A Dip in the Lake (1978)

A large composition consisting of hundreds of recordings from a city, assembled together according to chance operations. A complete realization, recorded in various places in Chicago, is available for free on ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_dip.html - 2 hours 20 minutes, so that's basically a double album of free Cage.

The city setting reminds me of a somewhat Cagean story. A few years ago, when I was out in a local city, I could hear what I thought was some sort of avant-garde noise/industrial band busking on a street nearby. I thought it sounded pretty good, but was surprised that a band like that would bother busking, as surely most people would hate it. Anyway, when I turned the corner, I saw that it wasn't a band at all, but construction workers doing some roadworks.

Anyway, unsurprisingly, we mostly hear some of the standard sounds of the city: a lot of traffic noise; snatches of music from car radios; trains chugging along; people talking; birds tweeting; construction work - etc etc. There are however a few surprises. There's the sound of what seemed like people playing golf at one point. In part 3 (Waltes 32-61), there's an odd buzzing noise, which is somewhat reminiscent of crickets chirping. One of my favourite noises occurs in part 4 (Marches 1-28): a beautiful, ethereal, high-pitched drone; it has a "glassy" timbre and seems to seep in from the distance. I have no idea what it is, but it's absolutely lovely. Occasionally some of the recordings are played backwards.

There's a lot of repetition. We might have, say, a two second clip of traffic noise, which is then repeated several times over a short space of time. It gives the impression of a record stuck on a loop (or several records stuck on a loop, since there's often more than one recording played at once), and creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. Similarly, many of the recordings start and stop, start and stop, start and stop.

So there's a fairly wide variety of sounds - mostly standard city sounds, but a few strange ones and a few more "organic" ones (birds and water), all intercut with each other in an often hypnotic way to build a rich soundscape.  It's all recognizably Earthly - but just with something slightly off. And actually, after listening to nearly 2 and half hours of this, even the more normal sounds become disconnected from their usual sources. I stop hearing the traffic drone as traffic and hear it instead hear it as just one interesting noise among many. All of these sounds are in their usual context - city sounds among city sounds - but the context is completely scrambled, so we hear even the most apparently mundane sounds in a new light.

Overall it evokes compositions like Rozart Mix, Variations IV, etc, but it's much calmer. Most of the sounds here are quiet and/or droney - traffic noise, wind, and so on - and there are long stretches of near-silence. A fairly easy listen, then, despite the mammoth length.