As you may or may not know, 2012 is the Centennial of John Cage’s birth, and among its many celebrants (including myself, details to come…) is “transmission arts” collective Free103point9, who work in conjunction with WGXC 90.7-FM in upstate New York to present works specifically designed for air-borne electro-magnetic transmission – Radio, that is.

Three years ago was the last time I did any kind of “year’s review” of aural nourishment, and I sort of feel the need to do it again. Those 24 hours of music are worth revisiting, and the following may not even count as a “best of,” but it is some of the best music I’ve heard this year, and I listen to an awful lot. Maybe call it a “compendium”? No that sounds too boring. In actuality this list is simply nothing more than a bunch of shit that goes on my iPod and ends up staying there for longer…

Back in the mid 90’s before I ever got into techno music, I owned the original VHS copy of Peter Greenaway’s 1983 release 4merican Composers (natch, “Four American Composers”) and watched it constantly while in music school; I think I probably saw the Cage movie no less than 10 times.

Someone showed me this incredibly awesome looking ‘DIY’ pedal being done by Line6 called the ToneCore DSP Developer’s Kit. At first I think, aaah what a cool platform for custom DSP pedal effects, what a nice little generic pedal with cool ways of creating my own DSP configurations… you can imagine the excitement, so unfortunately diffused by this paragraph:

This is a great interview of an awesome figure in electronic music, done just recently (2011) in Madrid by the Red Bull Music Academy: