Clare Lesser & David Lesser - Radio With/Out Voice (2025) Hi-Res

Radio With/Out Voice is a provocative new album which reanimates John Cage’s enduring fascination with the medium of radio. Performed by Clare and David Lesser—two of contemporary music’s most versatile interpreters—this recording explores Cage’s radiophonic works through performance, composition, and critical engagement.

Far from being a nostalgic reconstruction, the Lessers’ approach is both scholarly and boldly creative, situating Cage’s use of radio not merely as a historical curiosity, but as a radical act of decentralisation: of authorship, temporality, and musical expectation. This is Cage as theorist of transmission and static, prophet of sonic ephemerality, and architect of what Mark Fisher called “a time out of joint.”

Spanning works such as Radio Music and One¹² to the rarely heard Sculptures Musicales, this album presents the radio not only as a sonic instrument but as a philosophical site—an invisible architecture in which Cage staged his most audacious dismantling of musical norms. Static and fragmentation become expressive forces in themselves, mediated by the performers’ acute sense of form and freedom.

Drawing on deep knowledge of Cage’s methods, including his application of the I Ching and his subversive use of silence and structure, Clare and David Lesser illuminate the vibrancy of Cage’s late and lesser-known works. These performances embrace the medium’s inherent unpredictability—its “crackle” and drift—and in doing so, reaffirm Cage’s commitment to sound as process, possibility, and play.

This is an album for critics, scholars, and listeners attuned to the intersections of philosophy, sonic experimentation, and media archaeology. It speaks to the ever-shifting boundary between sound and signal, listening and hearing.