John Cage, Langham Research Centre - Early Electronic & Tape Music (2014)

"I believe that the use of noise to create music will continue and increase until we reach music created with electric instruments that will make available for musical purposes any sounds that can be heard." John Cage, 1937
Although John Cage sometimes worked in large, complex studios - for example, when he composed Fontana Mix in 1958 - his approach to electronic music and tape recording was often uncomplicated, improvised and pragmatic, using simple desktop devices: tape recorders, phonograph cartridges, contact microphones, record players, portable radios, etc.
He has created a completely new, radical and demanding sound world. This heralded the age of loudspeakers, mass communications, and Marshall McLuhan's "global village." The hissing, crackling and humming of electronic circuits,
and the disembodied sounds snatched by the radio from the air, spoke of the 20th century.
The Langham Research Center operates within the traditions firmly established by Cage, using the resources that would be available to him. Moving iron phonograph pickups were purchased and restored to realize the music. They have a knurled screw designed to hold a steel gramophone needle, and other objects are inserted and reinforced into the piece: pieces of wire, toothpicks, paper clips, etc. The Fontana Mix implementation includes individual mono tracks from Cage's original cassettes created in 1958. They are played on tape recorders with open coils. These methods allow us to work within the constraints that Cage faced and allow us to get closer to the world of sound in which he lived.
(Robert Warby, LRC)