Momentum: Deutsche by Nat Grant

This work is the latest in a 10 year long exploration of daily life and travel through sonic journaling. Momentum: Deutsche was created during two weeks in Recklinghausen and Berlin in May and June 2023 and features many layers of field recordings, digitally altered and collaged.

The five previous Momentum releases can be found at
https://natgrantmusic.bandcamp.com/

Dr. Nat Grant is a composer and sound artist working on unceded Wurundjeri country, Naarm/Melbourne (AU), producing works for live performance, recording and broadcast, digital arts, and community arts. Nat’s work focuses on the creation of multidisciplinary and longform musical compositions, performance events, and installations using traditional and graphic notation as well as improvisation.
http://natgrantmusic.com

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Jennifer Callaway’s ‘No Ground,‘ commissioned for the Radia network’s first broadcast of 2023, is a composition that takes a single 27 minute live improvised recording of a 1940s Bakelite valve radio, and subtly weaves this instrumental base into a patterned sonic fabric with several other musical and sonic elements. It is a delicate meditation on radio as instrument and channeller of the unknown, and a dual love letter to the medium’s long histories of domestic sonic use and its role as gateway to sonic experimentalism.

Jen told me when we were talking about a Radia commission that she hadn’t done a solo piece before. Given her many decades of creative output, at first this fact seemed surprising – even monumental – then I realised it was contingent on how we classify the singular. As an improviser, her tendency is to work in collaboration, with care to nurture her human and nonhuman connections; to instigate and to maintain what we could potentially call a conversation as much as an ecosystem. This alchemical yet everyday process is one that involves the passing and circulation of energy and an equilibrium of intention, as well as the robust embrace of the accidental.

Callaway’s sonic palette – as a concrète auteur of the current Melbourne improvised and experimental music scene – is resolutely grounded in the poetics of immediacy, the responsive, living moment of connection – with musical collaborators in collectives Snacks, Hi God People, Propolis and the duo Is there a Hotline?, and also with her photographic practice that traffics in the aesthetics of the blur: a collaboration with light and time, a yearning toward some aesthetic that revisits the wonder and experimentalism contained at the chemical dawn of the photographic process itself, coupled with a poet’s ability to perceive the life within the materials of the ostensibly insensible – within the grain of the table, the ghost of the living wood.

And here she is, not in solo capacity at all, but working with the radio as collaborator. This particular radio is one of my instruments within the radio cegeste menagerie; it’s a vintage Australian STC from the late 1940s with a beautiful warm valve sound, a great dynamic range, and many unknown histories. At some point both its aerial and its earth wire were cut off, so its ability to act as a receiver is limited. It has likely outlived some of its owners who also wandered its dial in the mid twentieth century, at a time when radio was fully centralised in culture, searching for information or entertainment, some human anchor for the ear, but it is also likely that they encountered its particular tonal translation of the vast seas of static between these islands, the pop and crackle of the inhuman, the unknown and the ancient.

Lending your tools to another artist is instructive, especially when that instrument is uncommon. It does much to cast light on the use of instrumentation within artistic process, and often leads (again) to the revelation that the technique or the tool is not the art itself (aka “don’t mistake the tools for the purpose”). As such, as much as I know these sounds, the rhythms, movements and temporal clusters that emerge from Jen’s use of this particular radio as a compositional tool are not the ones I would have chosen. They are another conversation with radio’s domestic and material pasts, its temporal immediacies, and its potential futures. I would have spoken to these as well, but differently. I recognise a musicality in No Ground that is completely Jen’s.

She wrote a statement about the piece that illuminates this further: “Is there anybody out there…….? Returning to my 1970s childhood love of rolling through the radio wave ether of space junk, disturbed psyches (akin to mine ?) and wistful echoes with a slow motion comb, greeting each shocking encounter with a little tickle and a dance. Back then, I would climb up on the kitchen bench to reach the shelf where the small radio in its brown leather-bound case spent most of its time (next to the “good” scissors). This time around, I had the wonderful privilege of borrowing my friend Sally’s art deco bakelite valve radio, at her suggestion. And I had the means to weave in a small number of additional imagined voices.”

From 1997 until the early 2000s I hosted a late night experimental radio programme on my local student radio station, RDU 98.3FM, in Christchurch, New Zealand, called Rotate Your State. The ‘sting’ I used for the show was a modified section of Stockhausen’s  Hymnen (1966-67), notable for its browsing of the musicality of the shortwave radio dial, a restless, echoic, tearing, twisting, turning and re-turning. This openness was offset by the presence of national anthems that intruded like interference through the piece, a series of quotational presences, the thresholds of declarative nationalisms conflicting with the borderless sense of planet that attended the use of radio space, the ungrounded sea of the wider composition. Stockhausen said that one of the ideas behind the use of these national anthems was to have them act as “signposts” for listeners, as they travelled through an unknown world of sound, noise and disconnected voices, that “everyone knows the anthem of his own country, and perhaps those of several others, or at least their beginnings.”

To ‘ground’ an analogue radio is to earth it, with this process located somewhat literally in the geographic; the ultimate goal being to locate a local frequency bandwidth signal. An improperly earthed radio wanders the dial, never able to fully fix down on one location; it might pick up several signals at once, or none at all. Many contemporary transmission  artists and composers have become enamoured with such indeterminate phenomena, in the context of living in the world of digital radio (which in a cultural sense is still radio, but in a material sense is arguably not radio at all), dialing back into the histories of radio through its potential as a physical medium, re-learning the lessons first encountered by the earliest amateurs and their crystal sets, hearing again the sound of the first violin transmitted on the night airwaves, or the frail morse of a maritime signal speaking across the as-yet unlanguaged sea. Here, we are collectively listening back beyond Stockhausen’s Hymnen, which in its prescient beckoning to a global geopolitics in a polyphonic entanglement of nationalisms, was nevertheless a high Modernist composition, grounded within the signals provided by their translation into the anthemic – and the monolithic cultural position of the radiophonic. This itself might be one key to listening to Jen’s composition No Ground, as it joins this conversation. A mobility and precariousness found in our contemporary media ecologies moves back into the analogue; the dial is now an ungrounding, that resists the very idea of the signal as a resting place within the sea of noise, it playfully flutters around it, it speaks back to the everyday droning voices found there with not a small amount of humour and transforms them through active listening, not for sense but for sound. It is resolutely un-earthed.

