As I scan around for interesting things to listen to on-line, I often find myself returning to Fällt Publishing’s invalidObject Series (2000), a thoughtful collection of recent electronic music ranging in style from glitch to ambient to degree-zero sound.
Tagged: electronic music, internet resource, microsound
September 5, 2001 saw the beginning of what will be, on its completion, the longest concert ever given. On that day, the birthday of John Cage, a performance of the latter’s Organ2/ASLSP (1987) was begun in the church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The concert will last 639 years.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Music
Tagged: Composition 1960 #7, John Cage, Organ2/ASLSP, Vexations
The loop fascinates, whether as idea, object, or aesthetic device. It spurs the mind on, sends it spinning, causes it to wonder: will this ever end? Technically, it shouldn’t, because the loop = infinity (whose symbol – ∞ – is itself a loop).
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Cinema, Literature, Music
Tagged: Furniture Music, Last Year at Marienbad, Stille Nacht III, tape loops, the loop
Composed in 1956, Radio Music is Cage’s second work for radio, the first being Imaginary Landscape No. 4 from 1951. Guy de Bièvre has made some interesting comments about contemporary performances of Radio Music, which are problematized by the changes, technological and otherwise, that the medium has undergone since the time the piece was created, claiming that it is not possible to give a historically accurate performance of the work, in other words to make Radio Music sound as it did at the time it was composed.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Music, Radio
Tagged: electronic music, indeterminacy, John Cage, radio art, sound collage
One of the chief attractions of autopoietic works, aside from their strictly musical qualities of course, is that they constitute a type of perpetual music. Eno’s 1996 Generative Music 1 included 12 recorded tracks and a copy of the software used to make them, thus allowing users to create their own, theoretically endless, autopoietic compositions.
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Music
Tagged: 100 000 000 Poems, 77 Million Paintings, Brian Eno, generative music, Raymond Queneau
“When I wrote the Imaginary Landscape for twelve radios,” Cage explained, “it was not for the purpose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpredictability already inherent in the situation through the tossing of coins. Chance, to be precise, is a leap, provides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself.”
Categories: Art & Aesthetics, Music, Radio
Tagged: electronic music, indeterminacy, John Cage, radio art, sound collage
The radioheads among us may wish to know about ShortWaveMusic, Myke Dodge Weiskopf’s paean to the random poetry and intermittent static of short wave radio.
Categories: Internet, Music, Radio
Tagged: interesting blog, short wave radio, sound collage