Dear Alan and all, I love your approach to the idea of sound, and to sound itself. True, bookliche researche often does make its own room in one's head, one that doesn't necessarily communicate with all the other rooms, and the door to which can get very trickily elusive just when you need it. It's also true there's never total silence. I used to like to go to Anzo Borrego, deep deep desert, get way out in it, and at midday, when it's usually really still and everything is sleeping, there are no (none) sounds coming from anything around, and you do hear your breathing (quite loud) and your heartbeat/bloodflow (quieter) as well as various kinds of tinnitus, depending. Maybe the same thing can happen out at sea--not that many environments can get that quiet. The idea of everything having its own sound that can be released is also quite wonderful. The thing about such sounds as performance is that they may exist as themselves, which is different from existing as something that is intentional. The notion of performance is tightly linked to the notion of intention, the (artist, musician, performer) having an intention to make a communication of some sort to an audience, a communication in a language that is in large part mutually agreed upon, although some digression from expectations is, usually, expected (oddly enough--). The radicality of Cage is not so much, for me, in relation to music as language per se as it is in relation to this idea of intention. He was groping, I think, for a kind of "performance" that could be about the sound itself, with no further need for meaning or intention (hence the importance of Buddhism) and the frustration of his audiences (also justified in its way) was that of people who had entered into the implied contract of performance and who had been betrayed, because Cage's presentations were not meant to satisfy the terms of that contract. So what can be done with sound besides performing it in that way, entering thus into the implied contract of performance? Perhaps your reluctance to show work has something to do with your wariness @ this implied contract, or your suspicion that it would not allow you to relate to your sounds or marks in the way you wish. One can collect sounds, allowing them to simply be themselves. This rather reduces one's ability to make them public, though. One can describe them. Description is one way to use intention in the service of the loved object, without insisting that the loved object surrender itself to meaning--in the translation to language, carrying the physicality of the sound or other loved object into the code of language, transmitting it in this way, that prestidigitation, becomes the performance. And it suits the implied contract quite well. See Basho's "Road to the North" or whatever it's called, or Annie Dillard when she's not being profound (it's her damned insistence on palpating her subjects for meaning that makes her work, finally, irritating. The use of the things of this world as propaganda for the divine is unholy.) One can discover sounds as part of documentation of what the things that make the sound would be up to anyway. Narratives w/o human motivation--that could be interesting. A more radicalized version of the very charming Fischli and Weiss parlor-trick. One must somehow, though, if these are to be public, provide a context that allows people to pay attention, that justifies time, or they will be unable to pay attention. And perhaps it's not possible to give people these sounds. Perhaps they must be found. Perhaps they would, will, be overwhelmed or masked, transformed, by the significance of the gesture of presentation. Well, this is probably as bad as a thick book. But the subject is wonderfully intriguing. AK
