IMA | lab No. 5

The project »Williams Mix Extended«, which composers/musicians Werner Dafeldecker (A/D) and Valerio Tricoli (I) are working on in the context of their guest fellowships at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics (IMA), offers a new interpretation of John Cage’s piece »Williams Mix,« which was originally written for cassette tape in 1952. In that the project views Cage’s original text from a contemporary perspective, it also includes the relationship between tape recorder technology and today’s digital practices. In the new version, the version by John Cage, which was produced from countless distinct tiny snippets of cassette tapes in extremely detailed work, is extended to 46 minutes using 600 different sounds produced by Dafeldecker und Tricoli. In the talk, the guest composers will present their project (also in the context of MaerzMusik 2012, performance at ZKM 2012). Thus, open for discussion is how and whether early tape recorder concepts can await new perspectives from today’s methods, and the aesthetic inspiration that arises from these early concepts.