The White Noise Boutique, a small pop-up shop that opened in Brighton, England in September, is offering custom vinyl LPs consisting entirely of white noise. Think of it as a purer form of the Ghost in the Mp3.
The shop was created by artist Jeff Thompson — who previously made “Computers on Law & Order”. Visitors to the shop can select a seed (dice, yarrow sticks) and a generator (such as hard drive entropy, algorithms, Type 1390-B vacuum tubes) to create a unique recording of white noise (for more info on the process, see the boutique’s site). They can then print a 7″ record of their creation, and/or get a digital file of it for £4 and £1, respectively.
Although it’s a conceptual art piece that mocks expensive specialty boutiques, it still actually functions as a store. “I really like the idea of a store that sells something seemingly so useless that has an incredible amount of detail,” Thompson said. “The records are priced to be cheap enough that anyone can afford them, despite it being a boutique. I want to embrace the high-end and custom-made aspects of boutiques while upending the capitalist and elitist drive behind them.”
