Monthly Archives: September 2014

#33

Show 496: LOS GRITOS DE MEXICO – The Cries of Mexico (Radio Corax/Felix Blume)

Leave a comment

Mexico City: more than 20 millions people gathered making noise!
A noisy city for most; Blume would like to transform it in a sonorous city.
The street sellers make the voices of the polyphonic choir, the small bell from the ice cream seller substitutes the triangle from the orchestra, and the hammering of the protesters on the metallic wall are the percussions.
In Mexico City, people shout to be heard, they shout their rage against the cops, they shout at the ‘lucha libre’ fights, they shout together ¡ Viva Mexico ! to feel united, and during a demonstration they also shout ¡Viva Mexico ! People shout in church, they pray together or alone, whispering in the silent night.
The thunder booms: nobody can shout at the storm, and the rain cleans the silent city.
A solo voice after the rain, and the choir resumes gradually.
People sing to forget and the shouting starts again, louder, so that the others don´t forget. The water flows under the city, the forgotten lake is mourning; it remembers when the city was an Island… On the top, it is too noisy, underneath, the water keeps in silence the secrets of the past.

INTENTION
Most of the people in the world live in cities. The daily soundscape is in most of the case a continuous sound of traffic, close or distant. Mexico City has a series of sounds added to the background which make the specificity of the city:
the cries and sounds of the street sellers are in most part responsible. In the past, most cities had their own cries (as some classical music can testify, like ‘Les cris de Paris’ from Janequin). In Mexico City, this tradition has persisted until today, but the government and general opinion is not in favour of them:
street sellers are each time further away from the touristic center, advertising campaigns are done to make them disappear from the subway, and police operations block their access to the streets. I would like to pay tribute to these Criers through a
soundscape of Mexico City, that will become a sonorous memory of a time that
sooner than later will disappear.

The artist:

News

#33

Show 495: Islander III by Brendon Wilson (CFRC)

Leave a comment

Across the lake from downtown Kingston Ontario is Wolfe Island, the largest of The Thousand Islands. This episode of radia immerses oneself with a path away from the mainland, through a combination of soundscapes on the move and spoken word segments of tranquility from Henry David Thoreau’s, Walden. Hop on your bike and ride the Islander III through this experimental soundscape.

“All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.” – Thoreau

#33

Show 494 : AstroForestry by Antoine Bertin (Campus Paris)

Leave a comment

For the past 18 months I have spent a lot of my time in forests wondering about the connections between forest and city. Perhaps having been raised in the urban environment, I have found it very difficult to even find where to start my artistic exploration of forests. The stories on audio tapes about forests I had been endlessly listening to as a child seemed completely out of date, and perhaps even out of place. I had to carve my own audio path through the woods. For the past 18 months I have spent a lot of my time in forests looking into the connections between forest and the universe. When walking in a forest at night, you see stars more than trees and trees more than your own feet. The body of work I have been developing throughout the Embedded Residency program with Sound and Music and Forestry Commission England consists of trying to invent new connections between us and the forest, of elaborating situations and fiction over distance and audio communication devices. Other branches of the body of work will include a sound recording of a peri-urban area from the perspective of a fox (made using a home-made GPS collar), an object resulting of the hybridisation of a radiotelescope and a fox ear, a collection of conversations with rangers from the Forestry Commission and astrobiologists about life, time and space !

Website : www.antoinebertin.com

Blog :www.antoinebertin.tumblr.com

#33

Show 493: I was using six watts when you Received me, by Maddie Leach and Jem Noble, for radio one 91 FM

1 Comment

radia season 33, show #493 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from september 8 to september 14, 2014.

I was using six watts when you Received me

by Maddie Leach and Jem Noble

a project commissioned by the SCAPE 7 Public Art Biennial Christchurch (27 September – 9 November 2013)

this edit for radia reframes a small portion of audio material from the original project.

—

From a small Nissan Civilian bus in the wide open fields of Christchurch’s Hagley Park, at scheduled but irregular times, ham radio operators from the Christchurch Amateur Radio Club attempted to contact the International Space Station as it orbited above the city. I was using six watts when you Received me had the radio call sign ZL3ISS, its own QSL card, and transmitted on 107.1 FM for local ground-based audiences. Leach and Noble worked with material held by the National Sound Archive Ngā Taonga Kōrero to assemble 34 audio tracks sourced from historical recordings made in buildings and public spaces now lost or transformed in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes.  Each track is framed with their own distinctive interval signal composed from recordings of the Christchurch Cathedral bells.

I was using six watts when you Received me operated as a searching attempt to recall a sense of place and to connect to an ‘elsewhere’ beyond the current geographic and social conditions of the post-quake city. The ISS contact sessions and local broadcasts were overlaid to produce intriguing new sonic artefacts that were subsequently acquistioned to the Sound Archives collection. The project traversed aspects of the everyday and the extraordinary to include recordings of dog walkers, street kids, local police, port workers and community events to the opening ceremony of the 1974 Commonwealth Games, the Queen’s visit in 1953 and a live recording of the February 22 earthquake in 2011.

