Music of Sound

The name RadiOM might sound like an FM station for meditation but is in fact an archive associated with the Other Minds site. No clearer? Well to quote: “Other Minds is a global New Music community where composers, students, and listeners discover and learn about innovative music by composers from all over the world” and the significance of those capital letters is indicative of the academic form of New Music to be found there. (Don’t get me wrong, thats not a criticism, merely an observation.)

RadiOM represents an amazing collection of archival recordings – heres just a few gems I found:

Computers and Art – John Lifton of London talks about his goal of realizing a cybernetic art work which will alter itself according to the spectators’ response to it. He talks with Don Buchla, who was at the time of this recording (Dec. 20, 1972), adapting his synthesizers to computer control, Richard Friedman, composer and programmer who helped design the Buchla program, and Charles Amirkhanian. Also included in this program, Lifton’s companion, American painter Pamela Zoline, talks about her recent work on the meta-set “Things in the World”.

A Stereophonic Journey Through India – ean-Louis Derche traveled to India in the summer of 1971 and faithfully recorded temple music in several out-of-the-way locations. Even more remarkable are his unusual recordings made in the streets of Benares, Chidambaran, Madurai, Tanjour, and Trivandrum. Listen to the sounds of rickshaws; a walk down a narrow street; craftsmen hammering metal; and the timeless flow of the Ganges River.

Ode To Gravity: Interspecies Music – For many years, Jim Nollman has explored the limits of human-animal communication. Along the way he has made some highly provocative tapes. In this program he talks with Charles Amirkhanian and introduces his recordings, including his now famous “Turkey Song”, in which human slide whistlers perform a call-and-response improvisation with the flock of gobblers at the Willy Bird Farm. Also heard is a recording of a colony of kangaroo rats and wild burros, made during a recent visit to Death Valley.