Laura Kuhn converses with Pascale Georgiev and Kingston Trinder, founding principals of Atelier Éditions, an independent publishing house and creative consultancy established in 2015. Developing collaborative projects across disciplines, Atelier Éditions offers curatorial and editorial consultation, creative direction, content creation, and print innovation, and authors archival monographs, contemporary art books, catalogues raisonné, and exploratory printed matter. 

Among their most recent books is John Cage: A Mycological Foray, developed in collaboration with the John Cage Trust, which draws readers across the idiosyncratic, mushroom-suffused landscape of John Cage. One encounters photographs, compositions, and contemplations, all in the same unexpected fashion one stumbles upon a variety of flora and fungi species while foraging for mushrooms. Volume I intermingles Cage’s mycological-oriented Indeterminacy stories with Diary excerpts and essays as well as the complete transcript of Cage’s text work, MUSHROOMS et Variationes (1983); Volume II offers the first-ever reproduction of Cage’s portfolio, Mushroom Book (1972), authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith.

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!