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As you may expect from the title, Prepared Piano for Merce Cunningham (28:48) includes assorted piano sounds in the form of soft notes, chords and interludes. You might not expect the spacious, rambling and seemingly-random presentation or sometimes-atonality thereof. The piece was recorded live in 1979.
An explosion of spoken and other media samples are strewn together, torn apart and otherwise radically altered in Hommage A John Cage a hand-spliced tape collage; a few spooky passages are interesting, most of the rest are just assaultively disjointed... Think of Simple (0:20) as the "Cliff's Notes" version of the preceeding track.
A 25-minute scene of juxtaposition, Duett Paik/Takis finds two artists working in their own worlds... Taik exploring classical piano and crooning softly; Takis sporadically clanging upon his metal sculptures with apparently unrelated whacks. A stately few minutes of clavichord music (sans beaten metal) winds the track down. What do screaming infants, screaming choirs, Beethoven's 5th, deconstructed media samples and a few moments of peace have in common? Well, they're all crammed into the less-than-three-minutes of Etude for Pianoforte... The liner notes include some biographical info, recollections, photos and colorful hand-scrawled drawings from the artists.
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