Synesthetech

Last Friday, four new pieces of mine premiered in a group exhibition (photos here) at the Robbins Gallery on the University of Michigan campus. One of these is a sound piece entitled Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1, a remix project melding ideas about curation, parody, remix culture, repackaging, experimental music, and time. The notes about the piece (available inside an empty CD case in the show, as seen here) are reproduced below:

I’ve often thought that if experimental music didn’t take so long to listen to, more people might be willing to give it a try. It’s with that hope that I present to you the first installment of Monsters of Experimental Music, a
compilation consisting of the works of world famous, highly regarded experimental composers - the original hits by the original stars - but condensed (without alteration of pitch) to a more reasonable listening time: four minutes, which Apple, Inc. has determined is the average length of a “song” (you know how all their ads for iPods say they hold up to 10,000 songs? Read the fine print - that’s if all your songs last only four minutes). Most of the songs on this collection were originally nearly thirty minutes in length, some of them significantly longer. A few of them are only fifteen minutes long, but that’s still pretty long. So here you go, experimental music in an easy-to-digest format of four minute free mp3s. And if your favorite song by your favorite artist isn’t on here, you know, either wait for another installment or just deal with it, because that’s how these compilation things always work anyway, right? I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please seek out (and purchase) the works in their original format.

• Download Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1 (134MB zip file of mp3s)

Listen to three sample tracks…

Eliane Radigue’s Adnos 1 (in four minutes):

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Tony Conrad’s Joan of Arc (in four minutes):

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Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (in four minutes):

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Complete track listing:

1. John Cage’s Music of Changes 2 (in four minutes)
2. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops 1 (in four minutes)
3. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (in four minutes)
4. Terry Riley’s In C (in four minutes)
5. Eliane Radigue’s Adnos 1 (in four minutes)
6. Tony Conrad’s Joan of Arc (in four minutes)
7. Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (in four minutes)
8. Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns? (in four minutes)
9. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie 1 (in four minutes)
10. Christina Kubisch and Fabrizio Plessi’s Tempo Liquido 2 (in four minutes)
11. Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial / Lift (in four minutes)
12. Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis (in four minutes)
13. Rhys Chatham’s Two Gongs (in four minutes)
14. Meredith Monk’s Three Heavens and Hells (in four minutes)
15. Francisco Lopez’s Live At 3feetofftheground (in four minutes)
16. Phil Niblock’s Ten Auras (in four minutes)

Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1 by John Kannenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.