Show 522: Anstatt (Radio Orange 94.0)

ANSTATT tells a story happening in Vienna. It explores the different ways to live and experience one city. Two characters narrate one day in Vienna and their narratives mix throughout the piece until it seems we are dealing with one person. Additionally the sound piece highlights the soundscapes of Vienna as a third character. The represented field recordings echo  the content of the character’s impressions throughout their day. Due to their atmospheric use they develop a distinct  narrative on their own.

ANSTATT is an attempt to  propose a polar meeting: what do we imagine about Vienna and what is its real acoustic representation? It’s real inhabitants? Finally confronting the majestic Vienna with other identities, more down to earth.

ANSTATT is non-fiction turned into fiction : it has been co-written by Barbara Huber (AT) and Léa Promaja (FR). Written in English and German, the text is based on the author’s personal experience and relation to Vienna.

http://www.leapromaja.net/?lang=en
http://col-me.info

Show 521: Improv Breakfast by Joni Erika Smith (Radio Corax)

In this year 2015 is the 300 year anniversary of the birth of German Baroque Composer Georg Friedrich Händel, born 23 February, 1685 in Halle (Saale), Germany. And it is the 100 year anniversary of the death of Russian Pianist and Composer, Alexander Nikolajewitsch Skrjabin and also, on March 8 – celebrated around the world every year – International Woman`s Day. With this in mind, two members of a folk, pop Indie band, an actress and classical pianist student talk about „Art“, Music, the World and their place in it. Improv Breakfast is a conversation in three parts which developed naturally through an organic interview (process). If it can be said that: Art is where the line is always searching, then somewhere that line will bend – there will be overlap (of ideas, expressions). The interviewees are not in the same room at the same time, but they sometimes end up at the same place. The subjects are at once the interviewed and interviewer. The three sensory and tactile stories unfold and come together gradually and grow organically to somehow form a new story. Each of the interviewed say they forgot they were in an interview. The listener will hear with all the senses. And the current that runs through it all is breakfast of course! – where many good conversations begin.

Credits:
Special Thanks to: Ralf Wendt, Nico and the Radio Corax Team!
By: Joni Erika Smith
Station: Radio Corax, (Halle, Saale – Germany)
Length: 28 min.
Participants:
Words and Music
Abel Camargo Neves da Cunha
Anna-Karolina Schiela
Radio Los Santos (Sebastian Caspar -violin, Lukas Schroll -guitar)

Links
http://959.radiocorax.de
http://www.radiolossantos.de

Additional Info:
Language: English/German
Includes radia jingles (in/out)

Show 520: Spaces To Act Or Not (CFRC)

spaces to act or not

by: Nelly Matorina

I recently discovered Caroline Nevejan’s work on presence. In the piece 8 spaces to act or not, she divides presence into three parameters: now/not-now, here/not-here, you/not-you. I was taken by the option of now/here/not-you, the immediacy and intensity of being in ‘now’ and ‘here’ surrounded by not-you. This piece contains field recordings from places where I felt surrounded by “not-you” most and wanted to act (make a sound), and then versions of just those sounds without a place. It ends with a sacred moment, I witnessed a wedding in a church in a small town in Lithuania which was open to the public despite being a private ceremony. The wedding was only 8 people, and the song I walked in during was entrancing and futuristic.

The piece contains readings from 8 spaces to act or not by Caroline Nevejan (http://www.being-here.net/page/745/8-spaces-to-act-or-not), and samples from Paras’ Memon’s A Story from their Self-titled EP, and M Mucci’s Days Blur Together. how

Show 519: First 100 Days by Julia Drouhin (Campus Paris)

First 100 days in the sound environment of a new born. With a parliament of crows, bats and birds, family and friends.

