Scuff Mud

Scuff Mud is an audio release: a recording of Eckhard Gerdes's spoken word set against the music of the band Shelf Life, doubling as issue thirty-six of the Journal of Experimental Fiction. It is not a print anthology; it is a CD, made under the aegis of Bryan Day and the auspices of JEF. Shelf Life on this recording is Bryan Day, Joseph Jaros, Alex Boardman, Andrew Perdue, and Jay Schleidt, improvising on homemade and prepared instruments, where strings and bodies are treated as material to be altered rather than played around. The result is spoken word that is being scored to its noise rather than competing with it: Gerdes's text and the band's improvisation do the same work, at the same rhythm, across the running time of the disc.