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Simon Scott, Mike Weis - For John Cage

from THESIS 15 - Mike Weis & Simon Scott by Mike Weis, Simon Scott,

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about

It's called "For John Cage" and well, it's inspired by John Cage's writing, teachings, philosophy, music, etc. My initial plan was to create a bunch of loops and record a piece with overdubs and use field recordings but while immersing myself in the teachings of John Cage for a Dharma talk that I gave earlier this year on mindful listening I had a change of heart. I decided to take a few sheets out of the old Cage playbook and drop the process down to the essentials. I decided to self-impose some limitations on this piece by only using a few objects, record it live in one take with no overdubs and no edits and to allow for incidental noises to inhabit the recording. John Cage was a pioneer on so many fronts in music and in thought and many of which have made an impact on me and continue to do so. He was the first to write music for percussion ensembles, he invented the prepared piano, he was the first to introduce indeterminacy in music composition, a pioneer in electro-acoustic music and non-standard use of musical instruments as well as non-musical objects to create sound. To Cage, all sound was music... "Music is continuous, it is only we who turn away." In a lot of ways he also introduced the idea of mindful listening, which is listening without a dualistic mind ("I've never heard a sound that I didn't like.").
With all this in mind I created my set-up - prepared tongue drum (I placed some fabric on top of the keys so I was unable to see what notes I was hitting to keep the tones of the rhythms unpredictable and chaotic, but to also soften the attack), prepared inverted cymbals with vibrating sex toys placed on top of them as well as a vibrating sex toy randomly bouncing between two Tibetan singing bowls and one Chinese tam-tam.
The rhythm that I played on the tongue drum is something I came up with after studying Korean Shaman music. I was having a difficult time remembering a traditional rhythm that I just learned for a "Samulnori" group . I was playing it incorrectly but the rhythm that resulted from this mistake is something that I always seem to fall into when I sit at a drum for some reason. I really like it because it is poly-rhythmic (two rhythms with two limbs and four when expanded to the kit to make one) but those different rhythms aren't really noticeable when played on a single drum with one tone but I noticed if I use it on a polyphonic instrument like the tongue drum the different rhythms are really prevalent.
I read an interview with Cage where he said someone mentioned to him the idea that every object has a spirit and that spirit can be heard when that object is set into vibration. This made him curious so he began knocking things around and listening to them ring out, "allowing the sounds to be themselves without being subservient to music. " The second half of this recording is my own experiment with this idea.

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from THESIS 15 - Mike Weis & Simon Scott, released November 14, 2018

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