Jen writes that she partially learnt her own sonic ungrounding through radio – that drifting around the radio dial as a child provided hours of wonder, and No Ground is a representation of that curiosity and grasp of accidental mysteries, filtered through decades of dedicated performing and listening to, and being involved with experimental music communities. Within the composition, radio can be grasped in its current material immediacies, a counter-earthing that recalls and revitalises its own histories of what it has been; in its end is its beginning: the fact that its dial is largely empty of signal in the early twenty first century harks back to the more expansive emptiness of the nineteenth, before the radio’s centralising within twentieth century culture and the media cultures of Modernity  – on the edge of representation, it is also infused with its longer imaginaries: with the oceanic, with the powdery granular whispers of geological and atmospheric phenomena – the sounds of weather, of natural radio and the magnetosphere; with the insect scratch and bird-warble of the non-human, with the pressing, crowding, numinous voices of the dead, always just out of earshot.

Sally Ann McIntyre, January 2023.

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Jen Callaway is a Naarm/Melbourne (AU) based musician, sound and performance artist, and photographer, raised in various parts of Lutruwita/Tasmania. With a special interest in psychodynamics, hauntology and conservation, current projects include bands Is There a Hotline?, Propolis, Snacks and Hi God People.

https://linktr.ee/jencallaway

Credits:
Jennifer Callaway: composition, recording, editing, images
December 2022-January 2023

“I cannot gather formal consent from a bird or rock, believe me, I have tried. It remains all too easy for the act of field recording to be deemed inconsequential, for nature and the environment to be treated as a limitless resource. Yet if we are to continue to record and represent lifeworlds beyond ourselves and the environments in which so much change is occurring, we must also consider how such complex entanglements can be unpicked. What concepts and practices are required to examine the animal voice in terms of rights? What happens when we apply a culture of finitude to the soundscape itself?”
– Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice.

“A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.”
– Walter Benjamin, fragment from The Arcades Project

tracing the source of the signal only opens the noise of the field (talking to the lyrebird about copyright) is a site-specific critical field recording research project conducted as fieldwork by radio cegeste in the location of Sherbrooke Forest, the Dandenong Ranges National Park, in Wurundjeri Country, about an hour out of the city of Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. 

The project traces critical histories of field recording and their relationship to broadcast via a particular vein of pioneering Australian broadcast and field recording experiments beginning in June 1931, and conducted throughout the 1930s. In this period, the nascent development of Modernist audio transmission and storage technologies became momentarily fascinated with the recording abilities of a particular ancient, local bird species, the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae.

In their paper, “First Sound Recordings of the Lyrebird,” Peter J. Fullagar and Ederic S. Slater compile a useful evaluative overview of this history. They describe the first recording (on the optical soundtrack of film) and the first (non-live) transmission: “The first sound recording in Australia of a wild bird was made 28 June 1931. On that day the song of the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae was preserved on sound-film in Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Australian Sound Films Ltd. made this historic recording with the assistance of Ray Littlejohns who was at the time completing a film on lyrebirds. The recording was broadcast during the evening of 2 July 1931, from a radio station in Sydney. Until this time all attempts at recording the song of the Superb Lyrebird in the wild had been frustrated by lack of suitable equipment with all previous efforts being of unacceptable quality.”

These field experiments went on, and a subsequent session produced the first Australian commercially available sound objects documenting the vocal abilities of a wild bird: “The recording used in the production of a gramophone record was made on 29 May 1932; repeating the field recording methods used in 1931. This record was issued in late 1932 or possibly not until 1933. Further recordings on sound-film were made in Sherbrooke Forest; one of special interest being a 45 minute recording made in 1934 which was subsequently used in preparing the soundtrack for the film on lyrebirds produced on behalf of the Commonwealth Government by Ray Littlejohns.”

But the 1931 experiments also included live transmissions from the field: “The first direct broadcast of the song of the Superb Lyrebird went to air on Sunday morning 5 July 1931, following some earlier test transmissions in Melbourne. This broadcast, by the Australian Broadcasting Company, was made from Sherbrooke Forest with various telephone and land-line connexions making it possible to relay the signal for simultaneous transmissions out of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide radio stations.”

The July 5th transmission also reached further, across Bass Strait to Tasmania: “Reception was hailed as excellent; indeed, reception of this transmitted signal in Tasmania allowed for re-transmission from a radio station in Hobart.” It was also heard live across the dateline: “A short wave overseas transmission of the broadcast on 5 July 1931 was provided by Amalgamated Wireless (A’asia) Ltd. and reception was confirmed, at least, from North America. Broadcasts of Superb Lyrebird song from Sherbrooke Forest were transmitted in 1933 and 1934, including further short-wave overseas transmissions.”

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In June 2016, during the depths of winter (which is Lyrebird breeding season), I traveled to the Sherbrooke forest on an initial field trip to conduct the first of a series of sonic re-mediations understood as “failed nature documentaries” that critically intervened into the above histories, undergirded by an exercise in investigative biomedia archaeology, researching and recording the site of the 1931 and 1932 recordings and broadcasts of the first wild bird to be captured by sound recording in Australian media history.

