Writes Galbraith, "John Cage Reflections is a broadcast work that combines spoken word with a live performance of Cage’s Cartridge Music. An actor inspired by Cage's speaking voice will read text adapted from a 1972 interview with Cage later published as “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society.” David Galbraith and James Galbraith will perform the Duet for Cymbal version of Cartridge Music. Since both the voice and electroacoustic parts will be composed using the Cartridge Music chance procedures involving graphical shapes and transparencies with dots, circles, lines and a circle marked like a stop-watch, the parts will at times overlap and compete volume-wise. Cartridge Music was included in the David Tudor 39th birthday concert in 1965, and on the program for a John Cage 75th birthday public performance in New York. “Cage was the first composer (with his Cartridge Music of 1960) to realize the potential of an electronic music made live in the concert hall,” wrote Michael Nyman in his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond."

Radius Sketchpad is an ongoing monthly program on WGXC 90.7-FM presented by the Chicago-based platform, Radius. This month features Damon Loren Baker's Distant, originally produced for Radius, and is followed by a playlist of works selected by the artist.

Wave Farm artist-in-residence David Galbraith (New York) hosts live from Wave Farm in Acra. The program will feature his contribution to 120 Hours for John Cage: John Cage Reflections.

Writes Galbraith, "John Cage Reflections is a broadcast work that combines spoken word with a live performance of Cage’s Cartridge Music. An actor inspired by Cage's speaking voice will read text adapted from a 1972 interview with Cage later published as “Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society.” David Galbraith and James Galbraith will perform the Duet for Cymbal version of Cartridge Music. Since both the voice and electroacoustic parts will be composed using the Cartridge Music chance procedures involving graphical shapes and transparencies with dots, circles, lines and a circle marked like a stop-watch, the parts will at times overlap and compete volume-wise. Cartridge Music was included in the David Tudor 39th birthday concert in 1965, and on the program for a John Cage 75th birthday public performance in New York. “Cage was the first composer (with his Cartridge Music of 1960) to realize the potential of an electronic music made live in the concert hall,” wrote Michael Nyman in his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond."

The Spotty Dog 440 Warren St Hudson Rinus Van Alebeek is one of the premier artists in the field of cassette based performances in contemporary music. In his own words: “Initially I worked with magnetic tape, because my Sony Walkman was too beautiful. When I had to decide to buy a multi tracker, my friends advised me to go on with analogue, because of the warmth of it. Over the years I found, bought and was given dictaphones, cassette players, walkmen and multi trackers. By now I know how to use them. Half way through the nineties, when still a writer 24 hours a day I changed my approach. Until then inspired by facts as you can find them in footnotes, I realised that every fact of life was the result of accident or an initial idea. This meant that I could make up persons and stories up to a degree that it became difficult to believe whether these persons and facts were for real or not. Call it para-realism. Years later, it is exactly this para-realistic quality that you can find at the heart of my works. Sounds from different parts of the world, pieces of conversations are brought together. Our mind wants to understand the things we see or hear in a cognitive way. One of the main attractions of the use and sound of magnetic tape is what I call ‘The Tarkovskian Notion.’ Tarkovsky’s movies all have the same mesmerizing flow. By some experienced as unbearable slow, it is this camera movement that links the narration and the images to a general sense of time passing. If I remember well, it is in “The Mirror” that a longer shot of a flowing river is shown. The pace of the river is the same as the pace of Tarkovsky’s camera movement, but, in my ears also the same speed at which a cassette runs. And those cassettes play moments from a life that is passing by, or has passed by. A life that is full of stories.” -- ZEROMOON LABEL FOR INTELLIGENT NOISE MUSIC OF THE NON ENTERTAINMENT GENRE http://www.zeromoon.com http://0moon.tumblr.com http://twitter.com/zeromoon Violet - deconstructed musique concrete http://zeromoon.com/violet /////// DOUG VAN NORT: http://www.dvntsea.com/ Doug Van Nort is an experimental musician that explores the radical sculpting of recorded sound materials and electroacoustic improvisation. He loves noise, tone, texture, gesture, deep listening, immersion, machines that improvise, density, sparsity, loudness, softness. Van Nort regularly performs solo, in the trio Triple Point with Pauline Oliveros and Jonas Braasch, in a duo with Al Margolis (If, Bwana) and has collaborated recently with the Composers Inside Electronics, Francisco López and Judy Dunaway among many others. His music appears on several labels including Deep Listening, Pogus and Zeromoon.

Wave Farm visiting artist Damian Catera (Jersey City) hosts live from Wave Farm in Acra. The program will feature his contribution to 120 Hours for John Cage: DeComposition For Radios v.2012.

Jonathan Wright is an artist and founding member of the Folkestone Fringe, an UK-based network of contemporary artists, established in 2008 during Folkestone's first International Arts Triennial. The group works to showcase, champion, and encourage the interplay of free-thinking contemporary art and public space. Their Boat Radio project is a new commissioning platform for transmission-based sound works on digital radio heard by listeners in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and Essex.

