Last April 17th & 18th 2021, Jet fm organized the 4th edition of the 24h Radiophonic Creation Contest. A very simple proposition, open to everybody involved in radio and sound, which rules with two basic things: maximum ten minutes long and a constraint, and of course you got 24 hours to do the all thing. You could do it with a team or solo. Free forms. This year the constraint was “Machine Arrière” (i.e. backward machine but also stoping the way you do things and maybe trying another way). We receive something like 21 creations, all available here: http://jetfm.fr/site/Les-24-heures-de-la-creation,12934.html and there: https://jetfm.bandcamp.com/album/24h-de-la-cr-ation-radiophonique-2021 For this special radia show please welcome four of them: La Nuit Au Théâtre – Machine Arrière Déserter C’est Créer – Augustes Mémoires, machine arrière Spaghetti Bolognaise – Ressorts Cervisiam Potantes ad Coetus de Felibus – EOS
GAU ON : A warm night of September, swept by southern wind. Recorded by Antoine Bellanger in the night of septembre 24 to 25, 2020. GAU ON only exists in 100% recycled vinyl. The sleeve was linoprinted and screenprinted using as ink the ashes of pines fallen that night.
GAU ON : iraileko gau bat, haize hegoaren goxotasunean. Antoine Bellanger-ek grabaturik, Saran, 2020ko irailaren 24tik 25erako gauean. GAU ON bakarrik binilo birziklatu formatuan aurkitzen da. Azala linograbaketa moduan inprimatua da eta serigrafiatzeko tinta, gau honetan erori pinondo errautsekin egina.
GAU ON : Une nuit chaude de septembre balayée par le vent du sud. Enregistrement par Antoine Bellanger dans la nuit du 24 au 25 septembre 2020 à Sare. GAU ON existe uniquement en vinyle 100% recyclé. La pochette est imprimée en linogravure et sérigraphie réalisées à l’aide d’encre de cendres de pins tombés cette nuit là.
“Zunehmend schlechter” (“Increasingly worse”) is an absurd audio farce that came about after Kanak heard the phrase “increasingly worse” (in the media, in the supermarket, on the street) several times in one day in late 2020 regarding the pandemic. It’s not meant to downplay the crisis, but rather to provide a bit of humor in the face of an extraordinary situation. We are told that things are getting “increasingly worse”, we repeat that things are getting increasingly worse, therefore, they must be getting increasingly worse. Or: perhaps the pandemic is over (“Die Pandemie ist vorbei!”). Alas, no, in fact, things ARE getting increasingly worse…our first inclination was true. And round and round it goes …
The second part, “540,” refers to the sort of circles we’re running around in as we are confronted with this problem, both on personal levels and in terms of society at large. First we see it one way (180°), but then decide that maybe that first consideration was wrong (360°), but then actually decide that our first guess was actually right (540°). As Bernhard wrote so beautifully: The truth we know is logically the lie, which, by not getting around it, is in fact the truth.
A work for radio by Mark Vernon, winner of the 2020 Phonurgia Nova Award, prepared for Resonance FM. Magneto Mori is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage. In this iteration the location is the Irish mountain town of Kilfinane. Using a portable reel to reel tape recorder sounds from around the town were recorded onto the first side of the tape over a two day period – dripping rain, creaky gates, car mechanics, drainpipes, shops, church bells, refrigerator cabinets, wind blowing through the trees, passing traffic, etc. were just some of the sounds encountered. On the second side were compiled voices of Kilfinane – extracts from the personal radio archives of Diarmuid McIntyre and Grey Heron Media that date back as far as twenty years or more. The recordings selected consisted mostly of local history, coverage of community events, news stories of local interest and interviews with a variety of Kilfinane residents. Using tape as an analogy for the frailty of human memory this tape was then cut into pieces of random length, freeing the sounds from their linear, chronological sequence. The tape cuttings were then intermingled with a collection of magnets that de-magnetise (thus erasing) portions of the tape. The tape (along with the magnets) was then buried in a hole in the grounds of the local school. After several days steeped in the earth of Kilfinane the remaining audio fragments were exhumed. Dirty, mangled and partially erased the tape was washed, dried and spliced back together in a random order ready for playback. This process of recording, emancipation from chronology, burial, erasure over time, unearthing and the reassembly of jumbled fragments for playback parallels the operation of memory and recall. Experience, retention, buried memories, forgetting, distortions, recall and chronological inaccuracies are all aspects of the human memory process. The main difference being that our memory is selective and plays an active role in what it chooses to remember or forget rather than the arbitrary procedures that are in operation here. Once the tape was cut into pieces there was no way of telling which fragments were which and in the process of splicing the tape back together the voice recordings gathered over a twenty year period became interspersed with the sounds of those two days spent making field recordings in the area. Further digital recordings were also made around the same location during the period of the tape’s interment. The contrast between these higher fidelity field recordings and the degraded analogue sounds added a further substrata of time to the process.
