-- "Bones heal. Chicks dig scars. And the United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world." -Capt. Lance Murdoch I've been doing more thinking about Cage and his aesthetic for the past several months than I ever expected to, but I will try to keep this short and hopefully coherent. Cage has never been my favorite "modern" composer, but a friend and I have been working on a realization of his composition "A Dip in the Lake" which started mostly as a whimsical excuse to travel all over the Chicago area exploring. The piece is 427 chance-determined locations or addresses arranged into groups of 2,3 and 4. After spending parts of 2 years making the source recordings and the last 2 months mixing them, I think that the process is the whole thing with these sorts of pieces. The end result will be different everytime it is done and how it turns out really is simply not that important. "Quality" can't even be an issue at all. There might be some interesting sounds that come out and there might not. I have great respect for Cage's ideas and processes. I think that his ideas to take the individual out of the music as much as possible are interesting and that his ideas opened up music in a lot of ways (that might or might not have come about anyway) that later composers and musicians have used to other, often more effective, ends. I see him in a similar vein as an instrumentalist who I think is great, but doesn't play a type of music that I am particularly interested in. I am always happy to listen to these folks and learn from them and respect and admire them, but I don't go back to their records that often. There are a ton of bop guys who fall into this category for me, classical players, singers of all sorts, pop music producers who do interesting things, etc. I don't mean to give any disrespect to or put down anyone (especially people who are way better musicians than I am), but listening to their music is as much an academic exercise for me as Cage's music. A lot of the time I love academic exercises, but the music just doesn't reach me on that emotional level that certain music does. Cage was a great door-buster-downer, but he's no Johnny Cash. All that being said, I am glad that I embarked on the project and doing the field recordings especially opened my ears up to some sounds and ideas that were new to me or old sounds seen in a new light. So, I guess like just about everyone else, I'm ambivalent. Rob