Exposé / Supporting Text:
The father of John Cage, J. M. Cage senior, invented a submarine that in 1913 broke the world's underwater record. The Times published a story on the front page about Cage's submarine emerging on the sea's surface in Long Beach harbour after having been buried 36 hours under five feet of mud. The submarine since then was called The Cagean. It's reported that John Cage jr spoke about this event his whole live – though he himself was just nine months old when it took place.
Water stayed important for Cage – in his „Water Walk“ (1959, performed 1960) and his later water colour paintings.
Later in his life, Cage got into Zen Buddhism. His teacher was
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki who used to speak about Zen in using images of water: Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the
water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one.
The result of Cage's encounter with Zen and asiatic thinking was „4:33“.
Things come to full circle if you look at Zen's image of the lotus and compare it to the „Cagean“ Submarine: Both rise from the mud through the wate to the daylight, living to see a new horizon.

Process of making the track:
In reference to what is written above, I decided to choose recordings I made at the harbour of Hamburg. The location and the sounds are reminiscent to the harbour, where once the Cagean submarine did arise. The metal sounds of the recorded pontoons remind to the metallic screaming of a submarine under high water pressure. The recorded sounds have been treated by the rules of musique concrete. Stretching, Looping, Cutting et cetera has been applied to the sounds. The track tries to evoke the image as a harbour as a place of birth, of incoming messages, a place of listening in the spirit of John Cage.
As a father of experimental music John Cafe did the same what his father had done with the submarine: He brought sounds out of the dark to the daylight. The sounds of the world, of Being and Time, still come in to our ears' heart like ships in the harbour.
Artwork by me and Christina Schröppel (basic photograph).
About me
Martyn Schmidt (*1969) is a composer and poet, living in Augsburg, Germany. He runs the vocal arts label „Atemwerft“, was a member of Attenuation Circuit, label for experimental music, and co-curator of „echokammer“, an event series for acoustic art in the borderlands of music, sound and speech. For years he worked as editor of a german music magazine and as an international music writer. 2013 he won the fist prize of the „Award for bordercrossing arts“ in Bonn.
www.martynschmidt.de // E-Mail: martynschmidt@yahoo.de Martyn Schmidt, Perzheimstrasse 44, 86150 Augsburg, Germany