The Descendants of the Decadents
On 21 April 2021 Mikey Georgeson sang Descendants of the Decadents onto a cassette tape. He put the cassette recorder in a shoe box and mailed it to a man in France. With the cassette recorder was a small book of instructions. The man (a mercury prize winning pop star) was to record a song and then send the device to someone else who would do the same. Each person MUST remember to zero the counter. This was important not to forget! The next person (a Turner prize winning artist) sent it to a singer in Scotland – a rising star. Then things started to get weird. Mikey had thought that the cassette would cure his mind and body from withering in the insidious digital miasma Lockdown had spewed out. Instead of healing him though he felt strange in its presence. He wondered if his unrecognised desire to pierce the monotony with perversity had summoned something paranormal. Rumours swirled that everyone on the cassette was mad or that simply listening to the recordings would drive you mad – creating a loop of unhinged droning.
Receivers of the device began to complain that the machine either turned itself on to record their lives or it refused to work. Somehow those who had it in their home felt unable to let go of it. Some started to suggest that the cassette player was not just broken but haunted and wanted to know where Mikey had bought the device from? Had he checked the seller’s history? What started as a supposedly joyful act of self-healing, taking inspiration from an art that shunned Victorian dogmatism had, it seems, released the transgressive perversity of the 19th century Decadents it was named after. Mikey has firmly stated that for mental health reasons the cassette will not be digitised. He himself has not listened to the cassette since its eventual return in October 2022. A cleansing ritual was performed in the garden of a shamanic/ post-man pop singer in an attempt to reverse the darkness that the gamma ferric oxide (Fe2O3) had dispersed into the lyric-field. This was the final recording that will be submitted to the cassette and visitors to Playback will be able to hear the cassette in full at a ritual live “play back” event. Mikey will take no responsibility for the future sanity of attendees. All phones to be bagged and labelled for return on exit.