Organized by Associate Curator Anthony Elms

ICA@50: Siltbreeze FlyerICA@50: SiltbreezeICA@50: SiltbreezeICA@50: SiltbreezeICA@50: Siltbreeze exhibition cardTom Lax: Siltbreeze flyer

Founded in Philadelphia in 1989, Siltbreeze record label, run by the one-of-a-kind Tom Lax, has opened ears to some of underground music’s most distinctive, provocative, astute, and ground-burning voices. A short list of label highlights would have to include A Band, Ashtray Navigations, Bardo Pond, Blues Control, Brother JT, Charalambides, The Dead C, Alastair Galbraith, Guided By Voices, Halo of Flies, A Handful of Dust, Harry Pussy, Alan Licht, Mike Rep & the Quotas, Sebadoh, Shadow Ring, Times New Viking, US Girls, and Venom P. Stinger. The list could go on.

The aesthetic of Siltbreeze can be abrasive, sardonic, dirty and contrarian. Also determined to rework any rules from the flawed system that is rock. Heed what founder Lax himself once said of his approach to writing press releases: “There’s no reason to assume any of this is real.” Despite at times casual construction methods for a record and/or cover and/or press release, there was always deliberate syntactic distortion at play vis-a-vis sonic distortion.
Image Scavengers: PaintingImage Scavengers: PhotographyICA@50: Pleasing Artists And Publics Since 1963Siltbreezes and German Spectres / Image Scavengers (1982) and Investigations 28: Martin Kippenberger (1989)