Laura Kuhn talks with Brian Brandt, who founded Mode Records with its first recording in 1984 of John Cage’s Etudes Borealis, in a 2-LP set. Brandt has long had the intention of recording all of Cage’s work, and at 54 volumes in its present Cage Edition, Mode has produced more commercial recordings of Cage’s music than any other label. Mode’s “curated” aspect is important and has led to a loyal following – this is not a label run by committee, but one built on Brian’s personal vision of producing fine recordings that are not necessarily a part of current mainstream musical fashion. We talk not only about both Brandt and Mode’s beginnings in the industry, but also about the many challenges facing the independent record producer today. And we listen to a bit of one of both of our favorite Mode releases – John Cage’s Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979; Mode 28/29, No. 6).

All Things Cage is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!