GAU ON : A warm night of September, swept by southern wind. Recorded by Antoine Bellanger in the night of septembre 24 to 25, 2020. GAU ON only exists in 100% recycled vinyl. The sleeve was linoprinted and screenprinted using as ink the ashes of pines fallen that night.
GAU ON : iraileko gau bat, haize hegoaren goxotasunean. Antoine Bellanger-ek grabaturik, Saran, 2020ko irailaren 24tik 25erako gauean. GAU ON bakarrik binilo birziklatu formatuan aurkitzen da. Azala linograbaketa moduan inprimatua da eta serigrafiatzeko tinta, gau honetan erori pinondo errautsekin egina.
GAU ON : Une nuit chaude de septembre balayée par le vent du sud. Enregistrement par Antoine Bellanger dans la nuit du 24 au 25 septembre 2020 à Sare. GAU ON existe uniquement en vinyle 100% recyclé. La pochette est imprimée en linogravure et sérigraphie réalisées à l’aide d’encre de cendres de pins tombés cette nuit là.
“Zunehmend schlechter” (“Increasingly worse”) is an absurd audio farce that came about after Kanak heard the phrase “increasingly worse” (in the media, in the supermarket, on the street) several times in one day in late 2020 regarding the pandemic. It’s not meant to downplay the crisis, but rather to provide a bit of humor in the face of an extraordinary situation. We are told that things are getting “increasingly worse”, we repeat that things are getting increasingly worse, therefore, they must be getting increasingly worse. Or: perhaps the pandemic is over (“Die Pandemie ist vorbei!”). Alas, no, in fact, things ARE getting increasingly worse…our first inclination was true. And round and round it goes …
The second part, “540,” refers to the sort of circles we’re running around in as we are confronted with this problem, both on personal levels and in terms of society at large. First we see it one way (180°), but then decide that maybe that first consideration was wrong (360°), but then actually decide that our first guess was actually right (540°). As Bernhard wrote so beautifully: The truth we know is logically the lie, which, by not getting around it, is in fact the truth.
A work for radio by Mark Vernon, winner of the 2020 Phonurgia Nova Award, prepared for Resonance FM. Magneto Mori is an exploration of tape recording as a form of memory storage. In this iteration the location is the Irish mountain town of Kilfinane. Using a portable reel to reel tape recorder sounds from around the town were recorded onto the first side of the tape over a two day period – dripping rain, creaky gates, car mechanics, drainpipes, shops, church bells, refrigerator cabinets, wind blowing through the trees, passing traffic, etc. were just some of the sounds encountered. On the second side were compiled voices of Kilfinane – extracts from the personal radio archives of Diarmuid McIntyre and Grey Heron Media that date back as far as twenty years or more. The recordings selected consisted mostly of local history, coverage of community events, news stories of local interest and interviews with a variety of Kilfinane residents. Using tape as an analogy for the frailty of human memory this tape was then cut into pieces of random length, freeing the sounds from their linear, chronological sequence. The tape cuttings were then intermingled with a collection of magnets that de-magnetise (thus erasing) portions of the tape. The tape (along with the magnets) was then buried in a hole in the grounds of the local school. After several days steeped in the earth of Kilfinane the remaining audio fragments were exhumed. Dirty, mangled and partially erased the tape was washed, dried and spliced back together in a random order ready for playback. This process of recording, emancipation from chronology, burial, erasure over time, unearthing and the reassembly of jumbled fragments for playback parallels the operation of memory and recall. Experience, retention, buried memories, forgetting, distortions, recall and chronological inaccuracies are all aspects of the human memory process. The main difference being that our memory is selective and plays an active role in what it chooses to remember or forget rather than the arbitrary procedures that are in operation here. Once the tape was cut into pieces there was no way of telling which fragments were which and in the process of splicing the tape back together the voice recordings gathered over a twenty year period became interspersed with the sounds of those two days spent making field recordings in the area. Further digital recordings were also made around the same location during the period of the tape’s interment. The contrast between these higher fidelity field recordings and the degraded analogue sounds added a further substrata of time to the process.
“Organizized” is a fragmented diary of radio pleasures in times of pandemic. Music and friendship when we needed them the most, improvised and recorded at the premises of Kanal 103 radio in Skopje.
In honor of 1st of May 2021, when the only squat in town turns 30.
Big love to all the beautiful people involved. Recorded and edited by Gjorgji Janevski Photo by Jelena Belikj
The core material for this project began with a selection from the Harvard Sentences, and then other materials including phrases from the Modified Rhyme Test, and panphones were added. This collage was then read aloud to an Android tablet and converted to a new text using Google speech to text software. The new text was read to the tablet and a second conversion was performed. That resulting text was then edited and had punctuation added.
