Category Archives: #33

Show 494 : AstroForestry by Antoine Bertin (Campus Paris)

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 The stories on audio tapes about forests I had been endlessly listening to as a child seemed completely out of date, and perhaps even out of place.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

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

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

Show 491: FROM CHINA by BUTTERLAND for radio x

radia season 33 – show #491 (radio x) – FROM CHINA
– playing from august 25 to august 31, 2014 –

FROM CHINA
by BUTTERLAND

An acoustic field trip through China and Chinese childhood.

FROM CHINA features Butterland’s radioplay “Childhood Stories”:

“Childhood Stories is an art project with sociological approach: it composes narrations of individuals about their childhood in order to create an authentic image of the social environment they grew up in. Therefore we gather material about childhood in a specific country by using a questionnaire. The answers are anonymized, translated and used as literary material, they are condensed or cut up, then arranged in a dramatic text – that’s Regina’s part. Christian composes the music using field recordings from the respective country. The result is an artistic documentary in form of an audio drama.
Childhood Stories China 2012 gives insight in the 1980s and 1990s in China’s urban middle class.” [R.D./C.M.]

Field recordings / montage / realisation: Christian Müller
Translations / script / female voice: Regina Dürig
Male voice: Miro Caltagirone

Butterland’s project “Childhood Stories” encompasses so far a radioplay in two different versions (German and English), a CD edition (published by edition fästing plockare in summer 2013), and a multi-channel installation (2013).
The German version of the radioplay “Childhood Stories China” has been awarded with jury’s prize in the category “Experimentelles” at the SonOhr Hörfestival 2014 in Bern, and it has been broadcasted by SWR2 in January 2014.
The radia edit FROM CHINA is based on the English version of the radioplay and comes with a special extra part based on field recordings from China.

Butterland
is the Switzerland based duo Regina Dürig and Christian Müller. Butterland works in the field of story and sound, their poetical and sculptural pieces seek an equal relation between music and literature, a mutual approach to narration and reduction. Christian Müller works as improvising electronic-musician, electro-acoustic bass-clarinettist and composer with a conceptual approach. Regina Dürig writes prose, prose miniatures and texts for music:
Find out more about their projects at www.butterland.ch

credits:
great many thanks to Butterland aka Regina Dürig and christian Müller for FROM CHINA!
the pictures are based on chinese fan art – more precisely: on photographs of ancient painted fans from china, “Landscape” by Dong Qichang (ca. 1590-1600, upside), “Landscape” by Jiu Jue aka Liu Jue (1438, middle) and “Landscape” by Li Liufang (1624, bottom), all of them today located in the Honolulu Museum of Art and their pictures graciously uploaded by the museum to Wikimedia Commons and credited to the PD.

metadata:
FROM CHINA
by BUTTERLAND
radia production: miss.gunst [GUNST + radiator x]
production date: august 2014
station: radio x, frankfurt am main (germany)
length: 28 min.
licence: (c) Butterland Regina Dürig & Christian Müller
www.radiox.dewww.gunst.infowww.butterland.ch

additional info:
includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english)

links:
radio x & radiator x: www.radiox.dewww.radiox.de/radiator-x
GUNSTradio & radiator x: www.gunst.infowww.gunst.info/radiator
Butterland: www.butterland.ch

Show 490: Hervé Moire & JPE for Jet FM

Live from Hervé Moire & Juan Pablo Espinoza for the Sonor Festival at the Blockhaus in Nantes (France).

Hervé Moire meets Juan Pablo Espinoza aka JPE for a live where different recordings are processed on live.
Hervé Moire is an électroacoustic musician self-taught, he composed 2 pieces published on the label Aposiopese. His musical universe is composed by field recordings, concrete sound recordings of different objects and acoustic instruments treated and confronted with electronic digressions.
JPE is a composer and a graphic designer working on multimedia and musical projects connected to improvisation, sound effects, electronic music and électroacoustic music. He learns electroacoustic music at the ENMP of Pantin (next to Paris) and composition in the center of Ianis Xenakis (CCMIX). One of its electroacoustic compositions appeared on the French label N-Rec. He is interested in the possible interactions between the music and the contemporary dance and the theater.

French :
Hervé Moire rencontre Juan Pablo Espinoza aka JPE pour un live où prises de sons diverses sont traitées en temps réel. Une imbrication de textures sonores où l’acoustique et l’électronique se fondent en différentes trames aux ambiances cinématographiques.
Hervé Moire est un musicien électroacoustique autodidacte auteur de pièces dont deux parues sur le label Aposiopese. Son univers est la rencontre entre field recording, prise de son concrète d’objets divers et d’instruments acoustiques traités et confrontés à des digressions électroniques.
JPE est compositeur et graphiste auteur des projets multimédias et musicaux liés à l’improvisation, au bruitage, à la musique électronique et électroacoustique. Installé à Paris en 1998 il suit le cours d’électroacoustique de l’ENMP à Pantin et de composition au Centre de Composition Musicale Ianis Xenakis (CCMIX) et de musique à l’image Cifap à Paris. Une de ses compositions électroacoustiques est apparue sur le label français N-Rec. Il s’intéresse aux interactions possibles entre la musique et la danse contemporaine et le théâtre.

