The manifestoon platoon came out of the convergence of two needs: 1) maintaining meaningful connections across great distances (Brooklyn–Moscow) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) doing something productive within the space of electronic music.
We’ve long felt that electronic music is strange: it alternates between the promise of supposedly limitless creative exploration potential, and hyper-conservative clinging onto generic conventions (not just in performance, but in instrument design and the institutions that “support” electronic music).
We wanted to transport the feeling of mixed-media art, which normally would be experienced in a gallery, cafe, warehouse, college, or other more open-ended “creative” space, into livestreaming and collaborative recording. Through our work in producing and performing in events for the New York Modular Society, our recording work, and our anti-pastoralist available light photography, we have been exploring new ways of collaboration that involve, but aren’t limited to, modular synthesis.
The first version of the manifestoon was written towards the completion of our first collection of works. We realized we had had tacit working principles all along—things that we did do and things that we did not do—that had been creatively productive for us. We are sharing these with the world alongside the works in the hopes that they help people to find their own sources of creative inspiration.