I took with me on this trip an ‘original copy’ (contradiction intended) of the 1932 gramophone record (from my own collection), which was one tangible object that emerged from these initial early twentieth-century collisions of site, species, mediated listening, and technological invention, as well as a gramophone player on which to play back this record to the (presumed – Lyrebirds are extremely territorial, and don’t roam far, a fact reflected in the culturally-transmitted content of their sonic repertoire over generations) descendants of the single Lyrebird captured on it. In this exercise I was assisted by members of the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group in (approximately) identifying sites, and while in the area I also joined their dawn survey session the next day, and recorded the sounds of these dedicated citizen scientists in their work, as well as the dawn chorus of Lyrebirds in the forest.

The 1932 record, recorded on the 29 May and released later that year or early the year after, is credited to “Herschells Pty Ltd. Sound Picture Producers Melbourne, recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns, member of Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. Dialogue by Mr. Alfred L. Samuel.”

From the first pressing of the record’s original wrapper (beautifully illustrated with a drawing of a lyrebird), we can read a description of the bird it presents to home listeners, far from the Dandenong forests: “His mimicry is almost uncanny and in addition to his wonderful repertoire you will hear above the roar of the wind in the forest, perfect imitations of – the Butcher Bird, the Kookaburra, the Australian Thrush, the Whip Bird, the chuckle of a flock of Crimson Parrots, the Pilot bird, the Black Cockatoo, the Honeyeater… You will also distinguish what appears to sound like a man hammering a fence, a water pump in action, a Dog barking the warning cry of a White Cockatoo, the chuckle of a domestic Fowl and a man whistling for his Dog.”

Side A of this recording is a voiceover narrative, which functions to construct a setting of romantic wilderness, a framework into which a recording of a single lyrebird is placed, a “wild Australia” in contrast to the home listener’s position in their domestic sitting room: “Don’t forget that what you are about to hear”, the male voiceover says, is “a bird singing its own wild song,” with “the nearest human being almost a quarter of a mile away.”

Side B of this recording comprises a demonstrative cataloguing of examples of the lyrebird’s mimicry. The record’s narrator, in introducing each of these in systematic fashion, describes the lyrebird as “Australia’s greatest mocking bird”

The record is copyrighted as follows: “Melbourne: Herschells Pty Ltd, 1932. Recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia, under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns. Must not be sold below price fixed by Copyright Owners. Must not be used for Radio Broadcasting or Publicly performed.”

No-one apparently asked the Lyrebirds whether they had given copyright clearance for their sounds. I thought it would be interesting, in the service of a critical field recording practice attuned to the ethical implications of sonic collection and in deference to the Lyrebirds themselves as superior sound recordists, to take it back to the forest to see what they had to say about this.


In the re-recording I made on this initial field trip, the 78rpm record was taken back to the place where it was recorded (as closely identified as I could manage, with the help of several books and the local knowledge of citizen-scientist and Dandenong Ranges resident, Jan Incoll) and played to this site over 70 years later, to produce a new series of residues of its playing to living Lyrebirds (a demonstrative playback conducted without human listeners apart from myself), who are presumed to be direct descendants of the historically recorded bird.

Listening back to the recording I made that day, the calls of various distant and close Lyrebirds in the present time of the 2016 recording echo that of the 1932 bird, their long-dead ancestor on the shellac record “singing its own wild song,” but they also overspill the record’s narrative framing and the limited capture and playback technology of the early twentieth-century. They emerge with startling clarity, to answer, to speak back, to include their own mimic-voices in the re-recording, and to perhaps reinvent the one-way exploitative tendencies of field recording practice itself, looping back time, listening and ancestry. Maybe, given their own incredible skills as “nature’s tape recorders,” they might even choose to one day include the recorded voice of their ancestor, filtered through human listening and the artifactual and temporal constraints of recording media, in their own future transmission (broadcast/reception) space.

Re-listening to this mise-en-scene within this half-hour composition, the Lyrebirds can be heard (as in a series of folk “rounds”), to “mock” the plummy British-inflected radio voice of the 78rpm record’s narrator as he praises them for their mocking-bird abilities, and to exceed his efforts to systematically set out each incidence of mimicry as an audio catalogue, frozen in time, in turn spilling over the three-minute time limit of a 78rpm record, to sing for the duration of the half-hour radia piece. The collision of the two timeframes – 1932 and 2016 – destabilises both the constructed soundscape and the integrity of the record, and the integrity of the location/field recording on-site. All the sounds for this experimental documentary were recorded on-site. Other sounds include wind in the trees, human voices (of passing tourists), rain and other species of birds, and myself, whispering a repetition of the voice-over narrative of the record within the forest site in earshot of living Lyrebirds, half lo-fi David Attenborough, half Australian Gothic, wrangling field recording and gramophone equipment by myself in the torrential rain, covered in leeches, almost a century later. This is layered with some audio of the volunteers from the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group finishing their annual dawn count. The Lyrebirds, however – their ancient culture positioned at the very beginning of the emergence of passerines – have the last (untranslatable) word.

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Many thanks to Jan Incoll (a.k.a “The Lyrebird Lady”) and all involved with the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group for the dawn cups of billy tea, the companionship, and the tolerance of microphones.
This project was partially developed while an artistic fellow at the State Library Victoria 2018-19.
It was conducted on the lands of the Wurundjeri people (Woi-wurrung language group), who are the Traditional Custodians of Melbourne and surrounding lands. In creating this work I pay my respects to all indigenous elders, past present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.

