Probes

On RWM, the radio project of the "Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona" Macba, an interresting exploration in modern music across a serie of podcasts curated by Chris Cutler, the famous drummer of Henry Cow, Art Bears, Cassiber, Pere Ubu and many others... and the founder and manager of the independent label and distribution service ReR/Recommended.

The radio podcasts "Probes" takes Marshall McLuhan’s conceptual contapositions as a starting point to analyse and expose the search for a new sonic lanaguage made urgent after the collapse of tonality in the twentieth century. The series looks at the many probes and experiments that were launched in the last century in search of new musical resources, and a new aesthetic; for ways to make music adequate to a world transformed by disorientating technologies. 

"Probes to listen to"

In the late nineteenth century two facts conspired to change the face of music: the collapse of common practice tonality (which overturned the certainties underpinning the world of art music), and the invention of a revolutionary new form of memory, sound recording (which redefined and greatly empowered the world of popular music). A tidal wave of probes and experiments into new musical resources and new organisational practices ploughed through both disciplines, bringing parts of each onto shared terrain before rolling on to underpin a new aesthetics able to follow sound and its manipulations beyond the narrow confines of 'music'. The "RWM Probes series" tries analytically to trace and explain these developments, and to show how, and why, both musical and post-musical genres take the forms they do.