CURATORIAL

The small but active experimental music scene in Latvia is starting to turn a page and break free of the stigmas that have plagued their cultural life for almost twenty years.

The mix presented here investigates the artistic use of breath.

This mix revises some of the exciting contemporary musical works utilizing a notion of mathematics and number. These compositions represent what could be called perceptive or sensual mathematics.

ZickZack label founder Alfred Hilsberg and author Frank Apunkt Schneider talk about the cultural, social and political conditions in Germany at the end of the seventies that gave rise to a radical new type of music, which Schneider describes as 'the undirected aggression of the freed noises'.

Florian Hecker suggests an amalgamation of two seminal collections of psychoacoustic works, which demand from its audience a selective piecing-together of distinct units into an overall Gestalt, one that culminates in a chimerical auditory experience.

A decade after the end of the communist regime, Czech and Slovakian underground musicians began channeling the national legacy of progressive dissident rock to virgin soil.

Sound libraries are collections of sounds explicitly designed or collected for further use, presented as unfinished ingredients. Sounds increasingly detach from their sources and are used by new authors less as references than as simple objects.

Felix Kubin brings us back the vitality of the Neue Deutsche Welle through lost tracks published on tape between 1981 and 1993.

A spaghetti western about experimental music on the West Coast in the 1980s.

Isolated by its remote geography and unusual Finno-Ugric language, Estonia is a borderland between the East and the West. It resembles the surreal zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker", a place full of secrets, where nature meets science fiction.

As art and industrial practitioners formally map out the discipline, hip-hop's discovery of digital sampling technology in the mid-80's provided a reintroduction to its original roots in block party DJ collage.

This layered 60 minute DJ set by Jon Leidecker underlines the history of those classic works of electronic and concrète music which sought to mimic and extend the voices and sounds of our pastoral landscape.

An overview as the art music tradition of collage music is joined by the popular culture tradition of hip-hop, which would establish many of the same aesthetics and practices solidly in the mainstream.

In the seventies the avant-garde finally crosses the line into wholesale plundering of commercial pop music, and the pop disciplines of disco and dub become increasingly comfortable with manipulating released music into new forms, narrowing the divide between art and pop practices.

The second episode of this series presents an overview of the sixties, starting with the world music collages of Richard Maxfield, Teiji Ito and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and following through to the impact of John Cage and Marshall McLuhan on the Beatles.

As recording supplanted sheet music in the 20th century, the presence of communal influence became unavoidably obvious once again as composers began to use recordings to make new recordings. From the beginning, recordings have been instruments.

Collaboration by philosopher and pioneer of mini FM radio, Tetsuo Kogawa, and sound artist Yasunao Tone, based on an email exchange on radioart.

Brenda Hutchinson converses with San Francisco composer and performer Jon Brumit about the thread of "collaborating with strangers" that runs through their work.

The recording, as memory/archive, as instrument, as transcription of a perfect performance, and as sound art using field recordings.

Transmission Art encompasses a diversity of practices and media working with the idea of transmission or the physical properties of the electromagnetic spectrum. These practices are generally participatory live-art or time-based art, and often manifests as radio art, video art, light sculpture, installation, and performance.

This programme transmits "Pillars", a new piece for radio by Robert Ashley, pioneer of opera-for-television and the use of language in a musical setting.

We investigate concepts of time, non-linear and non-Western, the latency of transmission or the use of acoustic and electronic delay, daily rituals and nature, a recorded slice of time and networked collaborations.