Gen Ken Montgomery

Generator Sound Art is an experimental arts and culture organization based in New York City and co-owned by the sound artists 'Gen' Ken Montgomery and Scott Konzelmann. It focuses upon the work of dedicated Sound Artists, and is an umbrella organization that either facilitated or continues to facilitate the activities of the Generator gallery / exhibition space, the Generations Unlimited audio recording label, and a second, eponymous audio recording label. Generator as a physical gallery / exhibition space existed in the East Village and then in Chelsea from 1989–1992.

The organization is based upon a non-commercial approach to art-making, with the acknowledgement that financial remuneration is not the primary goal of such activity ("Artists Throwing Money Out the Window" has been used as a personal slogan by Montgomery, and as the name of a series of audio releases that deal in "irreverent and / or fun errata.") Profits earned from Generator-related activities go directly to the artists, and also "build a fund to support future sound art projects." Generator's emphasis on handmade, self-released audio works also derives from its founders' participation in the "cassette networking" or "Cassette culture" milieu of the 1980s–1990s, while the embrace of spontaneity and unintended consequences is another recurrent theme within Generator-affiliated work.

Generator's founder and proprietor Ken Montgomery (aka Gen Ken Montgomery) (b. 1957) is a New York-based sound artist raised in Churchville, Pennsylvania, where he studied violin in his late childhood and early teens. Since 1994, he has used the "Gen Ken" moniker for sound art / noise music (he also uses the anagrammatic moniker "Egnekn" for "more whimsical and especially lamination-based projects.") As to the latter, Montgomery's "lamination ritual" is a staple of his performance oeuvre, described by the artist as "a people-participatory activity and sonic listening experience which stimulates the mind and body in-the-moment, while producing an original, tangible, transformed personal object that will last…almost forever." Among Montgomery's formative influences are the theories of composer John Cage – particularly those outlined in Cage's 1961 collection of writings, Silence – and the participatory work ethic of the German electronic musician (and Joseph Beuys protégé) Conrad Schnitzler (for whom Montgomery gave the first U.S. concerts, and first met during the sole German performance of 'KMZ' in 1982.)

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