MP Hopkins, Page 38 (language wrinkles) (2022)
 

skimming the edge of voices that can’t…

voices that can’t comprehend the conditions for mirroring…

the word as it clears itself…

 language wrinkles in an empty bed…

engraving a long exit from memory…

 a fragile memory finds a…

words simmered in three days of wind…

 transcription as an instrument of expulsion…

MP Hopkins’ Page 38 (language wrinkles) is an exercise in spatially-decentred radiophony and poetic indeterminacy. It builds an intimate architecture of Hertian space in order to interrogate and unravel ideas of the broadcast voice as one-way transmission, setting in motion a series of ellipses and feedback loops. Using radio as both medium and method, a page from an evolving text score the artist has been writing since 2018 is vocalised and sent into the aether, an open-ended process incorporating several mediating techniques that work sequentially to further multiply and distribute: live FM radio improvisations that function as feedback systems rerouting signals through multiple sources that emerge again, transfigured, within the same on-air broadcast; low power FM transmissions and spatially-located arrays of small receivers channelling playback through an echo-chamber of domestic activity, the artist recording his own listening-to and listening-with. Anna Friz, in her 2009 essay Transmission Art in the Present Tense, writes of contemporary transmission art practice’s consistent interest in polyvalent transception, stating that “a transceptive approach to transmission is not only a statement (“I am”), but also an orientation toward active, engaged listening: a question asked, however conditionally (“who’s there”)? Transmission is understood not only as a radial description of space, but a circle of relationship.” Echoing this approach, MP Hopkins writes of Page 38 (language wrinkles), that “My intention was to confuse the time and space of when the work began and when it was being heard, a blurring of transmission and reception, (…) my role as the one transmitting and receiving was meant to be somewhat collapsed into a repetitively revised action where speaking and listening to that activity was simultaneous; talking with/to/through myself via the radio whilst also listening to myself and re-recording that – a transceiving activity.”

– Sally Ann McIntyre, February 2022

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Page 38 (language wrinkles) was commissioned for the Radia network and Radio One91FM, Dunedin, New Zealand, January 2022.

MP Hopkins is an artist working on Gadigal and Wangal land in Sydney, Australia that makes audio, performance, radiophonic, and textual works. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and verbal notation within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways. Hopkins has released recordings with Penultimate Press, Canti Magnetici, Tahalamos, Mappa Editions and Regional Bears. He has presented projects for the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever, and The Make it Up Club. International appearances include Café Oto, UK; LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore; Les Ateliers Claus, Belgium; TUSK Festival, UK; Colour Out of Space Festival, UK; and he has produced radiophonic works for Radiophrenia, Kunstradio, and the Radia network.

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Conditioning Silence: a sound recording for the living and the dead  

“Towards the end of 2020, about a month after our (Melbourne’s) 111-day lockdown, my brother passed away in his single-room apartment in a rooming house for people requiring special care. He was a brilliant, troubled and intense person who had a profound influence on my life. 

In the days following his death, my mother and I went to his apartment to retrieve some of his possessions and finalise his tenancy. Stepping into his room proved to be one of the most intense experiences of my life. His presence lingered on through his strong odour and his highly idiosyncratic and personal selection and assemblage of various objects scattered around the room. The whole experience felt like I was trespassing into someone’s mind and world – a world which would normally demand some sort of invitation and regulation.  

After our initial visit, I had a strong urge to come back to his room alone, with no criteria or time constraints, and just sit and meditate; attempt to experience the space as he arranged it, as he lived it, and in doing so attempt to connect with him on some level one last time.  

Two days later, in 35 degrees heat, I went back to his room and sat down on his red lounge chair; my feet resting on the spot where he most likely took his final breaths. As I fell into a state of meditation, I couldn’t help but drift off and inadvertently focus my attention on the sounds of the busy world emanating from the other side of his window: the passing of traffic, the brakes and compressors of busses and trucks, car doors shutting, sirens, birds, wind in the trees, people going about their daily lives with their own rhythms and objectives.  After focusing on this busyness, I began to develop an appreciation for the contrasting yet interconnected acoustic conditions of his room which possessed a perfect stillness, a serenity, a sense of containership. A sense which spoke of protection, privacy, belonging and home.  

My attention then drifted towards the sounds emanating from his door and walls. The sounds of a semi-private residential rooming house: the faint echo of footsteps, music playing, elevator bells, residents pottering about, conversations, etc,. Whilst subtle and faint, these sounds were charged with a particular level of intimacy, delicacy and vulnerability. 

At this point, I started to become consciously aware of myself listening and realised that this listening was unlike anything I’d experienced before. The outside world appeared to have slowed right down and my auditory perception seemed to be completely defined by the withdrawn and solitary conditions of my dead brother’s room. No longer was I implicated with the world at large, with its rhythms, concerns and demands, but rather I was momentarily enmeshed in a liminal space between the living and the dead. A one way space  in which I could observe without the relational constraints of being observed.  

With this sonic placement in mind, I then started to wonder how such sounds may have presented themselves in the final moments of my brother’s life. What meaning might they have possessed? What weight might they have carried? What stories might they have told?  In pondering these questions, I was suddenly hit with an acute realisation that all these public, semi-private, private and so called ‘mundane’ urban sounds were in fact absolutely extraordinary; possessing all the secrets, knowledge and intricacies of our universe and just as magnificent and precious as anything one could ever imagine. And,  just like the incomprehensible rhythms and actions of my brother’s life, these sounds in no way needed qualifying or explaining. They were perfect as they were and appeared to exist well beyond the boundaries of my own level of comprehension and appreciation.   

The next day I decided to come back and record his room in order to hear what sound the microphone could shed on the situation. I recorded myself both observing a period of silence and recounting out loud these very reflections from a range of different acoustic perspectives in his space. Including, a stereo room recording using two spaced omnis, the sound of my own body using a geophone, the sound of his walls and floor recorded through a contact mic, weighted down by some of his personal possessions.   

These recordings don’t seek to offer a morbid representation of listening in the final stages of one’s life, but rather can be heard ­­ as an exercise in searching for sound in a special place and then reconnecting to that place through the body or prism of written sound.” 

This work is a precomposed iteration of a performance piece first realised as part of Starlings – Inhabitation Spatial Sound Showcase at McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, Langwarrin, Victoria, 27 February, 2021.

