Waywords and Meansigns was profiled in Flavorwire’s Alternate Routes column by Jesse Jarnow. Jarnow clearly gets what we’re about as a mega-music project, released without record labels and in the realm of creative commons rather than copyright:
“the possibilities of digital music distribution has enabled and unleashed a new wave of big dreamers, scaling upwards into the still-unfathomable new space in hopes of finding new forms and new audiences. As musicians, they are restoring primacy to the power of the niche, a reminder that niches are also universes unto themselves…
[a] project too big for any physical medium is the mega-ambitious, 15-plus-artist James Joyce-inspired Waywords and Meansigns. More than a book on tape, more than an album, tracks turn into multi-hour excursions as musicians/readers reckon with Joyce’s jeweled and layered text, chapters becoming multipart albums themselves. What results is something that exceeds the medium of books on tape, and probably even the mediums of books or tapes themselves. Musicians find many ways to turn Joyce’s musical text into actual music. During a three-hour take on Chapter I.6, experimental NYC musician Maharadja Sweets tries his hand at straight reading amid ambience (sounding a bit like Lambchop‘s Kurt Wagner), tracing out easy melodies, but also turns the text into an aural ransom note with words clipped from individual sources, and — in another section — offers the words as an almost religious incantation over fluttering drone-pipes. Los Angeles English teacher-turned-cabaret psychedelicist Mr. Smolin sing-songs the text while, behind him, art-surfers Double Naught Spy Car dive for hallucinogenic passageways and unexpected jazz corners. Neil Campbell, the fully haunted electrician who records as Astral Social Club does the (relatively) expected, offering a shifting, buzzing, unfolding soundscape and a (relatively) straight reading.”