Music From Other Minds

Program 882: Surreal Samsara

KALW Broadcast Date: July 26, 2026 | Host: Devin King

On this Music from Other Minds, we listen to two works that engage with the intense reality of the dream-world as well as the Buddhist idea that the material world follows a cycle of birth and rebirth. For the first hour of this program that we’re calling Surreal Samsara, we’ll hear selections from the 2007 opera Wagner Dream, by British composer Jonathan Harvey. Wagner Dream is a reimagining of the last day of Wagner’s life; Harvey envisions the work that Wagner died attempting—an opera based on the life of the Buddha—as a long dream or vision that Wagner has as he moves toward death. Then, for the second hour, we’ll listen to guitarist Henry Kaiser’s 45-minute solo that forms part of Bill Laswell’s 2026 project Mt. Analogue, based on René Daumel’s posthumously-published 1952 surrealist novel, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing.

Program Audio

30-Second Spot