Category Archives: #28

Show 383: Dreams for Delia by Radio Valerie

In 1964 British composer Delia Derbyshire collaborated with the actor and director Barry Bermange collaborated on Inventions for Radio, a piece made from Bermange’s recordings of dreams. The dreams they collected were examined for common themes, and the sections relating to each theme were extracted from individual dreams and edited together into montages. The sections were Running, Falling, Land, Water and Colour. Derbyshire added eerie electronic drones.

Our piece, Dreams for Delia, is a re-staging of this piece, a kind of psychic group portrait. Radio Valerie’s listeners were invited to ring us and leave a voicemail message detailing one or more dreams. The themes which emerged from our listeners’ dreams were Friends, Families, Flying, Fear, Forgetting and Animals.

Melbourne composers who either had shows on Valerie or were otherwise connected with the station were then invited to compose music for one of the voice montages. The montages which – and composers who – made it into the episode were, in order:

Animals, Steven Harris

Fear, Byron Dean

Families, Jason Heller

and Flying, Marcus/Default Jamerson

Show 382: iT: “mouth sounds for heart beats”/”my two body are a buddy” by Radio Študent, Ljubljana

Photo: Nada Žgank

..it’s natural that every time the voice fades away with an exhale… that it disappears…it’s natural that the voices passes in and out of silence, that it holds onto, joins, disjoins with its opposite, that it exists with the opposite…its time exists and extends over the time of compressing the air out …when the air is pressed out, the voice is too…even when sipping air, it comes out as smothered creaking…the voice pushes itself against silence…its duration is between an inhale and an exhale…in between, it is cut off, interrupted, it breaks…it immerses itself in an inhale only to exhale… the unnatural is being born and is dying…

iT / Irena Tomažin is a dancer, performer and singer as well as being a postgraduate philosophy student at University of Ljubljana. Mostly working in dance and theater performances she collaborated with many different choreographers, directors and sound artist, performing in Slovenia as well as abroad in Europe and in Japan. In last 7 years she started to work more on voice – creating her own voice performances: “Hitchcock’s metamorphosis”, “Caprice”, “Caprice (re)lapsed”, “as a drop of rain into the mouth of silence”, “Splet okoliščin” with Josephine Evrard etc. With her solo project named “iT” for voice and dictaphones she works on her own experimental voice materials. As iT she has performed in Vienna, Berlin, Bratislava, Mostar, Belgrade (DisPatch), Budapest (UltraHang), Krakow, Koper, Ljubljana …

iT – Crying Games. »iT« is a large body of voices, intertwined into melodies, monologues, dialogues, taped and retaped into repeating loops, recorded over one another, blurred in noise or sharpened in isolation. There are voices from story fragments, torn from or placed into landscapes of songs and atmospheres. »Crying Games« are songs and spoken texts created since 2005, which have been reshaped through different improvisations and interpretations. Created from inspiration, drama texts, pop songs or mostly from »iT«’s experimenting with voices, they have gained independent acoustic worlds through dictaphones and tape recorders.

Radio Student. Based in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, founded back in 1969 in ex-Yugoslavia, with 24 hours program and more than 200 regular contributors today, Radio Student is one of the oldest and the biggest independent and non-commercial radio stations in Europe, with a long tradition in radio art and the diverse field of contemporary investigative art practices, especially throug Ministry of Experiment project in 90’s and 00’s, and today through our Open radio art theory investigative platform RADAR.

Show 380: Sounds of music by TEA FM

SOUNDS_OF_MUSIC_THE_MUSIC_OF_SOUND

What produces the music sounds?
What sounds are music to us?
In the next few minutes we will hear noises, voices, music …

All occurred as a result of musical creation, manufacture of instruments, vocal exercise.

We entered at the rehearsal room, the workshop of sounds coming out the pieces to be assembled in the assembly that is your head.
We talk with a luthier, maker and repairer of sounds. He tells us what it does and its noises betray him.
We went on tiptoe for the trial of a band of rock and roll and thus discover the sounds of music of the twentieth century.
Then, we will open the door of a composer of electronic music to listen and develop his work, the sound like his tools, which produce noise keyboards, synthesizers, computers …
Finally, we found that the sounds of music are intrinsically linked to the music itself.

Without these noises, music is not serious music.
Listen … and make noise.

Produced by Radio Creative School TEA FM.

Script and production sharing between Laura Romero, Daniel Canelo, Miguel Deza and Chuse Fernandez.
Postproduction by Chuse Fernandez.

