Why 4 33

Does time have inherent meaning? Can music be measured? Can the keeping of time -duration- be any more than a mere form of calculation/measurement? Can the awareness (and foreknowledge) of passing clock time (duration) be an aid to free and focused listening? Can time itself be music? These are some questions prompted by Why 4' 33'?, Tim Tsang's latest EP - held together by concepts rather than media or genre consistency. In 2011, Tim Tsang released 'John's Cage 1.0: Sound Over Time' - a Youtube video featuring red numbers flashing across the screen as Tsang improvises freely over time. Since then, Tsang has been using music and performance as research tools to experiment with and better understand man's relation to time. 'John's Cage 9.0: Chronos/Kairos' was presented in 2013 at CCTV Studios - a 20 minute live performance with piano and multiple clocks and time-keeping devices. John Cage has taught the world that silence does not exist, and any sound has the potential to become music - one only needs to organize or contextualize it. Why 4' 33'? is a natural continuation of this working philosophy - that music is indeed 'organized sound over time'. While much has been investigated in the field of manufacturing and recreating creative sounds, Tsang is focused on alternative ways of keeping time in music. He has made numerous attempts to physically, conceptually, and musically combine/organize sound with time (even though time already is a property of sound). This most recent effort sees the embedding of clock time directly into the aural spectrum, superimposing itself onto the 'music' (that is, the textural, harmonic, melodic, rhythmic of the 'playing'), treating time and sound as canvas and paint, respectively, giving it a sort of 2-dimensional experience. To take the painting analogy a bit further, the canvas size is always foreknown to the painter before a single drop of paint touches the surface. This is a 'cage', which one must work with. While Frank Stella, in some of his paintings, sought to make the canvas adaptable and geometrically unpredictable, thus making the decisive act of painting closer to musical spontaneity, Tsang's intention is to allow the audience to 'see' music as one would see a painting on a traditional canvas - all at once.