The last two years, challenging as they have been, have seen a renaissance of artistic expression; my favorite musicians such as Animal Collective and Aesop Rock recorded and released amazing work during the pandemic, there’s been a noticeable upward trend in visual art making in the home, and writers all across the world are coming together to create new spaces and literary publications. Me being a writer and a curator, I saw the increase in creative expression across the human experience as an opportunity to make connections between and across fields of imagination. I started looking around for other literary publications that have put out special issues exploring a specific medium of art and found that there was somewhat of a lack of opportunities to submit writing about music that wasn’t done in a specific review format. Being Editor in Chief at Mycelium Magazine allows for me to create a space to help fill that gap, to give room to poetry and fiction about music. Thus, the idea for the special music issue, Issue 2.5, came about.
Collaboration and writing don’t often sit together in the mind, but the literary community thrives in a similar way to the musical community. In his book How Music Works, David Byrne says the following about collaboration and the creative musical process:
Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically ambiguous and therefore more potentially universal? Can eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?
The “virtually conjoined person” Byrne refers to, who represents the expression of communal human emotion, has been particularly present in my mind over the course of the global pandemic. There is a palpable sense of misery and loss that has been added to the collective consciousness. This deep emotional influence led me to realize that the music issue of Mycelium would best serve the creative community if it brought us, as a collective, back to the musical expressions that have helped us survive the last two years. Comfort music, survival music, that was the idea. The song or album that’s on repeat through all your tears, the jam that you can’t help but scream along to in your car, the meditative sound that you center yourself to- these were the sentiments I was after. Each and every contributor delivered on that in a spectacular way.
Featuring poetry, traditional and nontraditional reviews, fiction, and more, Mycelium Magazine’s issue 2.5 is a carefully crafted curation of works by authors who find music inspiring and worth writing about. I hope this can be the first of many special (small) issues. Thank you to all of our contributors and to all those who submitted.
The official publication date for issue 2.5 is set for March 18th, 2022, when the moon is full in Virgo. The cover and Table of Contents can be seen below.
Mycelium wishes you all the best!
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