No, not the guy from Mortal Combat, the musician.

John Cage is an incredible talent in the world of electronic and experimental music. His variation series, or more specifically Variation VII which was performed in October of 1966. The truly wonderful thing about this piece of music is the lack of control that Cage not only accepts, but encourages in this music. Cage started working on this project with the help of several other engineers and musicians including Francis Breer, Cecil Coker, Walter Gatman, Billy Kluver, David Tudor, and Jim McGee. Each of these people were accomplished engineers or musicians who each brought something to the performance. Bob Moog built capacitance antennas, much like the ones used in the Theremin, which were set up around the stage, and Cecil Coker put photo electric cells around the equipment on stage which would trigger different sounds or alter the noises coming from various machines. Coker had been spending much of his time trying to make computers speak using wired electronics, and he brought alot of that experience with him to this project.
John Cage's roll in this piece of music is very interesting. It can be said he wrote it, but there is no written music, and the piece is largly unplanned and the structure is indeterminate. Most of the performance depends on what is going on outside at any given moment. John Cage did "compose" the setting for this project, as he also composed the instruments used and people involved. In away he is changing the definition of what a composer is. Whereas in classical music the composer imagines the music and writes down exactly what he wants to hear, Cage takes a very different approach. He does not control the music, instead he collected a group of engineers and ways to make noise and set forth the ideas of what he wanted accomplished, and then allowed the other members of the group to utilize these things however they wanted.
Cage used dozens of unconventional instruments in this project. There was a large loudspeaker named George, ten telephones scattered New York, including in popular restaurant kitchens, over busy streets, in an aviary, and in a turtle tank, among other places. These phones were affixed with magnetic pickups and the signal was then sent to the performance at the Armory. There were also kitchen appliances, and radios. All of these "instruments" were fed back to the engineers, and controlled and manipulated using the photoelectric cells and the capacitance antennas.
This piece of music being so experimental means that it redefines normal expectations of music, including the idea of music having a beginning middle and end. The music clearly has a beginning, with the loudspeaker blaring the bomb siren esq tones. And it has an end, when the music stops, but what goes on between the two. There is no bridge or chorus or verse. It certainly challenges the normal notion of what a song is and how they are constructed, much as it challenges the idea of the performer. There is a sense of some form, most dictated by the instruments and the idea that the music is controlled as much by chance and embracing the lack control as it is by the performers. The music was also a multi media experience. Its as important to see the shadows projected on the giant white screens around the stage and the performers scurrying around the stage plugging one thing in and unplugging another as they turn a nob clockwise as it is to hear the sounds that these actions make. ONe of the performers even said that he felt like a bartender while performing. The spectrum of this performance is so outside the normal realm of music that the entire experience feels like something other than music, for both the audience and the performers.