Premiere episode. Micah Moses's Cinema Terrorisme is an audio sigil using cut up methods and collage in order to distill the horror of modern existential malaise into substantiate energy mass. There is no moral value expressed in Cinema Terrorisme. Everything you hear has been alchemically remapped into a new order of relational aesthetics. More information is available on the Cinema Terrorisme blog at http://cinematerrorisme.blogspot.com/

A broadcast of selected sessions from the Free Radio Conference at Sarah Lawrence College organized by Ann Heppermann. Tune in to hear presentations including:

During the weekend of October 12-14 2012, corresponding with the Hudson Valley’s peak fall foliage weekend, free103point9 will host a first Transmission Arts Colloquium. This gathering includes an exciting international roster of participants with expertise regarding the issues informing the transmission arts genre. Attendees were selected so to comprise an intimate group, whose discussions during the colloquium will be shared with public audiences through broadcast and publication. Participants include:

John Anderson (DIYMedia.net/Brooklyn College, Brooklyn)
Manuel Cirauqui (Dia Art Foundation, New York)
Christoph Cox (Bard College/Hampshire College, NH)
Anna Friz (Artist, Chicago/Montreal)
Magz Hall (Canterbury Christ Church University/University of the Arts London)
Galen Joseph-Hunter (free103point9, Acra)
Jeff Kolar (Radius, Chicago)
Bonnie Marranca (PAJ Publications, New York)
Valerie Tevere (CUNY Staten Island, New York)
Tom Roe (free103point9, Acra)
Gregory Whitehead (Artist, Lenox, MA)
Jonathan Wright (Folkestone Fringe, Folkestone, UK)
Elisabeth Zimmerman (Kunstradio, Vienna)

Participants were each given one of three statements and questions to which they will respond during the Colloquium panels:

1) Transmission Arts and Contemporary Art Forms
Transmission Arts is a true form of Intermedia, developing an interface or dialogue between multiple media. If we define transmissions arts broadly as encompassing broadcast, installation, communication networks, composition and performance—in public spaces or on airwaves—what is your understanding of the potential of this mode of work for the future? What is your definition of "the contemporary" in transmission arts? Where is it pointing for the future?

2) Rethinking Transmission Media
From the early days of experimentation, electronic communication has inspired utopian aspirations among artists as a means to bring together diverse groups of people in an immersive human community. These ideals remained fervent in the digital age, where possibilities for instantaneous networks and intricate feedback circuitries offer the promise of interrelationships among unlimited numbers of participants. At the same time electronic communication may be equally described by imperfect conditions of dispersed feedback, partial and broken signal, and entropic decay.

Transmission art engages with these complex socio-technical conditions and circumstances of transmission, often as direct critique of state and/or corporate communication infrastructure and systems. How do they rethink transmission media in order to engage with the issues of power, ownership, and access to the electromagnetic spectrum? How do transmission artists approach the deep and unavoidable philosophical tension between utopian dreams of union and the status of interference and noise?

3) Ecology and Sustainability
If we think of artworks as part of an elaborate ecosystem—a community, incorporating artists and the public in cultural, economic, and political interconnectedness—how can we work toward sustainability? What tools do the different species of transmission arts have to develop creatively in this wider network of understanding? How can they evolve in the context of contemporary social and economic systems and the intermingling of art forms?

Jonathan Wright is a UK-based artist, and free103point9 Wave Farm's current artists-in-residence. This program was produced during Wright's residency.

Writes Wright, "The content of the next hour's broadcast comes form various sources. The broadcast represents an extension of a gallery show I curated in 2011 entitled The quiet and the still. All the work in the exhibition was sound based but none of the work made any sound, everything was mute. The show was inspired by a quote made by Gosta Kraken that had provoked Russell Hoban to write the remarkable book Fremder:

'Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.'

These spaces of black can be transcended by sound; sound can reach beyond the visual.

I have extended the scope of the work presented in consideration of Marcel Duchamp's Infra Thin and his assertion that the notion is impossible to define, 'one can only give examples of it.' I have also borne in mind the surreal book, Impressions of Africa of which Duchamp was so fond.

Sounds that are intuitively indulged and savoured can become more profound when attached to further layers of meaning. We hear more deeply on listening again, especially if we are offered more information to unravel these layers.

Being able to transfer this curation into a transmission is a remarkable opportunity. The running order is as follows:

Litany a work made by me as an immediate reaction to arriving at the Wave Farm using a text from Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past.

Breath, is Sian Gledhill's piece made using news footage broadcast in the build up to the Iraq War.

Bundeena Rock pool, Honey bee hive c-series and an excerpt from Sonata for clarinet & nodar are field recording works by Jez Riley French. These are very subtle recordings.

Joseph Hatch made me in 1608 by Diane Dever and Gerry Kelly is an excerpt from a work made in response to the interior of a Mediaeval clock tower.

Fierce Temper, Harm Tempts Us and All Things Are Changing were made by the Artist at Wave Farm using Tinnitus recordings.

Walk is a piece by the Artist directly inspired by the environment of the Wave Farm and the its atmosphere.

Finally, Sirensong is a work carried over from the Quiet and the still, re-presented as a transmission, based on a fresh translation by the Artist of Kafka's Silence of the Sirens Performed by Zigi Ellison.

