Review Summary: Everything we do is music.
The above declaration is, in the American composer John Cage’s own words, the artistic statement of his monumental experimental piece 4 minutes 33 seconds. Infamously, the sheet music for the piece consists solely of the instruction for those performing it to refrain from playing their instruments for that length of time, and unsurprisingly, during its 1952 premiere in New York the predominant noise to be heard in the Maverick Concert Hall was reportedly the noise of audience members walking out of the performance in disgust. This clamour, Cage states, comprised an integral part of the performance. In the intervening years, 4’33” has influenced the direction of contemporary music profoundly, exerting a spectral influence upon a wide array of genres and approaches to music — such as experimental, ambient and field recordings.
Which brings us to the album at hand. In October 2019, sixty-seven years after the notorious premiere of Cage’s piece, the record label Mute have released the charity compilation STUMM433 (“stumm” is German for “mute”), with proceeds going towards Music Minds Matter and the British Tinnitus Association. The album is comprised of fifty-eight original recordings of 4’33” by a wide variety of recording artists signed to the Mute label, including Laibach, Moby, Goldfrapp, KÁRYYN, Erasure, New Order, Depeche Mode, and Richard Hawley. Due to the multitude of artists featured on the compilation, the album’s runtime (4 hours 25 minutes) will appear daunting to many listeners — its epic duration is rare indeed, comparable for instance to Bruce Springsteen’s 1998 album Tracks.
As this suggests, listening to STUMM433 is a thorough exercise in deep listening. It is not though, the first album of its ilk. In 2002 the label Korm Plastics released the album 45’18”, which similarly, was comprised of nine performances of 4’33”. STUMM433 is, however, a more comprehensive realisation of the subversive and incendiary nature of Cage’s original concept. Presumably, the majority of the premiere of 4’33” would have been witnessed by only an empty concert hall if it had been drawn out to four hours rather than four minutes in length. Nevertheless, STUMM433’s colossal intensification of Cage’s piece seems a direct challenge to the unremitting tumult of existence characteristic of the late-capitalist societies which prescribe our contemporary lifeworld. It is hardly an overstatement to suggest that STUMM433 is less an album than a comprehensive artistic statement.
Participating artists, it appears, were given free reign to produce their own interpretations of 4’33”, and resultantly there is a scintillating variety of approaches to the piece over the course of the album’s fifty-eight tracks. As becomes apparent when listening to STUMM433, the passively-engineered soundscapes of most contributions are dominated by either the drone of microphone feedback, or the ubiquitous urban whine of traffic. A number of artists, however, revel in the tabula rasa of auditory possibilities posed by Cage’s composition. Over the course of the album we hear distant laughter (Looper); the end of a taxi journey, followed by a walk through a city (The Warlocks); pigeons cooing nearby (Maps); a recitation of free-form poetry (Cold Specks); the incessant click of an iPhone camera (A Certain Ratio); an early morning routine (KÁRYYN); or, in the case of Fad Gadget, absolute silence. Some tracks are intriguing, others oppressive. All, however, are profoundly immersive.
Likewise, the participatory nature of the album is a crucial component of the artistic statement it makes. The first time I listened to STUMM433, the sounds of myself making breakfast and walking the dog became intermingled with the noises of the album coming through my headphones. When I listened to it again whilst driving, the album had to contest with the noise of a car engine. The imposition of background noise is fundamental to the experience of listening to the album. Whilst we often try to tune out noise from of our surroundings whilst listening to music, that situation is both reversed and deconstructed whilst listening to STUMM433 — an auditory journey wherein the listener’s everyday lifeworld becomes a musical agent in and of itself. Your experience of the largely hushed album is entirely contingent upon the background noise from your own activity and surroundings whilst listening, and as a result, every listen through the album is unique. The experience of listening to STUMM433 is therefore roughly akin to reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, playing a videogame, or watching Netflix’s interactive Black Mirror short film Bandersnatch. (Cage’s composition evidently predates these later forms of participatory media).
You may well not agree that the album is perfect. It is, after all, an album that’s almost impossible to approach objectively, given the extent to which it enlists the background noises of the listener’s own lifeworld within its aural palette. If you dare to give it a try, STUMM433 will likely be one of the most challenging albums you listen to this year. There’s a good chance that it may also be one of the most rewarding.
