Cage Pasqual's Kitchen

Earlier this year, Cage the Elephant added a different approach to their stage show with the “Live and Unpeeled” tour dates, which featured the group playing stripped down arrangements of their songs with a string quartet and additional percussion. Those special shows have now yielded a brand new album for the group as Unpeeled will arrive on July 28 via RCA Records.

Nicholas Isherwood made his début as Lucifer in Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht at Covent Garden, at the age of 25, and has since collaborated closely with composers such as George Crumb, Hans Werner Henze, György Kurtág and Iannis Xenakis. His relationship with John Cage soon developed into what he in his liner notes to the disc calls ‘a love affair’. The composer Sylvano Bussotti has remarked that ‘since the passing of Cathy Berberian, Nicholas Isherwood is the singer who best understands the spirit of the music of John Cage’. On ARIA, Isherwood presents most of Cage’s music for solo voice that is not included in the composer’s Song Books, and most pieces are here recorded for the first time by a male singer. The programme covers 43 years, from A Chant with Claps from the early 1940s to Ryoanji and Sonnekus2 of the 1980s, and includes the celebrated Aria, here performed with a new multi-channel tape realization of Cage’s Fontana Mix, by the Italian composer Gianluca Verlingieri.

"Silence. Sounds are only bubbles on its surface. They burst to disappear." (John Cage)

Of all the composers of the twentieth century John Cage (1912–1992) is doubtless one of the most inventive and the most determined in the pursuit of his musical goals. The significance of the seven pieces brought together here is the striking panorama of the intelligence of the material presented, over a period of four years, from 1939 to 1943, by the composer whom the critic Fred Goldbeck described as “the greatest Giraudouxian of our age”.

On Social Cues, Matt Shultz tries to make sense of a tumultuous time in his life. The Cage the Elephant frontman not only went through a divorce but also lost two of his best friends to suicide during the recording of the band's fifth full-length album. But rather than dwell on his tragic circumstances, Shultz focused on the positives that tend to get dismissed during periods of personal turmoil. “I think there’s the temptation, when you’re going through a tough time, to get stuck in the melodrama of things and be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write a sad song and it’s just going to explain exactly where I’m at,'” Shultz said in an interview with Beats 1. “You miss out on other notes and colours of life that are so important.”

It is rather common for music lovers to turn the radio on as soon as they start the engine of their cars. And it is equally common, for those steeped in the Classical music tradition, to amuse themselves trying to guess which work (or at least which composer) is being played when they find themselves in the midst of a piece. What is at work, in such a game one plays with oneself, is musical memory (in the attempt to connect a known tune or passage with something one remembers, and to give it a label), knowledge of a composer’s style, knowledge of the musical style of a particular historical period. When a given theme matches the listener’s inner archive of known music, then the game is won.