John Menick | Project

2009, 4 compact discs, 45” running time for each.


It's said that the subliminal compact disc industry is a 40-million-dollar a year industry. The industry produces hundreds of titles containing relaxing music or ambient sounds, each encoded with subliminal messages. These CDs are to be listened to while sleeping, work, jogging, etc., in order to improve mental and physical health effortlessly. The industry claims their discs help cure everything from a smoking habit to a lack of confidence to a speech impediment. How well these CDs actually work is unknown.

Subliminal Projection Company is a four-CD series of ambient sounds encoded with subliminal messages in the manner of this industry’s products. However, instead of the usual messages, I encoded each CD with my own memories. These memories relate to the sounds on each disc. For example, the Waves CD contains a memory related to a beach; the Rain disc contains a memory related to rain, etc. These memories remain unpublished, and are not available for conscious consumption.

The sounds and album images were purchase through royalty-free stock image and audio banks – much in the same manner as many of the commercially available self-help CDs. In fact, the sounds can be found on other CDs and are often re-used by the industry.

This work is available through Amazon’s CreateSpace. It is my hope that they will be distributed alongside many of the self-help CDs sold through the same website.

Purchase Subliminal Projection Company (Volume One: Rain)

Purchase Subliminal Projection Company (Volume Two: Waves)

Purchase Subliminal Projection Company (Volume Three: Night)

Purchase Subliminal Projection Company (Volume Four: Forest)