Dedicated to my loving brother Maurice Kay. 

– Martin Kay, 2021. 

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Martin Kay is a Melbourne-based sound artist whose current interests lie in producing environmental sound recordings that can be understood as coming from a type of second person perspective; charged with a degree of emotional resonance and psychological alterity. Through employing a technologically limited (recording focused) approach, he strives to experiment in-situ with a range of recording techniques that produce estranged representations of the environments and situations that he engages with, providing a material body through which to consider and reimagine his surrounds.

Martin’s works have been published through 3LEAVES, AVANTWHATEVER, BCSC, and/OAR, Earwitness, Herbal, MOOZAK and Espaces Sonores.

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VOICES:

Tilly-Juls
Warwick Fullford
Samaan Fieck
Jane Michaelis
Alan Steele
Sheng Yan
Peter Emptage
Anatol
Cricket
Berri
Hunter

Thank you: Mark Groves, Sally Ann McIntyre.

Mastered by Joe Talia.
Dedicated to W.G Fullford.

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Fragments of these recordings first appeared:

C.C.P, Bin Lang Tourism as part of Specimen, curated by Giles Fielke, 2017.
The Quarry, Remain In Light, curated by Joseph Norster, 2019.
Red Wine and Sugar, A Population of Indoor Cats (Index Clean)
Red Wine and Sugar, Lake/Wildflower (Thalamos)
Red Wine and Sugar, Benchmarks/Stark (Ongoing Discipline)

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Monday

Speaking: Only that which has sense and meaning should come from the lips of the
person who strives for higher development. All talk for the sake of talk (for example,
killing time) is harmful in this respect. The usual kind of conversation, in which
everything is muddled together, should be avoided. One should not, however, avoid
intercourse with others. It is just during this intercourse that speech should
gradually become meaningful. All speech and answers should be carefully
considered. Never talk without a reason (rather remain silent). Try to use neither too
many nor too few words…

… the propagation of man will be intimately connected with the organ of the
larynx… It will be the reproductive organ of the future…

