Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst and others. There is a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.
 
Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. The plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their surreal interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 

 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack, in the version embedded below, was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music.
 

 
Thank you Vanessa Weinberg!

 
Rarely heard live recording of a John Cage and Sun Ra performance from 1986. It was recorded at Sideshows by the Sea, the last surviving freak show along the Coney Island boardwalk. A carnival barker and a snake lady hawked the show outside and there was free pizza served, too. Can you imagine?!?! This concert took place on June 8th and pressed as a limited edition LP the following year.

Tyler Fisher writes on Sputnik Music:

Due to variety and musicality, Sun Ra heavily defeats John Cage on the performance. He opens the concert with a huge, furious, dissonant keyboard performance. The crowd cheers wildly and the spacey synthesizer sounds jump all around the range of the instrument and jump around in styles just as quickly. Elements of jazz flow in and suddenly a huge, orchestral sounding chord will overpower the recording instrument. The synth voices change frequently from a typical square lead voice to a bell sound to a synthesized voice. Sun Ra uses his range of voices perfectly, creating a heavy, metallic sound at some points which makes an even more frenzied sound to the already insane harmonic structure. He manages to jump from the most beautiful chords to the most dissonance in a matter of seconds. His first appearance goes on for 7 and a half minutes, garnering tumultuous applause from the audience. He later closes out the first half of the performance with a much more eastern tinged movement. Just when his playing couldn’t get any darker, he spends most of the second half making ambient, creepy noises. Much in the manner of the Mars Volta, he goes off without any sense of time or rhythm, creating whatever comes to mind. However, he lets the ambience slowly build into huge, crashing chords of either beauty or dissonance. Everything is going somewhere.

John Cage is just the opposite. His performance is much simpler. He merely steps up to a microphone and makes strange vocal noises. Cage’s voice sounds akin to an aging Johnny Cash. However, Cage never steps over saying more than 3 or 4 syllables at a time. He takes minute breaks before starting another few indistinguishable syllables. Of course, he relies on his “chance music” theory to get away with the minutes of silence. Sure, it’s a profound and intriguing idea, but it just gets old after a few minutes, especially when the recording buzzes in the background due to the quality. In truth, Cage is reciting excerpts from one of his poems in some strange language, known as Empty Words IV. However, who knows what he is saying? Luckily, Sun Ra saves the performance on the second half by filling in where Cage leaves silence. He fills with light, dainty keyboard lines way up high on the keys. He lets Cage have the show, not doing much of anything, but neither Cage still does less than Sun Ra. Cage proves a better composer and philosopher than a performer. Regardless, the crowd eats everything up, probably being mostly young, profound college kids themselves.

You can download John Cage meets Sun Ra at Adventure-Equation.

Read the back of the album cover, here.
 

 
Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog

 
Composer Milton Babbitt died yesterday at the ripe old age of 94. I have always adored his piece Ensembles For Synthesizer, composed from 1962-64 on the guargantuan RCA Mark II synthesizer for which he was an official composer/consultant. I include that piece here from the 1967 album New Electronic Music from Leaders of the Avant-Garde which is a toweringly great slab of classic experimental music. Seek it out !
 

Part One
 

Part Two
 

 
And because it’s so totally great, here is the John Cage piece from the same LP: Variations 2 as performed with brutal precision on amplified piano by the great David Tudor.
 

Part One
 

Part Two
 

Part Three

  Cage Against the Machine..‘4.33’ Mr. Scruff Remix! by Mr Scruff

Three silent cheers for Dave and Julie Hilliard! They’re the couple behind Cage Against the Machine, the grassroots Facebook effort to bring a new recording of composer John Cage’s famous “silent” piece 4’33” to #1 in the UK charts this Christmas over whichever bullshit song wins the UK TV pop contest X Factor this year.

The Hilliards named CATM in hat-tip to last year’s successful Facebook campaign to boost Rage Against the Machine’s raw 1992 tune “Killing in the Name” into the Christmas #1 over whatever crappy tune won the ’09 X Factor. This year, indie-ish artists like Imogen Heap, Fyfe Dangerfield, Scroobius Pip, The Kooks and Heaven 17 popped into the studio to not play their instruments, and the single will be released by the Wall of Sound label. And instead of one single charity, the proceeds from sales of the new 4’33” benefits FOUR. Factor that in, Simon Cowell, you tit-head.

The race to #1 starts December 13. Here’s where you can sign up for a reminder and chart-eligible link to download the single.

Here’s an added plus: the wonderful conceptual flexibility behind 4’33” has allowed CATM to solicit remixes from both some innovative producers and you:

So go to it, give us a four minute thirty three second audio snapshot of your life. Record it on your phone, your Mac, PC, recorder, dictaphone, walkperson, whatever and share it here.

Check some out…
 

Latest tracks by RemixAgainstTheMachine

 
This is nothing too profound, in fact it’s rather goofy and quite amusing to see how giddy the two Johns are around each other, but I’ve never seen this before and have no idea as to its provenance. Anybody?

 
On new years day 1984 25 million people (myself included) throughout the world tuned in to PBS to watch video art pioneer Nam June Paik’s pleasantly shambolic live experiment Good Morning, Mr. Orwell featuring the likes of John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Glass, Salvador Dali, Laurie Anderson and other usual suspects. All hosted by a bemused and mildy annoying George Plimpton. The full version of this was once up on the mighty Ubuweb but has mysteriously disappeared, so I bring you as many fragments of said program as I could find. Watching this in retrospect it comes off as perhaps the last 60’s style large scale “happening” featuring some of that era’s major hitters and is of course very quaint seeming “We’re linking New York to Paris on live TV !”, still very enjoyable to watch.
 
John Cage/Joseph Beuys

 
A ton more after the jump…

 
Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Here’s the late, great Joey Ramone doing a smashing job of singing the beautiful early John Cage piece The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs which is itself based on text by James Joyce. This comes from an Italian Cage tribute LP from the early 90’s that I was previously unaware of which also features a ton of other luminaries such as DM super-pal Ann Magnuson, David Byrne, Debbie Harry, John Zorn, etc.
 

 
Hear Robert Wyatt and Cathy Berberian’s versions of the same song after the jump…

 
Cathy Berberian (1925 – 1983) was an American mezzo-soprano vocalist, based in Italy. She was known as a proponent of both avant garde and contemporary vocal music, moving during her career from debuting one of John Cage’s major works, his Aria with Fontana Mix composition, in 1958, to covering Beatles songs. Cathy Berberian was an opera diva who never took herself too seriously, probably the hippest lady in classical music of her day.

In 1949, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study music at the Milan Conservatory, where she would meet her husband, the great composer Luciano Berio, who would write music for her during their marriage and afterwards. (His Requies: in memoriam Cathy composition premiered the year after her death.) Of his wife, Berio said “The versatility of her mind was astonishing.” Aside from her great vocal gifts, she was also a gourmet chef, a fashion model and she translated Woody Allen’s book Getting Even into Italian.

Sylvano Bussotti, Hans Werner Henze, William Walton, and Igor Stravinsky also composed works for Cathy Berberian’s voice and she’s name-checked in the Steely Dan song “Your Gold Teeth” on Countdown to Ecstasy: “Even Cathy Berberian knows / There’s one roulade she can’t sing.”

But for all of her high-falutin’ musical and intellectual pedigrees, Berberian was equally known as someone with a sense of humor. Her Revolution album of Beatles covers is a unique and quirky collection indeed, but she really ties together her pop and avant garde inclinations beautifully in her own composition, “Stripsody,” a short vocal piece where she uses comic book exclamations and sounds (Words like “Boing!”“Vrrop vrrop” appear on the sheet music) to get the point across, sounding very much like a comical version of Cage’s Fontana Mix.
 

 
Via Manooshi, memes, memories… Timestamp

John and Yoko - $1200

John Cage and Merce Cunningham - $800

Harold and Maude - Sold
 
Here’s a fantastic collection of wedding cake toppers by seattle based artist Mike Leavitt. It’s totally worth a look. From Mike Leavitt’s website:

No longer shall little random plastic people rule the top of your cake. Why suffer the cruelty of impersonal sculpture poisoning the cake frosting you lick from your fingers? Weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, retirement, online bingo… The cake topper figurines can be of any person in any style. Some ‘cake toppers’ aren’t even the bride and groom, just plain loved ones. The finished figures are protected and sealed from any frosting surface damage. For further protection, they aren’t posable with the multiple body part pieces like the action figures. These are finely crafted sculptures that will be enjoyed as long as the union of love that they honor.

(via The Jailbreak)

 
The New Yorker‘s great Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century) alerts us to the first major museum exhibition in years devoted to “arch-magus of the musical avant-garde,” John Cage.  Unfortunately, though, it’s happening not in America (nor is it scheduled to), but in Barcelona at its Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA).

The Anarchy of Silence?

Check out an online archive of John Cage’s Indeterminacy stories here, and on YouTube below. Stereophile has this to say:

The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage. “A wonderfully curious way to hear stories.”

Check out Indeterminacy on CD here.