on the dispatch, and what it is not

theswere is a small, mostly-quiet concern. we circulate short audio works under numbered catalogue. each work addresses a single parameter. we do not release albums. we do not tour. there is no streaming.

the project began in 2022, in a corridor outside a listening room. three of us had just spent forty minutes with a piece consisting of one sawtooth oscillator and one low-pass filter, and in the corridor we could not agree on what had happened. the piece had resolved, or it had not resolved, depending on who you asked. one of us insisted it had ended at the fourth minute; another placed the ending at the seventh; the third believed it was still ongoing.

we began the dispatch to document exactly this kind of uncertainty. every issue is a single audio object, released without liner notes longer than two paragraphs, without artwork, without interpretation. the documentation specifies only: duration, source, process. the listener supplies the rest. this is not a philosophical position. it is a logistics choice.

what we publish

works that meet two conditions. first, they must be reducible: describable by the smallest number of parameters required to reproduce the object. a piece generated from a single oscillator, one modulator, and a filter — three values — is a candidate. a piece requiring the particular weather conditions of a particular afternoon is a candidate only if those conditions can be enumerated. second, they must be patient: the work must tolerate being listened to at low volume, in the background, over an extended period. if the piece insists on the listener's attention, we do not publish it.

these criteria have produced a catalogue that is, by design, difficult to summarize. the works do not resemble each other. some are nearly silent. some are harmonically saturated. one is a paper score. one is a twelve-hour unattended installation recording that we have excerpted to forty-seven minutes, though the excerpt has been criticized (by us, internally) for being arbitrary.

who we are

four people, distributed across two time zones, meeting quarterly in a rented studio space that we will not identify. three of us have backgrounds in studio composition; one works in acoustics. we do not consider ourselves a collective, because we do not collaborate on works. we consider ourselves an editorial body.

no individual member is identified by full name on any dispatch. initials are used where attribution is required. this is not a mystique; it is because the works are not personal. the initials serve only to prevent certain pieces being attributed to the wrong author in discussions — an error that has occurred — without encouraging the discussion to become about the author.

on format

physical dispatches are pressed onto polycarbonate in editions of 40 to 80, depending on the work. digital transfers are made available only on written request to subscribers of record. we do not use streaming platforms, and we do not intend to. this is not a political position, and we are happy to explain our reasoning to anyone who writes to us about it; we simply find the distribution economics of streaming platforms incompatible with the way we think about works.

a piece is finished when it can be left alone without the room changing. until then it is still being made.
— from the accompanying notes to tsw-001, 2022

a note on the name

'theswere' is a construction, not a word. it was chosen because it reads as though it were a word, and because it carries no associations we could detect. we find that any longer explanation quickly becomes embarrassing; so we offer none.