– Rudolf Steiner

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This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2021
(Include filler words (um, ah), nonverbal communication, and false starts)
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:00:17].
Speaker 2:
Instead of what was it? I was thinking what [inaudible 00:00:26].
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:00:26].
Speaker 2:
Okay. And then I thought it didn’t make sense because they were [inaudible
00:00:33].
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:00:33]. What we’re doing. [inaudible 00:01:03].
Speaker 2:
That’s really good.
Speaker 1:
And [inaudible 00:01:10].
Speaker 2:
That’s too much [inaudible 00:01:12].
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:01:12] be honest, [inaudible 00:01:12].
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
Accept others [inaudible 00:01:44] for what they are. [inaudible 00:01:44]. But
yeah, we can all be held, held [inaudible 00:02:03] by the quality [inaudible
00:02:07]. I know that [inaudible 00:02:14]. It’s hard to put into words.
Speaker 2:
What did [inaudible 00:02:17].
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:02:21]. That’s what we really feel. [inaudible 00:02:35].
Speaker 2:
This man is old.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:02:57]. We clean the house each day and then we also [inaudible
00:03:07].
Speaker 2:
That man is old.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:03:08] day consists of cleaning up the house in the morning, which is
[inaudible 00:03:10].
Speaker 2:
That man is old.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:03:19].
Speaker 2:
He’s next to another bald man.
Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 00:03:25] and kitchen and laundry.
Speaker 2:
Another old man next to it.
Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 00:03:35] cleaned up.
Speaker 2:
Another old man next to it.
Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 00:03:37] clean up we prepare the lunch each day.
Speaker 2:
Another old man beside.
Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 00:03:43] slow down a bit and odd jobs around the place.
Speaker 2:
Another old man in the side.
Speaker 1:
[crosstalk 00:03:49] put you onto someone else.
Speaker 2:
Eight hours later.
Speaker 3:
It’s really wonderful working the finance group. I know every meeting we have
there, which is on Tuesdays mornings, I mean, one of the things we try to really do
is just tune into that energy of finance and [inaudible 00:04:14] through finance and
money and that whole area. Really try and transfer the thought forms that have
been built up with the whole energy of money. And try to move into a deeper
experience knowing it’s just an energy that can flow through us. I mean, I truly say
that I do look forward to the finance meetings because they bring up so much to
look at [crosstalk 00:04:38] that area. One of the recent things we’ve come to really
experience here is that flow [crosstalk 00:04:48] signing checks, it’s really just a
wonderful kind of [crosstalk 00:04:51]. And so, I think my, I thank God I suppose
[inaudible 00:04:57] for that experience within [inaudible 00:04:59].
Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:04:59] pile of timber and found a red belly black snake. It crawled
under the rest of the timber and he’s been there all day and talking to me. I haven’t
done much today.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:25].
Speaker 6:
Find a way to turn the topic towards yourself.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:28].
Speaker 6:
If you do it this way I’ll give you money.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:37].
Speaker 6:
Internet café [inaudible 00:05:40].
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:41].
Speaker 6:
So much. Completely wasn’t-
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:47].
Speaker 6:
Why is this useful?
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:05:48].
Speaker 6:
Like, music for children’s books and CDs. Teach guitar.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:06:08].
Speaker 6:
Why is this useful?
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:06:56].
Speaker 6:
Because it’s so facetious. [inaudible 00:07:04] even one cigarette.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:07:11].
Speaker 6:
God told you to give that [inaudible 00:07:41].
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:07:41].
Speaker 6:
you know you’ve been [inaudible 00:07:41].
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:07:41].
Speaker 6:
Sexual predators.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:07:53].
Speaker 6:
All that Julia Roberts stuff.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:07:59].
Speaker 6:
When I found my strength I received so much.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:08:10].
Speaker 6:
30,000 [inaudible 00:08:11].
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:08:11].
Speaker 6:
Also, a very beautiful, classical [inaudible 00:08:25] guitars.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:08:39].
Speaker 6:
[inaudible 00:08:39] the window and step on the gas.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:08:39].
Speaker 6:
You’re really close to him.
Speaker 7:
Also, just um, recently we acquired a new room, a lounge room. Um, for a long
time actually we haven’t had a lounge area in the house. It’s just been a dining
room has been a general meeting ch- chatting place. Um, we have a very original
farm house. It has two rooms in it, two old rooms, which has just been renovated
with the help of others. Um, that was the main focus for the lounge room. It’s really
beautiful how that’s sort of come along and really um, provided a place for people
to sit in a more relaxed environment and this last couple of weeks we’ve been
making cushions and dying, doing some tie dying and we like to go and sit as a
group and [inaudible 00:09:56]listen to the tapes. It becomes sort of like a
endurance exercise. And um, some of us end up staying for days and the others
bring food and water and ah, um…
Speaker 8:
[inaudible 00:10:20] the ground, ground, ground, ground. The ground, ground,
ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground,
ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground, ground,
ground, ground, ground, [inaudible 00:10:20]. Drink a glass. Drink. A drink. A drink.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:10:20].
Speaker 6:
‘Cause these girls are so lazy.
Speaker 9:
Also, just um, recently we’ve just um, acquired a new room, a lounge room. For a
long time actually we haven’t had a lounge area in the house. It’s just been the
dining room has been the general meeting and chatting place and um, we have an
old, um, old, original farmhouse. It had two rooms in it, two old rooms which have
just been renovated with the help of others, with the main focus for the lounge
room and um, it’s- it’s- it’s really beautiful how that’s sort of um, come along and
really, um, it’s providing a place for people to, you know, sit in a more relaxed
environment. Um…
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:12:12].
Speaker 8:
36 degrees.
Speaker 10:
[inaudible 00:12:19]. I am a breath of air and lung is [inaudible 00:12:27]. If I grasp
this I know myself in the spirit of the world.
Speaker 11:
[inaudible 00:12:49]. Oh my God. I just had the worst [inaudible 00:13:06].
Speaker 12:
[inaudible 00:13:06] dropped by.
Speaker 11:
I just had the worst thought.
Speaker 13:
What?
Speaker 11:
Imagine if some fucking weird malfunction thing happened and the door just
fucking opened?
Speaker 10:
Articulate fuck.
Speaker 11:
[inaudible 00:13:26]. It’s all the way up to [inaudible 00:13:33].
Speaker 10:
With [inaudible 00:13:38] eyes.
Speaker 11:
I really recommend people…
Speaker 10:
I say breezy black veins is now a thick black air. And in my lungs you are just
coming out of a dirty coat.
Speaker 11:
Drink.
Speaker 10:
All the time like a sliced fly. (singing). [inaudible 00:15:17].
Speaker 11:
Blue mesh. [crosstalk 00:15:34] are back. I’ll take one home to my daughter.
Sealed square plastic bag.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:17:16].
Speaker 11:
Dropped from the crane’s cock pit.
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:17:16].
Speaker 12:
[inaudible 00:17:16]. She’s fucking asleep. [inaudible 00:17:16].
Speaker 6:
I don’t know that. [inaudible 00:17:17] I can look it up really quickly. What is it?
Speaker 5:
[foreign language 00:17:27]. Aggressive time.
Speaker 6:
I think I’ve got it. Yeah.
Speaker 5:
Grab my bag and take it out slow.
Speaker 6:
[crosstalk 00:17:47].
Speaker 5:
It’s like a helicopter, but it’s a bit close.
Speaker 6:
[foreign language 00:17:56].
Speaker 5:
I don’t think it’s that much [inaudible 00:17:57]. I just want to get on with my life.
Speaker 8:
Lunch break.
Speaker 5:
[inaudible 00:18:09] fucking grab my [inaudible 00:18:14]. Just out of nowhere. I
don’t know how she does [inaudible 00:18:36] falling asleep. [inaudible 00:18:36].
Looks like it’s going to [inaudible 00:18:46]. Anyway, I’m a [inaudible 00:18:50]
fucking over it so there’s not [inaudible 00:18:59]. I’m hearing this sound like… I
can tell it’s not a helicopter because it sounds very close and if it was a helicopter
I’d feel it- feel a breeze in face.
Speaker 5:
I’m not sorry for what I’ve done.
Speaker 8:
It’s not [inaudible 00:19:40].
Speaker 14:
[inaudible 00:21:50] Australian scene out the window. In case you don’t meet our
three little three year olds, but the nut brown bodies, naked as can be, fully out
there with the birds flying over head, hoses in hand, [inaudible 00:22:02] each
other. Their blond heads and smiling faces and scampering little legs out there
they’re really delightful across the green field. They’re having a really wonderful
time.
Speaker 8:
Oh God, it’s like [inaudible 00:22:31].
Speaker 15:
I think the last few months in the garden have been a- a period of a lot of ah, inside
growth [inaudible 00:22:38] in the garden.
Speaker 16:
A lot of cabbages would agree with that.
Speaker 15:
We’ve been getting a lot of vegetables too from the garden. But, for myself I’ve
been away probably [inaudible 00:22:50] past three months. And going to
[inaudible 00:22:55] convention in Adelaide and a few other things. But ah, I think
it’s been a lot of sorting out in my head of what I really want to do and where I
should be. And it’s become clear all the time. So it’s really great to be back and
starting again finally at [inaudible 00:23:23], being here more permanently. But, ah,
we also acquired a member in the garden lately [inaudible 00:23:26] harvester.
Which, ah, for the amount of land we’ve got here and the size of the garden ah, it
really helps us tremendously to be able to get mulch for the garden [inaudible
00:23:38] the grass at the same time.
Speaker 15:
Being in a sub-tropical area the grass just grows over your head [inaudible
00:23:49].
Speaker 16:
Actually I think that’s exaggerated a tiny bit. (laughs) the grass grows quickly.
Speaker 15:
Well, it’s [inaudible 00:23:56] grass and it- it really grows fast. But the idea of
[inaudible 00:23:59] cut the grass over a big area and give us more park space. We
also mulch the ground, and we’ve got about, getting towards an acre of garden.
And basically it, our garden [inaudible 00:24:15] three or four people and it keeps
us pretty busy. And so had [inaudible 00:24:26]. The greatest bit of manifestation
we’ve done since we manifested homeland. [inaudible 00:24:32] we should be able
to keep the garden not only as a dynamic for [inaudible 00:24:39] garden, but also
not ever increasing awareness [inaudible 00:24:44].
Speaker 17:
[inaudible 00:24:44].
Speaker 2:
Prolong the extension of your [inaudible 00:25:15] sides of her mouth [crosstalk
00:25:16].
Speaker 18:
And the fluid streams into the body when awakening and streams out of the body
when falling asleep.
Speaker 2:
[crosstalk 00:25:29].
Speaker 18:
So that your nose gets pushed into your anus [inaudible 00:25:37] just to put out
your flaming kidneys.
Speaker 2:
[inaudible 00:25:41].
Speaker 18:
And you eat what you speak, like a [crosstalk 00:25:48].
Speaker 2:
[crosstalk 00:25:49] 200 meters [inaudible 00:25:51].
Speaker 18:
Eating your tongue and spitting and cleaning salt.
Speaker 2:
[crosstalk 00:26:00].
Speaker 18:
Body goes to [inaudible 00:26:03] and more before I want it short. I just say
[inaudible 00:26:12] like that. [inaudible 00:26:18] and the end falls [inaudible
00:26:24] giving birth to lumps of [inaudible 00:26:28]. From mouth to mouth,
confusing [inaudible 00:26:32] buckets of [inaudible 00:26:34] bubbles. When I
want to eat I just say about the noisy snake that falls like greasy sausage on the
floor [inaudible 00:26:51] before I eat it. [inaudible 00:26:57]

