Program #26, October 26 2000: Cacophonies.

How appropriate that for a show displaying such signifiers of order -- this is the half-year mark for Prisms, and it is the last time that the date and the sequence number of the show will match -- the theme was built around the notion of cacophony, which often unfortunately suggests a fatal lack of order. But as regards works of art, this would be paradoxical on so many levels (an easy one: simply to record a cacophony is to have assigned some boundaries and compositional process to it, even if only to deploy it into some territory of the sonically-unacceptable-to-whomever), because so many sounds that are cacophonous at first blush often conceal -- but then go on to display -- a deep inner beauty. The purpose of this particular show was to explore that notion by working through a variety of pieces exemplifying different types of (superficial) cacophony: from the "ethereal tonescreech" of Radulescu's Inner Time II to Lou Reed's proto-industrial/electronica-cum-practical-joke (or was it the other way around?) Metal Machine Music, we again see that beauty is more than skin (or, if you will: eardrum) deep.