Fool's Pack - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

One of the early factors contributing to the intense thematic seasonality of our releases, back in 1995 we thought it would be "fun" to kick off the start of April (April Fool's Day), in the spirit of a misremembered "John Zorn side project where everyone in an orchestra switched sections and picked up an instrument they'd never played before, recording half an hour later as Classical Disasters", to try our hands at other departments' artforms and release an [artpack] where even masterful artists created wretched failures out of their element -- but we all bombastically pretended to be very proud and confident in our half-baked creations as part of the joke.

Later installments of Fool's Packs abandoned the chinese fire drill element and just saw people making deliberately bad art. There are, of course, many ways in which art can be bad (eg. absurd, inept, vulgar, insincere, excessively avant-garde, unaware of its own value, rule-breaking and transgressive, etc.), so they were a mixed bag of rancid nuts. Some people would point to the very strange contents of our Fool's Packs as being emblematic of our wider work, which was really misrepresentative and kind of missing the point, so we concluded that our efforts might be better spent focusing more on making art that wasn't deliberately bad.

(Other historic artscene exercises in humorously making deliberately bad art include [Wballz] way back in the '90s, and [Duo Daughters] more recently. Also "[Mistergirls]" purported to be parodying us. Fuel also was at one point subject to an external parody as "Fool", yielding one very literal Fool's pack. The quantity of chortles per kilobyte tends to run rather low in any of these exercises, as it turns out that being funny is difficult -- perhaps even more difficult than making good art!)