Show 378: Truus Makes Waves by Truus de Groot

Truus Makes Waves

An Autobiographic opera by Truus de Groot

With:

Johnny Dowd    – presenter
Solex (aka  Elisabeth Esselink) – Instrumentation  on “NY NY”
Kathy Ziegler – Bontempi Organ on “Toilet Dame”
Analog Synthesizers sounds from Worm

Timeline

Intro by Johnny Dowd
Truus reads from Diary from 1980  (actual recording from 1980)
Truus reads from Diary from 1979
Song:  Done Me wrong Blues (recorded at WORM 2012)
Hoboken Street argument –   (actual recording from 1983)
Song:  Hoboken Runaround –  recorded in Hoboken 1983
Song:  NY NY – written in 1983 (recorded at WORM 2012) instrumentation by Solex
Song:  Seven Rounds  (recorded  at WORM 2012)
Song: Hoboken dirty Kids   – (actual recording from 1983)
Song:  Hector –  (actual recording from 1987)
strange Phone call  – >From Truus’ strange phone call collection
Song: Unlikely Crush – (recorded at WORM 2012)
Song:  Toilet Dame – (recorded at WORM 2012)
Closing words  by Johnny Dowd

Written by Truus de Groot (aka Geertruda De Groot Hrnjak) 2012

Truus Makes waves

An autobiographical opera  by Truus de Groot about her earliest years in the US.  Dealing with the isolation and loneliness through  her ongoing often humorous audio observations that she has collected over the years.

The piece starts out with Truus reading form her Diary in 1980, shortly before her departure to the US.  Just minor observations of a 20 year old, nothing special yet a moment in time.  Not really a clue she would be going to the US mere months later, never to call the Netherlands her home again.

It was an adventure looking back  for her, but at that time these were just impulsive decisions.  Never thinking twice, why am I doing this?  Is there future here??  What will I do?   Her first stop was a connection she made on a whim in Eindhoven, David Linton, who lived in Tribeca, NY.   His roommate was Lee Renaldo, who was at that time painting.     From there her US journey began.

In her isolation she could see the absurd humor of a culture that was so new to her.     The many hours spent just looking at people, their silly habits, crazy public fights, moody encounters, make this opera a time capsule of sorts.   It also conveys her frustrations of being harassed endlessly by the prying eyes of males that feasted their eyes on a beautiful yet naive young immigrant.

However bothersome that might have been, Truus always translated it into humorous  musical reflections.    It is not dark yet perhaps a bit cynical, but full of irony.

It travels  from 1979 to up to around 1990’s

Show 377: Nature Tones For Mental Therapy by Richie Herbst

“Nature Tones For Mental Therapy” is a collage of field recordings of the soundcheck and surroundings of the “Hommage á Sun Ra” open air festival in Nickelsdorf / Austria (june 2012).
In a very harmonic atmosphere, you will listen to the nature; like birds chirping, kids playing and singing, people meet each other, skoaling, … on the other / outer side Marshall Allen, Juini Both, Ddkern and Philipp Quehenberger doing soundcheck, all over the place, for their upcoming (and amazing, btw) gig at night.

Show 376: accumool by Matze Schmidt

Is »accumoolation« just the accu-moola for vintage lean production?

Accumulation seems to find its expression sometimes directly in instruments and media. Loopers boosted one-man bands and street music stars over the last years. They enable to “play with oneself” by an implemented write/read and repeat function that allows to double productivity and voluminousness. They are the incorporated “Single-Labourer-Working-In-Teams-Unit”. How does it sound to batch and batch and batch by means of this mean of production?
http://www.n0name.de/38317/accumool/accumoolnew.pdf
Matze Schmidt is an German Artist, using web and radio for mirror-works.

Show 375: DNT GVP by Neven Lochhead (CFRC)

“DNT GVP” is a composition by experimental musician and filmmaker Neven Lochhead, who is based out of Kingston, Ontario. Like much of Neven’s recent work, DNT GVP concerns itself with abstraction and experience of space. Clean guitar tones are played while sounds of Pond Inlet, Nunavut, a small hamlet in the arctic, surface to the ears between rests. A slight echo is applied to the sounds of the town, immediately informing that the sound is an abstraction. A complete and pure representation is always abstracted by the appearance of added audio. The landscape fades in and out of conscious listening. Later in the piece, a recording from an Italian language tape fades in, first appearing as part of the landscape itself – a distant radio playing through someone’s kitchen window. The sound of the tape increases, thickens and engulfs the impossible soundscape.

