Meditation Buddha Amoghasiddhi and His counterpart Green Tara have the wisdom quality of All-accomplishing Wisdom. In this music Of Fearlessness his hand gesture is represented as a mantra - His Gesture Of Fearlessness. This is heard  81 times throughout. The main melody in section 2 of Amoghasiddhi is transformed into an always repeating ostinato in Of Fearlessness. A third musical layer represents the ground of being.

Michael Hugh Dixon - Of Fearlessness (Mix#1 20200204)

Utdrag Krise 1

Live recording of the premier, St. Pauls Hall, University of Huddersfield, 18th April, 1996. Concert by YON Ensemble.

Floating Poles begins by setting up a regular movement from sparse music to a more compressed equivalent. This flow occurs around ‘poles’, defined harmonically. Later the poles float away from their fixed positions, dragging the associated material with them, leading to an overlap between blocks. The holes that result are filled by low echoes of the original material. Floating Poles was written for Stephen Altoft and first performed by him in Huddersfield on 18th April 1996.

James Saunders is a composer with an interest in group behaviours and decision making. He performs in the duo Parkinson Saunders. He runs the Open Scores Lab at Bath Spa University. See www.james-saunders.com for more information.

Floating Poles by James Saunders

I recorded this in the early 1990's (James Saunders used his equipment), and it was on Chris Villar's website for a long time. I also got to perform it in London at a related book launch some years later.

A Very Short Trumpet Piece    

A Very Short Trumpet Piece by Morton Feldman

For piano (4 hands)
Composed in 1990-1991
Live performance by Darius Paymai and Reuben Esterhuizen
Goodenough College, London
25 June 2024

Piano Duets

first performance

United Instruments of Lucilin:

Olivier Sliepen, alto saxophone
Sophie Deshayes, flute
Danielle Hennicot, viola
Guy Frisch, orgalitho

Lucilin in the City #18 - Sounding Stones
Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle Luxembourg - Natur Musée
February 11, 2025

Dante Boon - Six people on a sailboat (2024)

Flat Pack Music takes an architectural approach to building a composition. Pre-composed panels are arranged, Juxtaposed and altered to build an emotive and surreal sonic experience. The flat character of the sonic materials invites the listener to listen carefully to each object and build relationships between the different materials.

Flat Pack Music

Social Discipline is incredibly excited to present the adventurous life of Jeff Perkins, a hidden gem of the American underground.

This massive five-hour podcast, recorded in Berlin in June 2024, explores his fascinating journey—no one else can claim to have performed for Yoko Ono and John Cage, created legendary light shows with The Velvet Underground, Sly and the Family Stone, and The Germs, programmed the first Kenneth Anger retrospective in L.A., and encountered both Charles Manson and members of the satanic cult The Process.

Jeff joined the military in the 1960s and was stationed in Tokyo, where he met Yoko Ono in the early ’60s. He began performing some of her pieces there and later in New York. Perkins also filmed Ono’s classic Film No. 4 (Bottoms), a Fluxus work. His first independent contribution to the Fluxfilm Anthology was Shout. He was at the heart of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene, surrounded by figures like La Monte Young, Jack Smith, and Angus MacLise.

In January 1967, Perkins moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a programmer at Cinematheque 16. Influenced by Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, he began producing powerful light shows and collaborated with bands throughout the ’60s and ’70s—ranging from The Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Grateful Dead to the punk scene with X and The Germs. He even refused to do a show for the Sex Pistols due to a disagreement with the promoter. Perkins was a close friend of Terry Jennings and, in fact, entrusted his archive to La Monte Young. While in L.A., he was neighbors with the artist James Turrell.

In 1980, Perkins moved back to New York and started a loft project just a block away from Ground Zero, reminiscent of George Maciunas’ artist loft spaces. To finance it, he worked as a cab driver. He remained deeply connected to cinema, particularly through Anthology Film Archives, where he proposed a John Cassavetes retrospective to Jonas Mekas and later became a manager. In 1994, Nam June Paik—who coined the term “The Fluxus cab driver” for Perkins—invited him to perform at Anthology Film Archives in a homage to Yoko Ono. His performance, Butthead, was a great success. His legendary loft became a hub where one could easily encounter visiting filmmakers like Pedro Costa and Albert Serra.

In 1989, Perkins organized a series of lectures at Anthology Film Archives with Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad, reuniting the two after years of estrangement. Flynt would become a lifelong friend. In 2008, during the financial crisis, when I lived with Jeff, we organized a series of four-hour lectures by Flynt in the loft’s kitchen, focusing on the crisis and communist economics. I vividly remember Tony Conrad attending one of them in his elegant pajamas.

Perkins has directed two critically acclaimed films—one on abstract painter Sam Francis and another on the legendary Fluxus figure George Maciunas. He is currently finishing editing a film about Henry Flynt in Berlin.

This podcast concludes with an excerpt from his piece Movies for the Blind, which features recordings of conversations with passengers from his time as a New York cab driver.

SD44 w/Jeff Perkins "The Fluxus Cab Driver"

Composed for and is about the ensemble Birthday Present (Sam Leith Taylor, Paul Zaba, James Alexandropolous-McEwan, Rob Nettleship and Patrick Ellis), played by Birthday present (excluding Rob Nettleship) at the Casa da Música, Porto as part of the Harmos Plural Festival 2015.

2019 Work 41

Freeman Edwards

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