Tuesday 25 October 2016

JOHN CAGE, REINHOLD FRIEDL - Complete Song Books


Along with Column One's Boiling Pool this is shaping up to be one of my favourite albums of the year. The brevity of the tracks on each may tell you something about my decreasing attention span, or that I consider less to be more in 2016 as we all rush headlong, lemming-like, towards the edge of the data cliff and over into the eternal Beyond of absolute info-induced insanity/nothingness, whereby our saturated brains will act as no more than receivers whilst our senses and rational capabilities, becoming obsolete, render us zombie-like...

...it's already happened? Oh god...

REINHOLD FRIEDL and RASHAD BECKER take on John Cage's 'songs' which, yes, you guessed it, are not songs in the traditional sense, but exercises in sounds made by the voice and here treated electronically by Becker, who also adds other sound effects. 'Simply perform as you had decided to, before you knew what would happen' suggested Cage, in a typically cryptic fashion, thus allowing interpreters freedom, although their are 'instructions' such as this one for no.61...

Solo-for-Voice-No.61

...whilst it would be difficult to produce the sound of a wren's wings opening (of course, that's the joke), Friedl and Becker do include the birdsong, naturally. 'It's one of many treats here', I was going to say, but to highlight anything, to separate one song from another seems as absurd as the whole exercise will to those bound by preconceptions of what 'music' must be; in other words, people who refuse to acknowledge the brilliant, prankster, conceptual mind of Cage. 

Reading Cage's instructions adds to the listening experience and you can do that here and here. Some scores are akin to works of art in themselves and like the sounds link back to the earliest Dada experiments in typography and vocalising. On no.82 we hear someone, Friedl presumably, swallowing liquid. I do hope it was from a 'Paris cafe cognac glass' for absolute authenticity according to Cage's instructions.


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