Valerio Tricoli and Werner Dafeldecker reinterpret John Cage's Williams Mix

In 2012, for the centenary of John Cage's birth, Italian composer Valerio Tricoli and Austrian musician Werner Dafeldecker created 'Williams Mix Extended', a digital reinterpretation of Cage's 1952 work 'Williams Mix'. The original piece, a landmark of musique concrète, consisted of 192 pages of notation for magnetic tape, using pre-existing sound materials as defined by Pierre Schaeffer. Cage aimed to make concrete music reproducible, resulting in a two-year effort producing an eight-track piece lasting about four minutes. Tricoli and Dafeldecker's extended version runs 32 minutes, incorporating over 2,000 specially recorded sounds. They translated Cage's hyper-detailed notations—including tape snippets as short as ten milliseconds, ascending and descending cuts, binary codes for volume, timbre, and pitch, and sound categories like 'City, country, wind with voice'—into digital operations. This process redefined time by assigning arbitrary values to each page, stretching the original eightfold and shifting from spatial tape conception to digital sonics. The work also explores the complexity gap between analog and digital, and the relationship between original and copy.