Organised by Seattle artist Nathan Langston, Telephone is an experimental, collaborative, cross-disciplinary art project which first ran in 2015. It asks its participants to respond to artworks with work of their own, work which is then in turn responded to by the next people, and on and on until a network of creations is built. “It works like the children’s game of the same name. A message is whispered from person to person and changes and evolves as it is passed from player to player,” the website describes. “In our case, we pass a secret message from art form to art form, so a message could become poetry and then painting and then music and then film, throughout all possible forms of art. We also assign each finished work of art to two or three other artists, so the game branches outward exponentially like a family tree.”
And we’re talking about a sizeable family tree. The first game saw 315 people from all over the world take part, the second, published in 2021, nearer 800, while the most recent, as per Langston, consisted of “1,395 individual, interconnected and original works by artists from 930 cities in 65 countries.” The audience is invited into this sprawling web of art on the Telephone website, encouraged to follow a different path each time, the journey starting from the same spot but leading to very different places depending on your choices. Imagine a digital museum exhibition which works as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure experience.
Telephone Songs, the latest release from San Francisco-based songwriter Jon Rooney, AKA Virgin of the Birds, collects two offerings for this game into a double single. Rooney is no stranger to art, the project itself taking its name from a poor translation of a Salvador Dali painting. His work elevates a lo-fi folk aesthetic with art rock invention, as embodied by songs like ‘Moon Chariot’ which we covered in 2023 (“A track bursting with bright energy and mythical strangeness,” we wrote, “where any sense of opacity from the latter is rendered redundant by the conviction of the former. A song of serpents and winged horses in which you can only totally believe”). The two new singles—’I Walked With Fergie’ from the 2025 game of Telephone and ‘An Archer’ from 2020—are just as singular and instinctive, something only deepened by the process which brought them to life.
“I received the email with my prompt and a two week deadline to complete my assignment when I was in the hospital the day my daughter was born,” Rooney writes of ‘I Walked With Fergie’, a song prompted by an illustration by Edward Lang-Whiston. “My prompt was an evocative, stylized black and white illustration of unknown origins. To get started, I pored over the image and wrote down words that described what I was looking at – like “city” and “night” and “bottle” and “hands.” Then I fumbled around for a couple of chord progressions I liked and waited to catch the big fish, per David Lynch. I dozed holding my daughter while listening to Yo La Tengo and Billie Holiday.”
With the bait set, the big fish emerged from the sea of memory as a distinct image, Lang-Whiston’s drawing evoking Fergie’s pub, a bar in Rooney’s native Philadelphia where he first started playing music. With the title and chorus in hand, the song came together in a flash, recorded in the final twenty-four hours under the strange pressures of sleep deprivation. The result is unsurprisingly surreal, blurring the line between memory and dreams.
I walked with Fergie
I drank in his bar
I wrote in my bedroomA silvery turn
Surviving the teeth
Undoing the old doom
Telephone Songs is out now and available from Bandcamp. Telephone can be viewed and enjoyed on the project’s website.