Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: There’s a great moment in the recorded conversations of composers John Cage and Morton Feldman when they discuss a trip to the beach. Feldman isn’t pleased by the way transistor radios let music, and sound in general, appear in places it hadn’t previously. Cage jokes that having composed music that involves multiple radios, whenever he hears them he thinks, “[W]ell, they’re just playing my piece.” You can listen to it in the first 2.5 minutes of this excerpt:

youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo 8

Step 2: Think about Cage and Feldman’s conversation, in particular about the idea of what is and isn’t a sonic “intrusion” in our lives.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that reproduces or otherwise suggests the sympathetic (i.e., non-intrusive) commingling of radio and everyday sound.
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So I first listened to the opening of the discussion of Feldman and Cage.
And I must admit if there is one thing I hate is when somebody brings a radio on the beach ;) I rather enjoy the sound of the waves.

But I always love the idea of 'scrolling through small segments of music and sounds', whether it is listening to shortwave radio, or listening in the evening at my balcony to sounds outside, or small segments of audio in a film.
I think 'Rear Window' from Alfred Hitchcock has such great transitions of music and sounds, and 'Himmel uber Berlin' from Wim Wenders has that too.

I just recorded some sounds at my balcony and music from my old radio and sounds from a radio app in my mobile where you can scroll the world, zooming in and out of sounds, and WebSDR. Then, finally I added some chords on my keyboard with a sampled strings sound. Play on soft volume