Show 489: Birds of Marrakech by Radio Papesse

This week show come no where else than form our very own recorders.
It is a non-linear walk recorded during the opening days of the 2014 Marrakech Biennale.


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It all started from a terrace during the 2014 Bienniale opening days, then moved into the streets; among the crowd, the tourists, people wandering into new territories, just to find unexpected sounds and stories.
A quest that brought us into a misused theatre, then back to the streets, into the old town, where the ancient and the modern mix.
To hop into a taxi, where the outside noises slowly faded into soundart and migration stories; then back to where history meet the contemporary, in the frequencies of Marrakech cranes, into a lost flock, and the Muezzins’ prayers.
After days of wanderings and getting lost into the Marrakech dedalus, came an unexpected and healing encounter; but then, it is inevitable to end back again into the crowd until, just turning the corner, everything is relaxed and almost silent.
Just time for a mint tea and the birds come back in, so does the music, and the radios and the car horns.
The new birds of Marrkech.



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This show only uses raw field recordings, without any effect, and it is an invite to take your time and be taken into thin noises as well as deep drones, different languages and unreadable soundbites.

Among other things the field recordings include:
_ fragments of the preview-press-tour by Hicham Khalidi and Alya Sebti
_ live recordings of Clara Meister’s ‘Singing Maps and Underlying Melodies’ performed by Kamarstudios, Choeur des Maman Douées de Dar Bellarj and Si Mohamed Soudani
_ Shezad Dawood’s ‘In Towards the Possible Film’ (2014)
_ car recordings of Saout Radio ‘Ici.Maintenant.Où?’
_ Freq_out 10 soundcheck at Theatre Royal



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Show 488: Wie es vielleicht war by Nights im Bunker for Radio Helsinki

“Wie es vielleicht war” (“How it might have been”) by Nights im Bunker for Radio Helsinki, Graz – AT

“Nights im Bunker” is some sort of a mistery performance series that is performed once a month at the Forum Stadtpark – a place of production and presentation for contemporary art in Graz. “Wie es vielleicht war” (“How it might have been”) is a radio edit of different performances that the performers of Nights im Bunker did in the last two years.

Performers: Patrick Wurzwallner (drums), Arne Glöckner (guitar), Vera Hagemann (voice), Johannes Schrettle (text)

http://forum.mur.at/

Show 487: Teddy Love by Hans Kristen Hyrve for Radio Nova

Teddy Love by Hans Kristen Hyrve
for Radio Nova, Oslo

Teddy Love is a homage to modern urges. To your needs. To every listener’s distant longing. Do not resist interactivity; please answer when spoken to, please do as you’re told. That way our common pleasure will reach a modern kind of high.

Hans Kristen Hyrve makes short radio pieces for the National Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) on a daily basis. Composes music weekly.

Show 486: miraculous agitations by Dan Wilson for Resonance FM

Recorded in a single day, Dan Wilson introduces the possibilities of post-electronic music, taking the listener on a whistle-stop tour of trade waste bins with a view to discovering acoustic modules to electromagnetically scour for ‘miraculous agitations’: pleasing and unforeseen acoustic flourishes.

Dan Wilson is an award-winning electroacoustic composer, sound designer, writer, broadcaster and instrument builder. Currently Resonance104.4fm/ Sound and Music Embedded Composer in Residence. Mediadropping theorist, author of ‘Dropping Out’ (all copies now sadly impounded), the force behind Meadow House and Ashfordaisyak, etc.

http://miraculousagitations.blogspot.co.uk/

Show 485: Martin Anastasovski – Kyotech for Kanal103, Skopje

please allow me to introduce myself. my name is Kyo … O T to the E Ch and all you field recorders aint got nothing on me. my mids are non crispy my bass is deflated, in my ghetto foray i got all you wackstaz innundated. fuck all the species, my arc is riggedy, tell von mieses i only got in these crickets with no tickets. the corals are melting but so are my snickers, ghorals lick alkali salts while molten lava turns to basalt rock in a million years. alley kats in skopje city dont let me no sleep coz in the night they prowl the jungle deep, beep bleep i ride on a imaginary jeep while in the meantime human life is getting cheap. the marketplace is bustling with peppers and eggplants, wait until i bust these mushmulla in the cooler, counterfeit goods rock shutka like originals where the sun is beating down on the aboriginals, roma splendor galore tales of lore, lo and behold there is a wedding on a knoll. checking out, but theres no mic it went to record some workers on a strike. and out, but not so fast, the tao changed its mind and its ready for a fight, hold on tight, while you plug in deep, in the sounds of the ground where the slopes are steep and the dogs are belligerent like an action movie that is featuring, obliterating the face of the mind shazam wide open eye self esteem grind in a meat press like no free press get the fuck outa world this is spirits under duress. keep on hold on but dont put a condom on your head bcoz you cant see the glitter of the litter of this hydroponic transmitter.

https://soundcloud.com/kyotech

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.soundcloud.com%2Fkyotech&h=iAQFI-rmB