Semibegun

Semibegun is a radio show, a boutique tape label, and a music project focusing on expanding themes of early music. This dissertation project collects and presents a sampling of Semibegun’s output between 2022 and 2023 and provides historical, compositional, and theoretical background to complement and support the musical output. Each episode of the radio show, presented in this document as a chapter, originally aired as an hour long mix of uninterrupted music on Repeater Radio, the online broadcasting arm of London-based publisher Repeater Books. Named after pioneer of magnetic recording Semi J. Begun, each mix and release pushes beyond a constrained understanding of early music as a historical period of Western music spanning Ancient to Baroque. Instead, Semibegun presents episodic explorations of early musics. Each episode dives into specific aspects or variations of the theme: from the earliest recordings of the earliest pieces to the music composed for instruments made yesterday. By themselves, the mixes present a narrative through curation, juxtaposition, and intervention through light remix. The writing supports and explores various aspects of the music without in-depth dissection of the mixes in terms of mixing or DJing style and without a track-by-track analysis. The audio illustrates what the text does not and vice versa. They are complementary, not a mediation of one another.