because there is no guarantee this will be available, or, findable, on the net… in the near future. it’s already difficult to find… one of the 20th centuries all time great works, aperghis’ parcours, in my humble opinion. but before proceeding to listening/watching, to aperghis, i want to alert you to the related, unclassifiable art of bernie lubell who makes psychologically mad interactive/participatory machines, often of very large scale, out of wood.

see: http://bernielubell.com/

but to apherghis: and don’t miss the last piece below… which i rate in the top 5… of any work at all, according to any scale, in any universe.

and as an addendum, a cover or sorts… necessary in order to cover the brilliance of the cover that follows.

after talking today with karen schiff, i got to thinking about zen… see her brilliant work/thought at:

http://karen-schiff.com/

and in with continual dialogue with gerrie van noord about walking, philosophy, music and most things, of late, about the significance of ‘covers’:

https://gerrievannoord.wordpress.com/

to preface my comments that follow: i have studied various forms of Zen, and have a great love/respect for certain aspects of it. but like christianity, and any organized from of religion, ultimately it’s nihilistic because it’s about self-denial, denial of being an embodied human animal, giving over human fate to mythological, metaphysical forms of social control… etc. i’ve been to japan, to many of the zen and other buddhist temples there, and it’s impossible not to love them, aesthetically. and the concept of rejection of some aspects of ‘worldliness’, is spot on, mainly today’s hyper-consumerist capitalism. but it goes too far.

cover 2: the sound is not as good as it might be, but, no matter… one of my all time fav works. there are several threads to consider here – the use of silence in a very non-cagean way, non-cagean because of the musicians’ powerful use of gesture to frame it; the implication is that silence and stillness are incompatible; precisely because artists, like apherghis of course, understood that ‘musical’ silence is inseparable from time because music is perhaps culture’s most sophisticated exploration of time; so if time is eliminated by stillness, and reduced to a continuous duration as it was in 4′ 33″, so music is eliminated; continuous duration, and this was cage’s zen intent, is nihilistic in it’s elimination of temporal differentia and the elimination of the corporal activity of the performer, of humans as embodied animals, in favor of purely passive listening that is suppose to reveal the extra-human world of sound/noise through self-denial; which in effect is the elimination of interaction and relationality; here time is wonderfully visualized by the use of silent gestures, a far more interactive and relational conception of spacetime, the inseparability of space and time, suggesting that action, acting, performing, and event are the essence not only of music, but of being an embodied human animal that is essentially co-relational and interactive with and in the world framed inextricably by spacetime; more, music is an ‘investigative, experimental method/tool’ through which, at it’s best, the human animal explores its participatory possibilities as it navigates spacetime. 4’33” denies that form of participatory investigation of it’s spacetime world reducing the performer and the audience to a passive listening device. it’s nihilistic because it annihilates music. to passively accept a world of pure noise is to abandon active participation in transforming our being-in-the-world. and that is what buddhism, including zen, seeks to achieve – stopping thought, abandoning our creative engagement with all that is extra-human, denying subjectivity out right, rather than transforming and expanding the parameters of ‘subjectivity’ beyond the prison house of language and it’s sentences. The George Aperghis-Dressage Percussion group, in this piece, make silence haptic; they insist on several form of performative imbrication – of their corporeal embedded in spacetime, within their specific method-tools, the carefully differentiated instrumentality of drum their sets, performing with a remarkably sensitive co-relationality and choreographed interactivity, creating a highly differentiated unity of their performative event. this fabulous trio fully embrace everything that cage denied.