John Cage (1912-1992)
Full Albums / Full-length Recordings Various Lectures & Interviews Kenneth Patchen & John Cage - The city wears a slouch hat (1942) John Cage Considered: An Introduction (March 22, 1965) John Cage / Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings I - V (1966-67) Mureau (1972) Nova Musicha n. 1 (1974) Columbus College, Georgia (Spring 1975) Obscure No. 5, John Cage & Jan Steele (1976) Cheap Imitation (1976) Empty Words (Part III) (1977) Il Treno Di John Cage (John Cage's Train) (1978) John Cage Meets Sun Ra (1986) Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else (1989) Norton Lectures (1988-89) Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) (1991) A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute (1993) John Cage - A Firenze (1992) A Dip in the Lake (2003) A Dip in the Lake (2003) BBC Prom 47: Cage Centenary Celebration (2012)
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by Steven Craig Hickman
As I sit here listening to Éliane Radigue’s Triptych Trilogie de la mort, the droning of the waves slashing sonically, the winds riding the capped plunge of an acoustic universe, the hum of throbbing black noise hovering like a ghost in the shadows – the coming and going of some forgotten electrical footprint in my mind, I think about when it all ended. Did it really end? Did I imagine it would be this way? Didn’t we all think it would be something else, something different? As if difference meant not the Same? But of course we were all wrong. But isn’t that the way of thought, error prone, full of blanks, believing one could actually gain a foothold on reality? Find in the gaps, those cracks in time a way through to the Real? As if language and being truly were one as Parmenides hoped. But that’s the drivel of an old man’s brain, less than nothing; inconclusive. An oscillation in the void between two poles of indecision, when the brain in its blind process calculates one’s desires like a master magician, guides one toward the appropriate door, nudges one to make the inevitable choice, the only choice available, reckoned? Then it happens, the unexpected. The thing not looked for, because it was unknown, and even unthinkable, ineffable. Pulsating, speed-death, the circles, eddies, the vibrating air… I hear it now, haptically – the nervous irradiating force of the abyss. It envelopes me now; it’s palpable. I thought I would be gone by now? The ringing, as if the planets were clamoring against space, empty space. Can that be? Is there sound in the great desert of the emptiness? They say it’s already over, the apocalypse, like an event long expected that finally arrives, an unexpected guest; maybe even like a country exiting into its own bleak past, trying to recapture a way of life, a way back into its primal youth, looking for a truth it lost along the way. Like a child dancing on the edge of the sea, in the waves, her dark hair tremulous and free in the salt-spray wind. But its all too late for that now, we’re too late for that, we who waited too long to act, to do anything… now we all sit here in the dark listening to the dark sing.
The Prose Proem is taken from:
Lionel Williams (performing and creating as Vinyl Williams) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Over the past decade, he has released three full-length albums and several EPs of celestial psychedelic pop tinged with a pinch of shoegaze and a healthy dose of hypnotic kraut rhythms. The otherworldly music is always accompanied by equally transportive artwork and videos, which Williams himself creates. When we spoke briefly about how he connects the two worlds—the visual and the audible—he shared, “They’re interrelated in every fathomable way. They come from the same place, Alnilam [the center star of the constellation Orion, meaning ‘string of pearls’].”
Williams is currently working on a followup to last year’s brilliant LP Brunei. The record is set to be released sometime mid next year, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait for new music. In fact, he recently launched a Bandcamp-exclusive subscription service titled Astrocracy that delivers unreleased music and visuals (affectionately called V-Sides) to his subscribers every month. The artist describes the service as “a non-prophet subscription group where members can download all of the Vinyl Williams music catalog, as well as 3D assets from the celestial worlds I’ve created.” To celebrate the launch of Astrocracy, we explore some of Williams’s favorite Bandcamp artists. “Some of the artists are my closest friends who have influenced me heavily, and others make more avant-garde music that I regularly listen to when I’m working on videos or artwork,” he says. An eclectic, spiritual selection indeed
Si Istwa
Space Minus Distance
“Si Istwa appear as the fullest embodiment of extra-terrestrial music transposed into the human audio spectrum. Her only release Space Minus Distance came out on Flexible Records (imprint of Terrible Records) last year. It was pressed on flexi-vinyl, a pretty cool new medium, coming with extra artifact-ish mystical artwork made by the artist. Listen to this on a drive to Ojai, CA when you’re in one of those vehicles where the seats point in reverse out the back window.”
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