Program #129, January 16 2003: Unthemed.

I hadn't done any live collage work for some time, but I'd been fooling with an idea that I came up with in the final days of my last job -- I figured out that the second Conet Project disc goes very well with the Ensemble ST-X performance of Iannis Xenakis' musical depiction of political demonstration Kraanerg, both time-wise and sound-wise. I've put them together at home several times since, in whole or in part. The juxtaposition between the two discs became the backbone of this collage.

Musing in various ways about what is sure to be the upcoming war brought some sound sources into the mix. Many have been a little bit nostalgic for the Cold War recently -- not because the Cold War was good in itself, but at least the Us v. Them business was more clear and understandable then -- and wrapping my mind around that feeling made me think of the old Radio Free Europe ads from my early childhood (late '60s, early '70s) that included The Drifters "On Broadway", and from there to REM's years-later take on remembering those ads. Noam Chomsky's always good for a few good political sound bites, and various shows around the radio spectrum (Mike Webb's local talk show, George Noory's national one, and sundry pop music stations) provided useful sonic nuggets, many of them small-p and large-P political, as well. I threw in a couple of bits from Otomo Yoshihide's The Night Before the Death of the Sampling Virus, featured in the last collage program, as a bit of sourdough; bits from the Marclay/Otomo collaboration added new Otomo-dough. EHI's UFO-abduction-inspired piece and the Blade Runner soundtrack excerpts added some even creepier memes, while the Portsmouth Sinfonia's mutated take on some Pete Townshend anthems connected with the scandal du jour while adding an absurdly comic touch to the whole mess. Finally, Bob Seger's Main Street -- which I'd accidentally heard cruising around the radio the previous weekend, at a moment when I could appreciate the wistfulness behind the pop -- connected back to The Drifters via name-play (Main Street <--> Broadway) and via the sense of nostalgia discussed above, to the current sense of worry about the war (how many Main Streets will be affected by it, here or in Iraq?), to the absurd (and yet somehow essential) contrast between Conet's mysterious messages, Kraanerg's impassioned masses, and Seger's fundamentally American pop-culture depiction of longing and youth (innocence?) recalled.

That collage pretty much wore me out, but I was still thinking (in a looming, foreboding way) about the war to come, and just wanting it to go away, both sonically and thematically -- so I dialled up Riley's ebullient, healing Salome Dances For Peace for the rest of the program. Could Riley's resuscitated, re-purposed Salome help us avoid the worst of our incipient conflict? I certainly hope so. But if not, at least playing the music couldn't hurt.