Julia Drouhin has been working with sound since 2003. She has investigated the haunted air of ghost towns through phono-memory, conducts voodoo sessions with records made of chocolate or ice, has glittered the catacombs of Paris, curated mini-FM events in both France and Spain, and performed with candyfloss clouds. She completed her PhD on the art of walking and radio art at the University of Paris 8 in 2011. In 2014 she won the Giuseppe Englert Prize for which she produced a musical and environmental “Listening Passage” in the mall of Launceston, Tasmania.

www.tacticalmagick.net/juliadrouhin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKY1N0YL4Uw

Show 518: Hours after Hours by Samuel Longmore for radio one 91FM

hours_after_hours_radioone

radia season 34, show #518 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from march 2 to march 8, 2015.

Hours after Hours

by Samuel Longmore

This composition was recorded at night in six different rooms and liminal spaces within a certain building in central Auckland, New Zealand. The history, location and daily life of the building itself may or may not be relevant to the piece, but this set of conditions is as follows. This building houses the Audio Foundation, Auckland’s most recognisable locational node of sound culture and experimental music. It was, formerly, a tie factory for a local manufacturer which, in an Antipodean bid for faux-continental sophistication, called itself Parisian ties. Now no neckties, and indeed hardly any clothing, are made in New Zealand. But the building is still busy working, nurturing a resolutely self-aware locality in regards to the sonification of place, with rooms containing a sound library, a gallery space, a small performance venue, studios and workshop spaces, an office and small shop housing hens-teeth rare local runs of multi-format limited edition pressings, as well as its own low power FM radio station, AFM.

These rooms were entered by the artist at night, with a microphone and a recording device. The gain was set to high and the microphone was left “to do its work”, without guidance, the artist immediately leaving the scene, not monitoring the sound. In subsequent takes, the sounds of these room-ambiences, these (near) ‘silences’, were played back into the rooms, and re-recorded, creating an accumulative and self-referential circuit in which the resonant frequency of each room began to emerge. In editing the piece together from the resulting audio six separate rooms are sequenced together. Listening back to these, their subtle shifts, it is as though witnessing a mysterious formal experiment, the alignment of each room emphasizing the difference within the gesture’s repetition, the magnification of the room-tone and the resulting ‘presence of absence’ undulating like waves. Signaled by no intermediary save the change in resonant frequency, the shifts subtly become a sounding-out of the dimensions of walls, staircases and other architecture, an aural mapping, a blind yet acutely aware material and physical cartography of the space which Sam describes as “an overall picture” of the space.

This work joins a compositional tradition of sound works exploring the resonant frequency of discrete spaces through repetition. Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, through Jacob Kierkegaard’s 4 Rooms. The absence of any kind of originating signal, as well as Longmore’s explicit removal of his own body from the scene of recording, extends these practices toward an accumulating analysis of something that sounds close to silence, within the after-hours existence of rooms dedicated, in their everyday life, to sound. If Longmore’s minimalism relies on an analysis of the formal aspects of recording, it is also deeply interested in the chaotic aesthetics of noise, the conflict between the non-intentionality of improvisation and the expectations of findings in compositional practice. Such a dialectic allows the emergence of traces, an uncovering of things normally inaudible. Perhaps that’s why, in the absence of any signal to be obliterated, we might not be so surprised when these ‘field recordings of the act of recording’ themselves start to speak – to sing like choirs – at certain points. Or uncover, as Sam writes, “the tension between the resonance of each space and the non-existence of silence – the former always tending toward dominance with the latter inevitably cropping up a a disruption.”

Samuel Longmore

Grounded in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Longmore’s practice and research occurs in the spaces where his interrelated concerns for the experience of aural perception, the phenomenology of architectural space, field recording as compositional action and the para-ontologies of sound:silence / signal:noise, overlap. The work of Merleau-Ponty affirms a position regarding the importance of subjective, corporeal perceptual experience which is central to his practical investigations, fueling an ongoing interest in the ephemeral and spatiotemporally specific ontology of sound. Sam has a BVA in Sculpture from the Dunedin School of Art. He now resides in Auckland and is working towards an MFA at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Art.

Sam would like to thank Jeff Henderson and Chris Cudby at The Audio Foundation for their support in the making of this piece.