March 6- March 30, 2002

Location One is happy to present the works of two innovative sound artists/composers: The late John Cage and Laurie Spiegel. John Cage’s 1992 film work One 11 and 103, an exploration of light and sound scores, will play in alternation with Laurie Spiegel’s electronic music, Obsolete Systems.

One 11 and 103 by John Cage
Abstractions of light travel across and into the sounds and space created by artist and composer John Cage. Writes Cage: “One 11 is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power. 103 is an orchestral work. It is divided into seventeen parts. The lengths of the seventeen parts are the same for all the strings and the percussion. The woodwinds and the brass follow another plan. The shots of the cameraman still another. Following chance operations, the number of wind instruments changes for each of the seventeen parts.”
Director of Photography: Van Theodore Carson. Director: Henning Lohner.
Editor: Bernadine Colish.
Writer/Composer: John Cage.
From the Electronic Arts Intermix website

Obsolete Systems by Laurie Spiegel
Obsolete Systems, released last year through Electronic Music Foundation, is a collection of Spiegel’s compositions that spans more than thirty years. A display of Spiegel’s electronic music making mastery, Obsolete Systems includes the 1971 work Mines (Modular analog synthesizer, built by Don Buchla, mid-1960s) and Immersion, from 1983 (Electronic tape realized on McLeyvier computer-controlled analog synthesis music system). “Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare composers in whom head and heart, left brain and right brain, logic and intuition, merge and even exchange roles. Though she is one of the highest-tech computer composers in America, Spiegel is also a lutenist and banjo player, and sees the computer as a new kind of folk instrument. She makes her most intuitive-sounding and melodic music from mathematical algorithms, and her most complex computerized textures by ear and in search of a desired mood. Form and emotion are as difficult to separate in her music as they are in that of her idol, J.S. Bach.” From Kyle Gann, www.retiary.org/Is/obsolete_systems