Radius Sketchpad is an ongoing monthly program on WGXC 90.7-FM presented by the Chicago-based platform, Radius. This month features Rob Ray's Subject To Greater Uncertainties, originally produced for Radius, and is followed by a playlist of works selected by the artist.

Subject to Greater Uncertainties weaves together Rob Ray’s interests in military operations, the desert, and natural resource extraction operations as expressions of human comprehension at the fringes of the complex system we call “the world.” Rob Ray asks: How do we act upon knowledge of which we are aware is only a tiny slice of something much larger and complicated? What are the intended and unintended outcomes of those actions?

Subject to Greater Uncertainties is composed of four discrete sections: X:1 and X:2; Furnace and Swarm:

X:1 and X:2 were created in the Mojave Desert region of Southern California at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Desert Research Station. Rob Ray used a 5-watt solar panel to voltage starve a BoardWeevil and record sonic booms emanating from the nearby the R-2508 Special Use Airspace Complex. Rob Ray thinks of this setup as a sort of “sound maquette” to investigate his interest in X-class solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections ability to destabilize global radio and low-orbit satellite electronics systems.

Furnace and Swarm were created in the abandoned Wildrose beehive charcoal kilns of Death Valley. The Wildrose beehives were constructed by the Madock Consolidated Mining Company in the 1870’s to convert wood into charcoal for the smelting of silver-lead ore extracted from their mines in the Argus Range. This operation proved fiscally unsustainable and the beehives were decommissioned only a few years after they were constructed. The beehives now serve as excellent reverb chambers and hiker desiccation prevention huts.

Rob Ray makes site-specific electronic installations, psychogeographic games and experimental sounds and videos. He has recently relocated to Los Angeles, CA from Chicago via Rensselaer’s Electronic Arts MFA Program in Troy, NY.

Rob also collaborates with Jason Soliday and Jon Satrom as a member of the Chicago-based circuit-bent multimedia noise trio I Love Presets and is the visual arts editor for the online journal Drunken Boat. From 1999 to 2008, Rob was founder and head curator of the DEADTECH electronic arts center in Chicago, IL, USA.

This Saturday Afternoon show features Baltimore-based artist Jason Sloan, and his project whiteout, a new series of live FM transmission performances exploring and questioning the aesthetic of noise on the radio. These new textural works are created live and in the moment through the use of multiple analog electronic instruments and a transmitter. The whiteout performances are currently taking place throughout cities across the United States during the summer and fall of 2012. So far the whiteout itinerary includes Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Austin and Los Angeles with the possibility of additional cities being added. A collected set of all the performances in the whiteout series will be released as a deluxe limited edition, collectable vinyl box set available sometime in 2013.

Writes Sloan, "I was about twelve when I first became aware of how beautiful radio noise could be. I recall laying in bed and listening to my portable shortwave radio, slowly turning the dial, but allowing for long pauses on the dead spaces, as I moved from one distant broadcast to another. At times, I think I was more interested in the sounds produced by the odd interference and signal modulation than the broadcasts themselves. I would often drift to sleep listening to the ghost like voices buried beneath layers of slow and undulating static. At that age, I didn’t think much about what attracted me to the noise. I just enjoyed its sometimes violent yet mysterious and relaxing qualities. Looking back on those late night listening sessions in the early 80′s, I’ve come to realize the impact they had on my own development as a sound artist and electronic musician. The seeds for my awareness of the radio as an expressive medium were probably planted during this years. Of course, I was totally unaware that artists like Neuhaus, Stockhausen, Vostell, Cage and others had already begun exploring the possibilities of the radio as an art form decades earlier.

With this in mind, two years ago I began to include live scanner feeds in my concerts and performances. Unlike shortwave radio, scanners pull from air traffic, police, ham and other types of local broadcasts within just a few miles of the listener. The idea of incorporating live, local transmissions into the performance as a sonic fingerprint of the local geography was appealing to me. I saw it as an aural snapshot of that very moment or even an invisible, stringed instrument of sorts.

Recently, I was in my car listening to the SPK debut album Information Overload Unit from 1981. About halfway through the albums opening track Emanation Machine R. Gie 1916, I became aware of how much it sounded like some of the textures and modulating frequencies I would listen on the shortwave for hours as a kid. I began to wonder if a musical performance of pure analog electronic “noise” was broadcast on the radio, how would a listener moving through the dial know what they were hearing was an actual broadcast? And if they did, how where they able to discern synthetic, controlled noise from pure generative noise? It is my hope that the whiteout series of performances brings the very essence of noise, music and even our own environmental sonic awareness into question."

The interview features David Skal- an expert on Halloween. Host Bryan Le Beau is joined by David Skal author of "Death Makes A Holiday." They will discuss the origins and myths of Halloween. And for our commentary Andrew Bacevich reflects on "Paltry War, Paltry Politics." Andrew Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University, where he also serves as director of the university's Center for International Relations. Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, joins us to recount a hoax that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Nevada Territory. "Talking History" is a radio show distributed by the Pacifica Network.