Curated by Marcus Schmickler

Is it possible to approach developments in music by its relationships with money? Can we gain insight into societies by means of their relationship to music? Music serves as a mirror, as a prophecy for society because it reflects developments faster than anything that materializes.

There is an obvious simultaneity between music and economical developments, between music and mathematics and between mathematical and economical relationships. How better could we navigate through these dichotomies than through number, their common foundation? Ultimately, while we look at the connections between both number and music, how does music and its matter, frequency, correspond to (an ontology of) number? This mix revises some of the more recent musical works explicitly drawing from mathematics and number.

INTERRUPTIONS #7
The Beauty in Breathing
04.01.2012 (41' 27'')

Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith

The Zen Buddhists insist that during meditation the practitioner must focus exclusively on their breath. When stray thoughts enter your mind, you must always go back to your breath. What they mean by this is that if you are breathing, you are alive. What we do every second is something we take for granted. Coming at it from a very different angle, the artists featured in this mix want to make us aware of the same thing: by highlighting our most commonly shared – yet almost invisible – bodily function and using it as the basis for sonic exploration, they reveal something at once cosmic and mundane, that which is right under our nose, but which we somehow ignore. John Cage once said that music is all around us if only we had the ears to hear it. The same can be said by the artists compiled here: breathing is all around us, if only we had the tools to pay attention to it. This compilation is, hopefully, one small step toward that end.