Tonight's program is devoted to Christian Marclay's marvelous More Encores, a playful and refreshing recording project first released on 10" vinyl record in Germany in 1988, and later, in the late 1990s, on a CD released by ReR Megacorp that became available throughout the world. Marclay has been experimenting, composing, and performing with phonograph records since 1979. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video, and music. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to 8 turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards, etc. More Encores was originally released as a 10" vinyl record on No Man's Land (Germany) in 1988, composed entirely of records after whom each of its 12 tracks is titled. "John Cage" is a recording of a collage made by cutting slices from several records and gluing them back together into a single disc. In all other places, the records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables and recorded analog with the use of overdubbing. A hand-crank gramophone was used in "Louis Armstrong." More Encores is a classic slice of primal "Plunderphonia," the natural companion to John Oswald's suppressed "Plunderphonics" masterpiece, featuring a series of viciously beautiful vinyl collages from this important and influential sound sculptor and turntable terrorist. Other tracks "played with by Marclay" are based on the music of Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg, Maria Callas, Frederic Chopin, Martin Denny, Arthur Ferrante & Louis Teicher, Fred Frith, Jimi Hendrix, Johann Strauss, John Zorn, and Christian Marclay himself. 

Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer who holds both American and Swiss nationality. He has cited the influence primarily of John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Vito Acconci, and his work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as music instruments to create sound collages, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of Turntablism." Jurek goes on to say that "... while many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art — and it is art, make no mistake — writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious." Marclay's own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independent of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.

"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!