For this iteration of the project, as a piece for radio, the source materials were reedited and rerecorded with contributions from a number of different voices. These were then layered and combined into a three-part sequence, where the sections are in a ratio of 4:5:2. Repeated beats and rhythms were used as a base, including a reference to the song Tom’s Diner, used in testing lossiness in the development of the MP3 file format. Questions of signal and noise, of message sent and message received, of the relationship of different voices to who and what is heard run through the text. It calls out to the listener, there is a message here. Can you hear? Can you tell what it is?
Thanks for their vocal contributions to:
Dante Lorenzo
Veronica Fazzio Welf
Sue Coulson
Shelley Hodgson
Thanks to Lucinda Guy and Chris Booth at Soundart Radio for inviting me to work on this.
MARK LEAHY is a writer and artist. From Ireland, he now lives in Devon. He works with textual practices and performance, using constraints and structuring rules, to cross or question category and genre divisions. Recent projects include ‘9×9: a set of poems under constraint’ (ArtsandCultureExeter, 2020), ‘Breath Pieces’ (Glasgow, June 2018); ‘telling time’ (Jamboree, Dartington, June 2018); ’threaded insert’ (Plymouth Art Weekender 2017; Cardiff, May 2018). Poems have appeared in Tentacular, Stride, Freaklung, Curly Mind, Other Room Anthology 8; Swatches was published by Acts of Language (2009), and Subject to Gesture by Dock Road Press (2017). Critical publications include essays in C21 Literature, Open Letter, Performance ResearchJournal and Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. He teaches part-time at University of Plymouth and Falmouth University, and works with a number of regional arts organisations. markleahy.net.
Un projet radiophonique documentaire et musical. La composition musicale a été entièrement créée à partir de sons domestiques collectés chez les habitants du quartier qui ont ouvert leur porte pour nous faire partager leur son de prédilection, favori ou redouté.
Cette approche vise à mettre en relation les sons de l’espace intime et la potentielle musicalité qui en découle. A l’issue de la collecte, les sons sont agencés pour créer une composition musicale qui sera réintroduite à l’intérieur des foyers par le biais des ondes radios. Ces sons intimes sont devenus, le temps d’une émission, une ouvre sonore collective. Porte à porte sonore, des sons collectés dans les maisons du quartier du Chant d’oiseau à Bruxelles.
La Pulpe est une sororité de recherche-création cristallisée autour d’Aurélia Nardini, Lola Dubus, Ludmila Postel et Crys Aslanian. Ielles transposent les pratiques de patch propre au plateau radio à l’échelle d’un groupe d’improvisation électronique et narrative. Maléfiction est le fruit d’un patient travail d’écoute et de pratique collective lors d’un temps de résidence à l’Atelier-Studio d’Euphonia en 2020. L’une des membres jouant à distance en streaming, Maléfiction est un appel longue distance témoignant du désir de jouer ensemble et d’aller de l’avant malgré le 1er Confinement.
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La Pulpe is a Creative Research Sorority crystallised around Aurélia Nardini, Lola Dubus, Ludmila Postel et Crys Aslanian. Together they transpose the patching practice of the radio set into a groupe of electronic and narrative improvisation. Maléfiction has been patiently brewed up after hours of collective listening and practe during a residence at Euphonia Marseille. By including one of its member playing remotely, Maléfiction is a long distance call reflecting the desire of playing together and moving ahead despite the 1st Lockdown.
“The Borderguard’s path” was recorded in the Sumava forest between the Czech and German borders on the 2nd of January 2021. I set out to explore the sounds that can be heard inside some of the 1st and 2nd World War bunkers in the area, which are said to total around 2000 in number, most of them forgotten and still to be re-discovered. After an hour walk through a snow covered path I managed to find and crawl into to one of these bunkers. It was a very damped and dark space, where the only source of light was a small shaft window. I had with me a couple of synthesisers (Gakken SX-150 and the DRC running on a tablet) which I placed inside two separate rooms and recorded short improvisations with them, along with some “ghosty” sounds coming from the inside of the bunker’s rusty pipes. Two microphones were placed not far from each other in another corner of the space. This audio piece was quite a personal experience in self-isolation and overcoming an unavoidable fear of being alone in a dark unknown space. I will never forget the exhilarating feeling of crawling back out, from the darkness into the light. For further information, check: https://sirr-ecords.bandcamp.com
