In Response to Rod's Harvest

Dear Rod (and the rest of Cascus),

I know just how you feel in terms of wanting to liberate electronically encoded sound from its normal "instrument"--the hifi, stationary stereo pair of speaker cones in their square enclosures. Working on sound for Claire and Dan's shadow puppet show in the alley at Appendix's July show, I chose to use cassette tape players, which I could get at the thrift store for between 4 and 7 dollars (and blank tapes for 25 cents). I then recorded several related manipulations of the same set of samples onto the tapes.
I would have liked to spatialize the various tape recorder/players more, but I decided for that particular performance it was preferable to have them all in front of me like separate instruments. I rewinded, paused, ffwed and modulated volume on them, creating a constantly shifting mix between similarly sourced sounds, played out of tape players with radically different speaker characteristics, levels of fidelity and quirks. It was really fun to perform live this way, and I was thinking all summer about writing a composition for people holding tape recorders (and possibly speaking or singing, in addition to operating the controls of the tape player according to a score).
I love the potential for a not-overwrought or overthought randomness in this performance setup and it sounds like you are probably achieving something wonderful and slightly along the same lines with CD and radio technologies.
But might not cassette tape be the cheapest of all available technologies for this sort of thing?

And having read your post, I'd love to see you consider working on this problem using the same tools you were using for your senior recital: what about approaching the problem of the loudspeaker from the point of view of Tudor's Rainforest? I know that this a work intensive project, but objects other than speakers, perhaps in numbers greater than 2, could help break the proscenium arch and force the audience to reconceptualize the space as installational and 3 dimensional rather than theatrical and 2 dimensional.

Along these lines, I was thinking about how to extend the work we've done together on making live musical performance (by itself, sans dance or theater) installational. What would a jazz band jamming through Tudor's Rainforest sound like? Or is this simply an unnecessary and gimicky combination of 2 good ideas that needn't ever meet? The Composers Inside Electronics who performed the Rainforest throughout the late 70s and the 80s always improvised. And Tom Verlaine of Television stuck his amplifier's cone full of sewing needles to get a sharper sound. Check out the amp rig commisioned by the guitarist from Haight Ashbury hipsters Quicksilver Messenger Service. Where has all the innovation in the creative design, extension and subversion of the loudspeaker gone to these last decades?

But out of all the ideas you mention in your post, the one about low power radio excites me most. Can you share some more technical details with Cascus? Is a low power broadcast signal something a home enthusiast could cook up with the aid of a soldering iron? Or do FCC regulations necessitate your silence?