– Homeland Community 1978 / Taiwan 2014 / Skenes Creek 2021.

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Samaan Fieck lives on Gadubanud land, north of the Southern Ocean, surrounded by the Otway Ranges. He is the host of More Than the Ear Can Hold, a weekly broadcast on Apollo Bay Radio (3abr). He has exhibited / performed throughout Australia, Taiwan, Japan and New Zealand at; The Centre for Contemporary Photography, ACMI, Lacking Sound Festival (Taipei), Treasure Hill Artist Village (Taipei), Avantwhatever Festival and CAST gallery (Hobart) among others. Since moving to the Otways he has provided the composition and sound design for The Sublime and Remain In Light, in collaboration with These Are The Projects We Do Together. He is an active member of Red Wine and Sugar, with Mark Groves.
http://www.samaanfieck.com/

—

“Space is a practiced place”.
– Michael De Certeau. Practice of Everyday life.

As discussed in George Perec’s Species of Spaces there are specific activities which we enact in a kitchen (preparing meals, washing implements used for cooking and eating), and others which take place in the bedroom (sleeping, sex, storing clothes). Domestic spaces are delegated function and furniture to match.

A bedroom is a room in which there is a bed; a dining-room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard; a sitting-room is a room in which there are armchairs and a couch; a kitchen is a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet; a bathroom is a room in which there is a water inlet above a bathtub; when there is only a shower, it is known as a shower-room; when there is only a wash-basin it is known as a cloakroom; an entrance-hall is a room in which at least one of the doors leads outside the apartment; in addition, you may find a coat-rack in there; a child’s bedroom is a room into which you put a child; a broom closet is a room into which you put brooms and the vacuum cleaner; a maid’s bedroom is a room that you let to a student.

So is place simply a space that we have designated a use or function? Or perhaps even the overlaying of a memory of use or function? However what was designed for utility, for convenience or for hygiene, can also become a behavioural trap. So what happens to a space if it no longer has a specific designated use or function? Or if we simply refuse to follow the rules of which activity takes place in which room? Does it revert from a place back to simply a space? How does that affect our behaviour within it?

HOMEWORK was installed as a 16 channel audio work, shaped for and situated within my own home. A series of speakers of various types, along side transducers, attached to and in contact with various things, were placed through out the eight rooms of the house. The work was presented at night, with the interior of the house in darkness. A series of small LED globes where connected into various speakers so once the signal sent to a speaker reached a certain volume level the globe would engage, sending flickering light throughout the house, following the various intensities of sound. An additional four LED globes places inside bottles, run from a separate inaudible audio signal, where placed around the house.

The sounds used for the original HOMEWORK installation were largely collected from empty spaces of various sizes and uses; an office; a public toilet; a small store room; a large ex-factory, now studio space; my home. A series of recordings were made through simple gestures enacted in these locations; shoes striking concrete; body and clothes brushing against each other; creaking of doors; or rubbing microphones into the carpet. Additional sounds were generated through amplifying infrastructure found in a given room (such as an air conditioning unit) and then feeding it through the rooms various resonant items or surfaces, such as a filing cabinet (via transducers), and then further recordings where collected.

All these sounds were then arranged to both sound out the physical space that is my house, but also to overlay a new fictional space over the domestic one. Allowing the domestic items and rooms to blend and merge with the sounds and activities of other rooms and spaces to create the experience of a new space within a pre-existing one. Physical rattles, knocks and hums present as traces of previous activity which never took place. Well not in this space anyway. Pointillist clicks and knocks sounded out the full dimensions of the space, played back through various horn speakers placed at the extremities of house. Transducers places within the two aluminium sinks found within the house, vibrating cutlery and resonating the hollow forms, creating various rattles, hums and percussive sounds. An additional series of speakers played back the resonance of other rooms; stray shufflings and textures moving throughout the space.

