Taken from my ongoing project “The Music For John Cage”, which began about four years ago as both homage and an experiment that relates Cage’s musical formality to the instant compositions created though improvisation. As I started to move away from what I saw as improvised jazz in my own approach to music creation, I found myself delving, head first, into electro acoustic performing. I have found Cage’s use of the I-chi to control the play of his music a parallel to that of electro acoustic improvisation, EAI. I wanted to escape the role that the turntable or, in my case, a vintage record player has begun to take in contemporary music making. I found by re-interpreting 20th century new music, through both graphic scores and my own affectual feeling derived from recorded performances of the compositions, has allowed the record player to be used in a way that subverts its intention. I found Cage to be the perfect fodder for this notion.
In my re-interpretations of She is Asleep parts 1 &2, I use found aspects of the recordings of Cage’s rendition. I have taken these appropriated samples and processed them as acoustically created sounds that make up the rest of the piece. This work evolves around layers of simple Lo-Fi processing. Sometimes the original source material is evident, opening flaunted, like some of the vocalizing heard in Cage’s version of She is Asleep, others are transported into realms that have no mirrored reflection of it’s source. The record player is equipped with contact microphones that allow for me to generate sounds from the player itself. The platter can be scene as a sounding board, where objects can be dropped, placed, dragged, plucked and then processed. The same can be said for the motors, which are amplified and then processed.
Cage, for me, has a great relevance in the construction of 21st century new music, especially in the EAI movement where tonality has been dismissed. Invented sound and chance has become a paramount reality in my music. I see my work occupying a sturdy relationship to Cagean theory.
She is Asleep (09:18 | 03:21)
