Erik Belgum

Erik Belgum (born 1961 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American experimental-fiction writer and audio artist whose work spans the page and the loudspeaker. He studied piano for fifteen years and music theory and history for three years in college before turning to linguistics, and a computer-music summer school at the Eastman School in the mid-1980s set him toward what he and his critics call "ambient fiction": text-based audio built to be drifted into and out of rather than tracked plot-first.

His one printed book on a trade press is Star Fiction (Detour Press, 1996), the work that prompted Phillip G. Leggiere in American Book Review to call him "one of the most prominent practitioners of the new radical short fiction" and the Dictionary of the Avant-Garde to place him "among the best of the younger writers of fiction." His shorter fiction has appeared in journals including Chicago Review, Asylum Annual, Avec, Central Park, and Black Ice, and he has coedited VOYS, a CD-distributed sound journal.

In audio, Belgum has released roughly seven CDs and been broadcast on ABC (Australia), the BBC, CBC, Bayerischer Rundfunk's Hörspiel series, and Hessischer Rundfunk, among others. The recorded catalog includes Bad Marriage Mantra (Voys Editions, 1997), Retirement Fund: a Chamber Opera (with Eric Lyon, Electronic Music Foundation, 1996), Take It or Leave It (with Raymond Federman), Blodder (Innova Recordings, 1999), and Strange Neonatal Cry (Innova Recordings, 2003). He has held residencies at STEIM in Amsterdam and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

For JEF he published Collected Stort Shories (JEF #47, 2012), a ten-piece collection whose title puns on its own typos and whose contents fold algorithmically generated language in with found documents. It is the print book that records his algorithmic-prose practice between Star Fiction and the present.

Start with Collected Stort Shories, his only JEF title and the page-side document of the method his audio work pursues by ear.