—

“Listening to two different generations of radio voices, punctuated by the bells and the blips of the transmission, I start to draw a diagram that connects the widely disparate geographical elements of the work: the National Sound Archive on Cashel Street,[i] the temporary encampment in Hagley Park, and the uncharted vacuum of outer space. At the centre of the diagram, and of the sculpture project, sits the van and transmitter: a purposeful, itinerant monument, inhabited by amateur radio operators. Surrounding it in a circle is the public park, bisected by lines of visitors to the van, and overlaid with the archival radio broadcast — a series of dotted lines — and arcing upwards is the line of radio waves which reach the ISS and the astronauts and continue beyond, off the page and perhaps forever. Enveloping the whole is the Twitter feed associated with the project’[ii]; I draw a kind of cloud, thick with zigzags. It makes a clean equation on paper, completely dematerialised and spanning a vast stretch of space, and sits cleanly with Leach and Noble’s stated desire not to add more stuff to a cluttered and broken post-quake city.

Largely immaterial, the work is held together by a sculptural logic which relies on displacement: the tenuous possibility of making a real connection to somewhere else — somewhere as distant as the past, or outer space —and the currency of sound as a vehicle for collective recall, and anticipation. It is both preposterously expectant and resolutely conceptual. Maybe, maybe there will be an affirmative reply to one of the call signs issued. A small community of believers arrive intermittently at the van in time for scheduled passes, but it’s not a response they come for. Rather it’s to listen to the still-present voices of a Christchurch that was, and to be part of a transaction with the farthest reach of inhabited space. They come to listen to the radio. They come to remember what it’s like to get lost.”

– Abby Cunnane – catalogue essay for SCAPE 7 Public Art Biennial Christchurch, 2013.

[i] Based in Christchurch, the National Sound Archive is a not-for-profit organisation owned by Radio New Zealand. It holds over 70,000 audio records, and is publically accessible for research. See http://www.soundarchives.co.nz.

[ii] Throughout the project fragments of the archival recordings were released as cryptic, often hilarious or caustic tweets. On 21 September the tweet came from a Jack Perkins Spectrum documentary on Hagley Park, featuring Gail and Debbie the Labrador: ‘I said “you haven’t seen a big yellow Labrador looking a little lost have you?” He just made an #indecent suggestion and exposed himself.’

—

Jem Noble

Jem Noble (UK, 1974) lives and works in Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish First Nations territory). He has produced solo projects in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and collaborated with a wide range of artists, film-makers and cultural producers. His practice traverses still and moving image, sound, object-making, text and performance. Noble holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from University of Wales Swansea and maintains a particular interest in posthumanism. His work explores connections between materiality and subjectivity across physical, experiential and political domains. Within this, themes of framing, fictionality, indeterminacy and co-production have informed much of his recent making.

Noble has given lecture-performances at dOCUMENTA (13), Contemporary Art Gallery and Access Gallery, Vancouver, and The Engine Room, Wellington (2013). He has developed projects for: SCAPE 7 Christchurch Biennial in collaboration with Maddie Leach (2013); Manifesta 7 in collaboration with Piratbyrån (2008); FUSE Magazine Online Projects (2012); Paul O’Neill’s Our Day Will Come, Tasmania (2011) and Edmonton (2014); VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver (2009) and Spike Island, Bristol (2008). His work has been shown in group exhibitions including Soundworks, ICA London (2012); Gracelands at EVA International (2012); and FTP, Museum of Haifa (2012). Noble has undertaken several collaborations with Turner Prize 2012 winner, Elizabeth Price, producing sound and music for her large-scale video installations.

Maddie Leach

Maddie Leach (NZ, 1970) is an artist based in Wellington, New Zealand. Her practice is one that seeks viable ways of making artworks in order to interpret and respond to unique place-determined content through a process of establishing specific relationships between form, materials, locations, histories, events, individuals and communities. Leach’s projects favour a keen poetic resonance alongside strong conceptual and formal rigour. Within this framework she has consistently varied the way she resolves her work – having fabricated objects or had them fabricated for her, used text and print media, worked with video, performative actions and processes of exchange. Elements of uncertainty and risk become evident in many of her projects where idiosyncratic narratives are drawn between a tenacious logic of material and economic actions, elusive hopes and fragile navigations of possibility.

Leach’s project If you find the good oil let us know (2012-14) has been nominated for the Walters Prize 2014 at Auckland Art Gallery. Last year her work was included in the 5th Auckland Triennial and SCAPE Biennial of Public Art. In 2012 she was Taranaki Artist in Residence with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth and in 2008 was an International Artist in Residence at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork City, Ireland. In 2014 she has had international residencies with Spaced (Perth, WA) and Spike Island (Bristol, UK).

—

image: Shaun Waugh

radia programme sound editing: sally ann mcintyre