Welcome to
Different
Track!
WE’RE GLAD YOU FOUND US.
DIFFERENT TRACK PRODUCTIONS is the media and merchandise outlet for activities carried out by the non-profit organization, Continuum Culture & Arts, as well as by partnering artists and other aligned cultural entities. At the present this encompasses audio recordings, video, and books.
Our catalog includes material created in recording studios, at Continuum’s long-running Soup & Sound series, in live performances in basements and living rooms. We do field recordings, recordings from communities of “non-professional” musicians, music in a variety of genres. Mainly we support artists in creating and presenting their work without compromising their vision or artistic integrity.
Because we are a non-profit we are able to offer some of these things for free, some for a price. Contributions from individuals help us immensely, so if you feel that Different Track and Continuum are doing something important, please help us by making a contribution and being part of what we are doing.
In the second quarter of the 21st century it has become very clear that many of the structures upon which society has been based are failing us. We need different, sustainable, deeper and more meaningful ways of living together as a species in harmony (and rhythm) with the Earth.
In the US—where so much culture is run as a top-down, greed-based endeavor, the product of historic oppression, and where so much popular culture is vacuous, corrupt, and supportive of the brutish status quo—we believe that any hope for the future must come from love and creative cooperation on a human level. Put another way from revolutionary, alternative, structures and mutual aid. We believe art has a special role in this—not as a pedantic thing necessarily, but as a practice that engenders the optimal use of human potential: the imaginary interaction with the fabric of existence in space and time.
This isn’t a new thing. Indeed the people who run Different Track and Continuum Culture & Arts—and likely you, dear reader—have been involved in cultural production on the margins since the 1970s. Many of our fears and observations from back then have proven tragically prescient, and now it seems we are at, and beyond, various tipping points.
Regarding Art, and the present endeavor of producing artistic work, our perspective is that aesthetics and economics exist largely in independent realms and that though they are interdependent in ways that demand a certain amount of respect, the relationship is an uneasy one. Due to issues not intrinsic to the people or the work, but to market issues, much worthy art and many artists are marginalized, potential audiences lack access to compelling and necessary expressions of human creativity, or (worse) they are accustomed to greed-driven value systems and conditioned to thinking that if something isn’t validated by certain commercial forces it lacks value.
Different Track Productions uses the power and vision provided by the non-profit status of its parent organization to transcend these and other limitations a bit. If we think something is inspiring, beautiful, and worthwhile, and it fits our mission and capabilities, we try to make it accessible to curious people worldwide.