Program #64, 2 August 2001: Unthemed.

No continuous segues this week -- I decided to give the animals a break. Instead, the organizing rubric for this program started off being something along the lines of "pieces from discs I recently acquired and have been itching to play". So, that's how we got Scelsi, Ligeti, and Feldman in the first and third hours, along with the piece from the Ken Nordine disc I donated to the station for the Grateful Dead folks to mess with. All damn fine stuff.

However -- even as I was plucking Otomo Yoshihide's The Night Before the Death of the Sampling Virus from my mailbox, and reading his liner note that "[t]he purpose of this virus project is to lay bare the act of sampling itself, not to create a musical work" -- my mind was already starting to wrap around the notion that maybe it was time to do something I'd been considering for a while: a live mix. (Fair disclosure note: especially I'd very recently been to, and inspired by, a nifty rebreather gig.) Virus is explicitly designed to be mixed, remixed, tinkered with, and subjected to creative reformulation. As Otomo goes on: "When you play this CD, you should be sure to utilise your CD player to its maximum ability. This may be to set it on random play mode to shuffle its contents, or to adjust a given track on repeat mode and play it over and over. If you have a second player you might simultaneously play it alongside relaxation music, or you might rub grease onto it for an erratic playback effect, or listen to it fast-forwarding... all ideas are acceptable. What is important to remember is that the user is the one to decide how they are to be utilised."

Well. I haven't gotten an opening that good since my last plea bargain opportunity, so I set to work organizing my plan. No grease was involved, and the KBCS CD players didn't have shuffle capability, but I did make up two temporary minidisc copies (now erased) of Otomo's 77 tracks' worth of "viruses" to simulate the same effect. I also found not one but two nice albums of traditional Japanese music for "relaxation," and by the end of my planning also decided to throw in a copy of "Sukiyaki" on LP (frequently subjected to turntable manipulation), portable radios randomly tuned back and forth across the AM and FM bands and routed through my mic, and parts of the first half of the program on tape. Then, once 1am arrived, I just kind of let it flow. Too much fun! and especially rewarding since it's the first time I'd ever done anything like this. I won't repeat the experiment often, as it would probably wear out its welcome with many listeners in fairly short order -- but I will definitely be biding my time until it's time to do it again.