The piece presented here is not indented as a strict document of the installation. Rather recordings were made in the various rooms of the house and then re-combined and arranged in an attempt to give some sense of the shifting densities of sound and the new spaces they created. Small excerpts of the original recordings have also been used and edited into the mix to provide additional detail. Other than simple layering and arranging, no additional processing or treatments have been made to the recordings.

—

TARAB/eamon sprod explores re-contextualised collected sounds and tactile gestures formed into dynamic, psycho-geographical compositions inspired by discarded things, found things, crawling around in the dirt, junk, the ground, rocks, dust, wind, walking aimlessly, scratchy things, decay and most if not all the things he hears and sees. More than simply documenting a given site, TARAB is interested in a direct engagement with our surrounds, teasing out half narratives, visceral sensation, false leads and heightened awareness. Recent works have consisted of multi-channel, site specific performances and installations for speakers, transducers, found sounds, found objects, microphones and elements of the performance/installation space itself.

TARAB/eamon sprod has presented performances throughout Australia, Europe, Japan, Korea, North and South America; compositional works have been published on labels including Naturestrip (AU), nonlinear (AU), 23five (US), Unfathomless (BE), Aposiopese (FR), Swarming (FR), Cronica (PT), Semperflorens (RU) and also his own sonicrubbish imprint formed in 2018.

eamon sprod is currently undertaking a Masters by Research at RMIT in Melbourne, of which the ongoing HOMEWORK project is a component.

sonicrubbish.com

My Digital Music Collection is exactly what it says on the box: a list read out in a single take by New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based sound artist and podcaster Allanah Stewart “of all the albums I have on my computer at the moment.”

In this piece Allanah’s voice, self-recorded simply in a domestic room in front of the computer screen, turns the data of titles into a kind of wonky conceptual sound poetry, in which the names of obscure, fetishistic experimental music albums from New Zealand’s underground history bump up against more commercial releases, in a surprisingly intimate self-portrait.

Making a gently humorous case for the continued role of the DJ as loving listener, nerd, selector and collector in an age where automated-playlist bots increasingly program our listening spaces, and celebrating the role of the peer-to-peer file share in independent radio, My Digital Music Collection re-humanises the algorithm, returning lists of data back to a resolutely analogue, lo-fi, and radiophonic voice.

++++

“I have loads more digital music files in my life than I do physical releases. Unfortunately I don’t have enough of an income to keep up with the speed that I find new music and I don’t think I ever will. There’s so much good stuff out there to explore. I remember when I first started downloading music, when I was 11. My username on Napster was “Hellokittyfanman” and people would tease me on the chat rooms because they thought that I was a “man” who enjoyed hello kitty. But I was just kid that happened to be a hello kitty fan, man. These days I spend a bit of time roaming through Soulseek. I like digging through peoples files and just downloading stuff cause the name sounds cool. I suppose that trading files online has become my version of a record fair. I can find super rare rips of stuff without having to pay someone hundreds of dollars for a damaged tape that was originally sold for 3 bucks or something. It definitely removes the exclusivity of the whole process, though some might say it also removes some of the romance.” – Allanah Stewart

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Allanah Stewart is an artist from Aotearoa/NZ, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. As well as her work in various experimental music projects, she is the presenter of a monthly podcast radio programme called Enquiring Minds, hosted by Noods radio, which explores experimental music and its many crossovers. She recently finished a Master of Arts Therapy, and believes in the power of the arts. Dissecting drums, recording silly things, making music and eating chocolate keeps her going.

http://www.tapeways.com/p/enquiring-minds.html

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Charlotte Parallel: Deep time

Charlotte Parallel’s practice operates within a geophysical framework, engaged directly with physical properties and processes of the Earth. This has seen her explore areas such as sound waves, transduction, conduction, seismic vibrations, field-recording methods, and the relationship our bodies have to these processes. Parallel’s research phase is fundamental to the way in which her practice operates, revealing the potential of specific sites where she will record data, both above and below ground. This data, which is often inaudible in its raw state, is then translated into sound works. These works make visible/audible elements that are often overlooked, ignored or inaccessible in their original state, but constantly moving through and around our environment.

This exhibition explores the concept of deep time, or geologic time, in various locations across Ōtepoti Dunedin. Deep time, a concept developed in the late 18^th century (but not coined until the 20^th century), speaks to the way that key events and successive changes to the earth are measured over an expanded timescale, within the mineral make-up of the earth itself. This area of geological study provides a framework for engaging directly with the past, measuring cycles of sedimentation and erosion that have come to shape the land.

Parallel worked in collaboration with a seismologist, using sensors and computers to listen to and record the earth in sites across the city. Each site speaks to various stages of movement and distribution of earth including Te Wai o Tinirau / Makereatu / Blackhead Quarry, Walton Park Sand, Logan Point Quarry and in the base of various storm drains. In Deep time Parallel uses sound, accessed by the viewer through telephones, to analyse distinctive formational changes that have taken place within these sites – reminding us that the land is not static but ever-changing, responding and adapting to both organic and forced movement.

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Charlotte Parallel is a New Zealand artist based in Koputai Port Chalmers working in the fields of sculpture, sound, performance and collaboration. She has been exhibiting within New Zealand consistently over the last 16 years and internationally since 2010.

Deep time was commissioned by Dunedin Public Art Gallery, for the exhibition FOUR: Kim Pieters. Charlotte Parallel. Megan Brady. Aroha Novak, 25th Aug 2018 – 18th Nov 2018

images: Iain Frengley
text: Lauren Gutsell

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Deep time was conceived as an interactive installation, for one or many listeners. This edit by the artist was made especially for the international radia network, recomposing the work’s sites and sonic materialities as a piece specifically for the radiophonic context.

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