Spunarounds is an independent avant-garde record label founded to support a single ongoing project: The Synthesist. Both are the work of the same artist.

The Synthesist is a synthetic digital audio project that recontextualizes Modernist philosophical prose as music. Its first two releases—issued in December 2025—are albums built entirely from the writings of Clement Greenberg and Arthur Schopenhauer (the latter in English translation). The texts are quoted verbatim.

“Synthetic” is used here in its proper sense: composition through combination. Aesthetically, the project is grounded in Modernist thought. The project’s position is simple and unsentimental: art is a matter of experience, not principles. If the work functions as art, it succeeds. If it does not, no justification redeems it.

Spunarounds and The Synthesist are based in Edmonton, Alberta: once a hotbed of Modernist activity. This project treats that lineage not as nostalgia, but as a still-viable critical framework capable of pointing the way forward through an increasingly dim age of aesthetical and ethical confusion.

“All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people: so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer