Cage Open

  To Cafe Oto in Dalston last week for an evening of compositions for electronics, tapes and radios by John Cage, performed by the ensemble Langham Research Centre. A wonderfully blurry tension between aleatory and structural elements permeated the music, bleeding in the Music for Five Radios into a caustic soundclash of contemporary antinomies: celebrity gossip against catastrophising headlines, grime and bashment against classical and MOR, banal jingle against dissonant interference.
   The performance was part of a series of events for Cage's centennial and showed how colossally ahead of his time he was. Equally, in LRC's hands, his work has never sounded more contemporary, with the open-ended, chance-determined nature of the scores meaning that each performance is unique and of its moment. For example, the version of Fontana Mix I'd previously heard made it seem like a precursor of musique concrete, whereas LRC's looser interpretation added a female vocalist improvising a kind of tongue-in-cheek sprechstimme as she wandered through the audience to disconcerting effect.
   Here's Cage himself, wryly playing with his own image as an 'experimental composer':