM Von Hausswolff, Conrad Schnitzler (with whom he would record in Berlin in the dead of winter 1986, the sessions producing three of the tracks here). He eventually co-founded the label Generations Unlimited with Schnitzler and David Prescott, and he continues today as what he calls the world's foremost practitioner of Sonic Lamination Art.

Postcards 1981–1986 (VOD106) gathers 41 tracks across two LPs from his first five official cassettes, live recordings at the Pyramid Club NYC in 1982, collaborations with Michael Zodorozny of Crash Course in Science as KMZ, and previously unreleased material including one recording from 1981 made with his eight-year-old niece on vocals. Boomkat described it as "incredibly diverse output" from a "cassette scene lynchpin." Issued in a glossy gatefold sleeve in an edition of 500 individually numbered copies.