new compilation of works by emerging west coast composers who somehow belong within a John Cage lineage. Music by James Tenney, Michael Pisaro and their students, Mark So, Michael Winter, Chris Kallmyer, Tashi Wada, Liam Mooney, Scott Cazan, Laura Steenberge, Cat Lamb, Quentin Tolimieri and Casey Anderson. Played by Frank Gratkowski (bass clarinet, b-flat clarinet, alto saxophone, radio, triangle), Seth Josel (electric guitar(s), mandolin, radio, triangle) Hans W. Koch (electronics, radio, triangle), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello, triangle, radio, voice), Lucia Mense (sopranino recorder, soprano recorder, alto recorder, tenor recorder, bass recorder, contrabass recorder by Paetzold, radio, triangle). Recorded June 2013 in Cologne.

"Experimental music can behave like a wildfire. If the conditions are sufficient (dry enough, hot enough, with enough material to burn) it will spread with very little encouragement. The “environmental” conditions in this relatively small world can be improved by the actions of a few people.
Dryness might mean: a need to escape from a particular musical dead end, a looming sense of crisis.
Heat might mean: people coming together. At times the energy of such groupings (of artists who are in constant close contact, helping and disagreeing) is hard to take, but it is, for those who have experienced it, a very real and combustible force.
Material might mean: musical ideas that are both profound and unfinished, such as those left behind by Cage and still actively pursued by the composers of the generation following, including, of course James Tenney.
Jim Tenney had a deep, intuitive sense of this. By the time I met him finally in 2000 (when we started teaching at the California Institute of the Arts together) he was also an experienced hand. It was somehow clear to him that the desert near Valencia was both dry and hot enough. Thanks mostly to Jim, the students started coming – not in huge numbers, but enough to form groupings.
I knew something about wildfires from my experience with Wandelweiser – and did my best to bring some of that material together with the talented people who started to appear. Hardly anything needed to be explained. This group, like several that followed, seemed to know right away that what was happening there might be of use to them, at the very least, as kindling, and sometimes much more than that. Strange, strong, and diverse, no one would tie the group of relatively young composers represented on this recording together, based on surface similarity or, God knows, agreement. But they are together and part of a much larger group.

The very beautiful, heartfelt recordings here are some evidence that this fire spread, that it continues to seek out places to burn. Jim would be proud of these people, and I am moved and encouraged by their music.