Show 374: radio d’oiseaux (kokako variations), by radio cegeste

Small, distributed in trees, in hollow logs and on the ground, a flock of radio receivers inhabits a forest area near a large native Rata tree on Kapiti, an island off the coast of the lower North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Slowly, the radios enter the soundscape of the surrounding biosphere, chime in with birdsong captured in field recordings, gathered in the same area on previous days, making audible the signal from a small-radius mini FM transmitter. Down the mountain, a young male Kokako has been calling for the last three months, unsuccessfully trying to attract a mate. The main thing he has been able to attract are the attentions of other, more common endemic forest birds, Tui and Bellbirds, who, being skilled mimics, have started to imitate his calls. Perhaps in response to such unwanted attentions, he has not been heard for the past week, but the radio remembers him, playing back his song in an evocation of both the long history of human vocalisation of birds in this place, and the birds’ own complex mimicry of each other.

Rarely heard but even more rarely seen in the wild, the Kokako, a shy inhabitant of deep forest, and one of New Zealand’s most endangered birds, whose calls have been described variously as “flute-like, organ-like, bell like, sweet, plaintive, haunting and ventriloquial”, has lived on this island since 1991, when thirty three birds were transferred from three remnant populations elsewhere in the North Island. These populations, artificially lodged together into a new environment, yet all sourced from different localities and having their own dialects, originally didn’t recognise each other as the same species, and so breeding was, understandably, unsuccessful. In the ensuing decades, it seems, the development of a ‘Kapiti dialect’ has emerged on the island, and the birds have begun to converse, and to breed, and become tentatively established locally. The South Island subspecies of the Kokako has been declared extinct, and until recently the North Island variant was declining toward the same fate, but in the last few years, due to such placement on offshore predator-free islands, the birds have become one of the recent success stories of New Zealand conservation species management.

A document of a single take performance with no human listeners, beginning and ending as an unadulterated recording of the sounds of the locale in which it was enacted, this mini FM transmission subtly weaves various other recordings from the same location at other times of day into the extant soundscape, a collected sound library begun with the very early morning chorus and progressing toward midday, the time when the piece was transmitted. Shifting sound tonalities are heard, these are entirely due to the aforementioned ‘flock’ of radios and how they are positioned in relation to the stereo microphones used to record the piece. Static is heard when the radios leave this radius of transmission, the territory of the signal marking its place in the forest with song, shards of noise signifying its breach, echoing its placement on an island in a biosecure, highly managed environment forever on the lookout for tears in the fabric, and also birdsong itself as a highly territorialised marker of location and identity. The chiming dawn chorus of bellbirds at the piece’s apex thins out to eventually become a duet of call and response in real time between a live Kokako, attracted by the transmission, and the radios switching off and on as they transmit the song of the same bird, a disjunctive ventriloquistic mediated discourse, not without its own poetry, bird and radio calling to each other for an extended moment over the thick native tree wooded valley.

radio d’oiseaux (kokako variations), through its fabric of forgetting and remembering, of dialect and localisation, ponders the hope for an environmentally aware media that doesn’t approach environment from the perspective of the covetous collector or become a mere one-way conduit for the human ear, but leaves the sounds where they are, taking the advice of the New Zealand environmental care code: Toitu te whenua (leave the land undisturbed), at the same time risking an indulgence of the radio’s secret fantasies of interspecies communication, of not only being a sender but also a receiver, of joining in with the chorus and listening to its localised specificity, of being part of the living soundscape rather than merely part of its museum.

—–

this live transmission was made into the bush at Rangatira on Kapiti Island, beginning at 12:20pm on Thursday the 21st May 2012.

Radio Cegeste 104.5 FM is a mini FM radio station hosted as a platform for radio art by Sally Ann McIntyre. Its projects and programmes cohere around a loose set of circumstances and proclivities, including site-specificity, nomadism, the collection of sound libraries, phonography, museology, memory, the haunted materiality of absent presence, old buildings and other historic sites, psychogeography, the performative fragility of small-scale transmission, bird migration and electromagnetism, the complex idea of ‘dead air’, the recorded and transmitted history of birdsong (sometimes also as a sonification of a New Zealand nationalism), and the possibility of an ecology of the radio that doesn’t represent unstable systems as functioning in eternal homeostasis. Her current residency on Kapiti Island, during which she is conducting research into the soundscape and investigating the potential for radio art as a form of fieldwork, is sponsored by the New Zealand Department of Conservation and Creative New Zealand, in association with the Kaitiaki o Kapiti Trust.