Robert Filliou (1926-1987) was a French poet, writer and artist affiliated with Nouveau réalisme and Fluxus. Filliou conceived the celebration of Art’s Birthday in 1963. He claimed that 1,000,000 years ago there was no art at all until one day, on 17 January to be precise, art was born when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Art’s birthday – which, by the way, happened to coincide with Filliou’s own – saw its first public celebration on 17 January 1973 in Aachen, Germany and in Paris, France. Filliou’s ‘Whispered History of Art’, now released on vinyl as Slowscan vol. 30, is a Fluxus mythology about the origin of art. The playful and humorous lecture was recorded by Ondine Fiore at the New Wilderness Studio, New York in December 1977 and is introduced by Dick Higgins. Courtesy Filliou recording: Archivio Francesco Conz. Verona.

Sea Urchin is thrilled to join forces with Jan van Toorn‘s great SLOWSCAN label.

Dissatisfied with the limited availability on vinyl or tape of good artists’ recordings, Jan van Toorn founded his own cassette label Slowscan in 1983 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. In the first 10 years of its existence Slowscan produced 10 important releases, the highlight of which was an 8-cassette Fluxus Anthology box set that met with international acclaim. After having been dormant for a number of years Slowscan made a restart as a vinyl label in 2000. Since then the label has released important and rare recordings of artists and electronic music, such as Liam O’Gallagher, Le Forte Four, Richard Maxfield and John Perreault.

John Chick (1944-2013) was one of the members of the original Bardo Matrix crew, who started out as a psychedelic lightshow or ‘experimental cine’ group in Boulder, Colorado. After moving to San Francisco in 1967, Chick helped set up light shows at the Avalon Ballroom with The Family Dog, with whom he was staying that summer. Doing so, Chick found himself at the heart of San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Once that summer had been spent he moved back to Colorado where he helped The Family Dog set up The Denver Dog – the Avalon Ballroom’s Colorado branch – and helped distribute The Avalon’s psychedelic posters in Denver. At The Denver Dog Chick worked with Blue Cheer, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin and many other musicians and bands. The next year, in 1969, Chick decided to follow the hippie trail to Kathmandu, where he opened the Spirit Catcher bookstore with Angus MacLise and continued the Bardo Matrix imprint. The bookstore became a meeting place for expat poets and musicians and it was under the Bardo Matrix imprint that Ira Cohen and Angus MacLise published their famous Starstreams poetry series on local rice paper. John Chick had many an inside story to tell in his lifetime and Sloow Tapes did a great job releasing some of them on cassette. Order now → Hippie Histories