the other half of the label

Residencies

Zariia makes records, and it holds residencies. People are invited one at a time, and there is no schedule and no cohort. A residency here is a span of time and a frame. There is no place and no money in it.

A plain table at night lit by one small lamp: an open notebook with faint pencil marks, a pencil across it, a glass of water, headphones resting on their side. Nobody is there.
Someone's own table, on an evening in the middle of it. Most of a residency looks like this. Nobody is being hosted.

Most residencies offer a room, a stipend and a city. This one offers none of them, which is the first thing to say about it. What it does offer: a bounded stretch of time, a frame to work inside, the instruments the label has built, and somebody at the other end of the correspondence who reads what you send.

The shape is not modesty. A label with no releases and no money that announced a funded programme would be describing something it cannot do. What follows is what it can do.

Virtual

The residency happens wherever you already are. Nothing is provided and nothing is travelled to, at any point, including at the end of it.

This is not about convenience. A residency that requires a place selects for whoever can leave their life for a month, which in practice filters by money, by care work, and by who is permitted to travel alone. Take the place away and most of that filter goes with it. It does not remove all of it. Uninterrupted hours and somewhere to work are unevenly distributed too, and claiming otherwise would repeat the error further in.

For people who are not musicians

This is the part that decides the rest.

A training arrives with settled ideas about what performance is and what production is. Those ideas are useful, and they also set a limit on what gets tried. The odd work is likelier to come from a practice that never picked them up: someone who makes games, or writes, or builds things, with a sense of music but no training in the shape it is supposed to take.

A trained player is not a lesser one, and this is not a claim about people. It is a claim about what a training does to a practice, and it cuts the other way as often as not.

A residency is a channel carrying material, time and correspondence; a session is a room, and the room is the only thing that carries how somebody is received material · time · correspondence how somebody is received residency — virtual, long session — a room, short
A channel carries material, correspondence and time. What it will not carry is how somebody is received in a room, and better fidelity does not help, because nothing is failing to be captured. The residency does what can be done at a distance. The rest only happens in the room.

The session is a different thing

The residency is the long, quiet part. A session is a room; it lasts a day, and it is where a record comes from. They are two different things and they are meant to be — a session has its own invitation, made separately, and it is not the back end of a residency.

A residency is not a promise of a session. Some will lead to one. Most of a residency is somebody working alone, and that is what is being offered.

There is no money in it

Unpaid work in the arts is usually a way of getting something for nothing. One rule keeps this from being that.

If nothing comes out of a residency, nothing is owed; if a record comes out, the residency was work and is paid at release if nothing comes out nothing is owed, either way if a record comes out the whole span was work, and it is paid
Unpaid is clean exactly as long as nothing is taken. If a record comes out of a residency, that time was work. It is paid at release, on the same terms as everybody else in the room, inside the fee and not on top of it.

During the residency the label is not a patron and makes no claim to be. That is the trade.

The label publishes nothing about residents

No list, no page, no announcement, no roster. If your work becomes a record you are credited on it as a musician. That is what you did. Resident is only what you were called, and it does not go on the record.

What a residency gives and what it does not give what there is a bounded span of time the instruments the label has built correspondence with somebody paying attention the possibility, not the promise, of a session what there is not a stipend, or any money during it a studio, a room, a city to travel to a page about you, a listing, a title a guarantee that anything comes of it
The right-hand column is the one that usually goes unmentioned. A residency with an empty left column would not be worth describing. One that left the right column out would not be worth taking.

How many, how often

There is no schedule and there are no groups. A residency starts when somebody is invited and runs its own span. People are invited one at a time, as I find them, and no two residencies need to line up.

A year crossed by three residencies of different lengths, beginning at different times, each holding one person one year one person · one span no two need to line up
Nobody is in a cohort. There is no intake that opens and closes, no group to keep pace with, and nothing that begins or ends because somebody else is ready. A span is long enough for something to change and short enough to finish.

There is no call

Nothing to apply to, and no form to fill, now or later.

An application is a written performance of yourself, and choosing people by how well they describe themselves is what this label is trying not to do. The first residents will be people already close to the project. That has a cost: going by people already known is the mechanism that makes rooms narrow. Saying so does not fix it, and a form would not have fixed it either.

If you have read this far and think it is meant for you, the contact page exists. There is no process behind it, and a reply may take a while.