We are continually made aware of musicians who have in the past seen value in spuriousness and enacted it in their work, pioneers whose realizations of fakeness preceded the vocabulary for it. Fake Music‘s new initiative will be not to reissue the works of these unimportant artists so that they might persist in their obscurity. FakeMusic Re–Anticipations will periodically issue notifications that we will not be reissuing one of these forebears. The first of these nonreissues is the lack of a catalogue of VOLVO, a Dutch rock and roll band who in the 1980s did not play, perform, or record. We ...

The second nonreissue in our Re–Anticipations series is the 1995 debut CD of Argentine band Reynols, Gordura Vegetal Hidrogenada. Reynols have staked an important claim in fake music history, repeatedly asserting the nonexistence of their group. Fake Music is very pleased to not reissue this seminal work in no format that can be heard or owned by enthusiasts or collectors. We deeply believe this is a history that should be greatly treasured and heard by none.

Fake Music offers the third in its Re–Anticipations series, the complete catalogue of the Dutch trio the Heroines, a band who from 2006 to 2011 were visible in Amsterdam’s music scene despite their intention to produce no musical output. This collaboration has been years in the making and we are excited to acknowledge our inability to reissue their work.

Fake Music offers the fourth in its Re–Anticipations series, Yves Klein and Charles Wilp’s 1965 Prince Of Space, Musik Der Leere, an extremely rare LP heard by no one until today. We are proud to announce that with the present release this work will remain unheard. Such a significant work as this deserves nothing less than to persist in silence and obscurity.

We do not know where in the world you are receiving this email, but we are sending it from cities whose inhabitants are starting to speak of warmer seasons. As we from FakeMusic look forward to sweatier days, we think too of the comfort and well-being of our listeners, and so we offer our fifth nonreissue, an acknowledgement of Daniel Eatock’s intent to produce “Audio Mosquito Repellent.” In its broad implemental scope, the piece might have powerfully addressed issues of public health, aesthetics, naturalistic observation, leisure, etc. Unrealized as it is, we cannot reissue this work (to do so would be ...

Silent or absent music often conveys a sense of headiness, the impression that its lack of a low end (or any end at all) makes it more mentally than physically stimulating. Pootie Tang’s silent hit from his eponymous movie stands out from these less scrutable compositions by getting radio play on hip-hop stations and inciting physical expression in its listeners. (Un)Named for the mannerism that stands in for its traditional title, [untitled gesture] upends the typical genre assignation of “non-music” simply by changing its means of dissemination. The piece is of course able to effect such a shift only because it appears ...

Our catalog thus far consists of works conceived and works issued that we are unable to re-release for pragmatic and conceptual reasons. Yet this focus occludes a domain of the nonreissuable: works that were neither conceived nor issued. With this present announcement, we acknowledge our inability to make public any of the compositional work of Eliane Radigue between the years 1974 and 1977 due to the fact that these years marked a hiatus in her production. We choose to mark Radigue’s nonproduction in particular given the deliberate intent of her temporary retreat and given the deliberate subtlety of her subsequent compositional work. ...

Does funkiness have anything to do with mourning? Does it depend on how we use the word (do we attribute something of the stinky to the offbeat?)? How can funkiness precede funk? Is it the job of funkiness to flatten pomp? Can we ignore mourning when we think about funk? (What does Alphonse Allais have to do with this?)

While we have concerned ourselves specifically with the exploration of fakeness in music, we readily admit that we are not experts on the matter. In imagining our inability to reissue the gravestone of Alfred Schnittke, a composer whose work we do not know intimately, it occurred to us to invite our Schnittke-adoring friend the composer and conductor William C. White to frame this work for our catalog. He is our first guest contributor; we thank him for his enthusiasm and attentiveness.

Until now our catalog has included music that is intentionally fake, that was designed not to be listened to. With our tenth nonreissue we broaden our scope to include the unintentional—music that was at one point real but has circumstantially become fake. The lost works of Maria Anna “Nannerl” Mozart open this new avenue.

In the sense that it might leave our active memories as easily as details of a novel’s plot or names of cities visited, knowledge of fakeness is not unique. A piece of fake music that we’ve encountered in the past might only be present in our sensitivity toward newer ones. But with any luck, some aspect of daily rote will jiggle such information loose from forgottenness long enough for us to notice and document it, as happened with our friend and sibling Bryce Wilner, who, we are pleased to report, remembered a fake piece of music used as a joke and ...

While the slate-sweeping and resolve-invigoration kindled by this new year rolls or fumbles on (year of the monkey, we understand), we’re happy to announce that we remain unable to turn to the new or even to the renewed. Nor the old. The objects of our attention hover out there where we can’t really pay attention to them. If we can’t turn to them, we nevertheless can (should?) have this unavailability underscored by more parties, which we have done here with Lauren Fulton, a curator, writer, and our third guest contributor.