Unlocking Hidden Stories: How CRAFT Transforms Erasure into a Sonic Journey
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An erasure essay, for the record, is made exactly like an erasure poem. Words, and sometimes letters, are removed from a primary text and what remains on the page is then collected into paragraphs (this is how it becomes an essay).
And a mixtape is made much like an erasure essay, because both artforms require a significant amount of time spent with that original text. I cannot count how many hours I spent, as a teenager, re-listening to albums so I could curate songs to evoke the correct mood on a mixtape. I spent so much effort determining which songs to cull and pull to polish into my own invention. If you can imagine all the albums from 1996-2000 as one large text — like a spool of printer paper that could be pulled around the world — you can understand how creating a mixtape is like creating an erasure. There is so much to perforate and excise before getting to the real message you want to reveal on the page.
