Mr Apollo

Arcades

Gusta

Supersnickletip

A tribute to some of our musical heroes...

Ladies of Electronica

Dub version of Stockhausen's Cardigan, from The Electronic Music EP by Discrete Machines (release date 23.02.15)

6. Cardigan Dub

cold genius (part 01)

In radio interviews between John Cage and Morton Feldman between 1966/67, the composers discussed the notion of intrusive sound. Feldman cited the sound of transistor radios on the beach as an example, but Cage suggests that we should accept such sounds as the reality in which the artist must practice – that make-up what John Ashbery described it in his poem Illustration, as ‘the truth we know’. Situated simultaneously in Paris and West Yorkshire, sound artists Steve Jones and Sally Rodgers construct an audio work from found sounds and by utilising chance operations in homage to Cage’s ‘Radio Music’. Cultural detritus, both analogue and digital, gathered from unmarked tape spools found in a junk shop and from random surfing on YouTube, are processed according to the inclinations of both artists and combined in an exchange of files and ideas sent backwards and forwards via the Internet. Cage’s suggestion that we are ‘bathed in radio waves’ resonates in a culture where the proliferation of ‘intrusive’ sound threatens to overwhelm, yet he encouraged us to embrace such sound as valuable artifacts of our time and place.
Closer listening to the 1/4” tapes reveal references to the Arab/Israeli 6 day war, dating the tapes to 1967. The unnamed recordist  captured the sounds of radio broadcasts in his home, effectively creating his own Radio Happenings round about the same time as Cage and Feldman were recording theirs across the Atlantic. Time has degraded the magnetic tapes, and because they were made on a dual speed machine that now plays one channel in reverse, the output has become a chaotic and fragmented, a soundscape that resonates with Cage’s maxim, “ Just sounds, sounds free of judgments about whether they are ‘musical’ or not, sounds free of memory and taste… sounds free of fixed relations.”

The truth we know

threefortyfour

Excerpt from gallery enabling sound design for exhibition spaces at the Miraikan Museum, Tokyo, Japan. The themes were; The Genome, Robotic Surgery and Drug Research


discrete machines

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