M.E.M.E. Manifesto

The Manifesto Of M.E.M.E

• We are dedicated to the proposition that all sound and thought was created and exists, perpetually.

• Therefore, it can only be rediscovered or found. Found within wires, found within objects, found within human buildings, found within our hearts and recognized by the mechanism of instinct.

• Sounds poor cousin is noise, noise is the occurrence of rediscovering many things simultaneously, therefore noise can be reduced and patterns extracted which represent found thought without the debasement of political and cultural bias.

• The reduction of noise; audible and physical, and the thought process; conscious, subconscious and subliminal are the representations of the neurosis of time. We ignore such neurosis, time for us is plastic, not uniform, and therefore our tool.

• Structured comprovisation (composition + improvisa is the life-force of our unit.

• Emotion, feeling, instinct etc. are the mechanisms that keep the life-force in agitation.

• We disdain the assumptions inherent in the evolution of electronic instruments as a temporary means of commercial convenience. When this convenience is bent to our interests, it assumes the aspect of a tightly filtered channel for the recovery of ideas. In this sense, all of our comprovisations are "automatic", when realized with the aid of our systems; biological and electronic.

• The re-assemblage of the soul and free-thinking in total are rediscovered through electronic sound stimulation.

• The "new" technology that dilutes our society and corrupts the mind is turned back upon itself when it used in a way that regresses to primal instinct and away from sterilization.

• Instinct is the ability to recognize when an event has been recovered. It is our greatest tool.

• Our technology exists for the construction of traps to recover music that has been lost.

• We do not differentiate between biological or mechanical species. We assume the process of sound recovery is being carried on by all species at the same time. We are obligated to use the entire palette of found sound, whether biological, electronic or mechanical in origin, to further our purpose of recovering only the most meaningful sound. Hopefully, this sound will be useful to more than just the species from which we arose.

— Grant Richter and Dean Ireland
Milwaukee, Sept. 15th, 1989