Delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

You can hear an audio recording of the lecture here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature.

Includes two texts by John Cage and the text On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Fanal – a recondite word for lighthouse or torch, and a cognate in German and English – began as Kai Althoff’s solo step outside of his long running and in certain spheres abundantly cherished (and in certain spheres perfectly uncomprehended) duo with Stephan Abry. The first Fanal album is a primarily instrumental collection bolstered and upholstered with muscular synthesizer arpeggiations and martial drum machines. After Workshop’s intimacies, Fanal’s relative coldness made the project seem as distant and magisterial as the secluded castle pictured on the album cover (not to mention the sublimity of the castle’s manicured grounds).

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

A founding member of the radical electronic improvising group Musica Elettronica Viva, since the early 1970s Curran has developed an idiosyncratic body of solo work that occupies a unique position in the post-Cageian experimental tradition.

Natural History consists entirely of field recordings from Curran’s archive, arranged as a series of ‘still lifes’, sometimes layered, but without any additional processing. Sounds recorded over the course of nearly twenty years, at Curran’s home in Rome or while traveling: constructions sites, insects, children’s toys, a piano being tuned, foghorns, lovemaking, a singing neighbour.

You can listen to the album here or purchase the digital version here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Program produced for the production of The Lords and Ladies of Little Egypt at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 13 – 18 September, 1988.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.