the show from orange 94.0/vienna produced by barbara kaiser is an atmospheric summary of the reheat festival 2010 at kleylehof, austria. this year’s topic was „monsters“.
it’s a mixture of recordings made before and during the festival: soundcapes, concerts, installations, performances and statements of artists and festival visitors. you can find more information about the festival and its programme at http://reheat.klingt.org. the show includes festival contributions by alfred stohl, lupe, sabine marte, skylla, peter brandlmayr, joerg piringer, monc/ink, doris kern & klaus filip.
Category Archives: #24
Show 288: Circuit 02 Broadcast by Jeroen Vandesande
On invitation of XL AIR, artist Jeroen Vandesande transformed his installation CIRCUIT02 (for pics, see website) in a proper radio broadcast for the Radia LX 2010 festival. Vandesande (°1986, Turnhout, Belgium) completed his master studies at the Ghent School of Fine Arts Sint-Lucas and has been active as a (sound & visual) artist since 2004. Besides giving performances he also creates sound installations and regularly works together with musicians and performers. For this occasion he worked together with sound technician Martijn Veulemans and the XL Air radiophonic team. Vandesande has performed for audiences in several art centres and concert halls around the globe.
The installation.
CIRCUIT02 is the follow up of Vandesande’s acclaimed CIRCUIT01 where he tried to create an instant communication system for musicians through the use of a no-input mixing panel in which acoustic instruments were connected and modulated with the internal feedback circuits of the mixing board. Circuit 02 extends this prototype system to an infinite number of players. The result is best described as an autonomous society of communicating radio’s. The idea behind Vandesande’s Circuit 02 is a kind of technical elaboration of the famous Bertolt Brecht idea of two way communicating radio’s:
But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. (Bertolt Brecht – ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’ – 1932)
In what can be described as a technical perversion of the Brechtian prophecy, neglecting the social and political undertone of this quote, Vandesande build a network of mutual communicating radio’s by providing each transmitter with the possibility to receive and vice versa. He literally changed the apparatus from distribution to communication (or what is generally understood by the use of this word). The result is a crafty and powerful feed-back sphere inspired by 20 (old school) radios. The Brechtian utopic idea, when carried out with technical accuracy, creates a dense cloud of feedback loops, a vast network of pipes indeed. Walking through this cloud of analogue static fog, one can recognise the individual speakers and listen to the different voices of the different radios, finding a subtle beauty in this Babylonian noise. The big challenge for the RadiaLX festival was to translate Vandesande’s idea’s into a classic radio broadcast and to recreate the dynamic spatial qualities of the installation in a flat streaming signal. In order to do so, Vandesande decided to play with the different perspectives one can take in the spatial environment of the installation by recording the radios and feedback loops individually and from different angles with different recording techniques and different gear. Vandesande started out with the recording of two radios communicating with each other, a broader network of radio’s was then recorded with the modulation of AM-broadcasting on FM-feedbackloops. These sounds where recorded through spatial microphone techniques combined with so called close-micing. One rather amusing outcome of these experiments was listening to AM Radio on FM band – could this be a world premiere? What you’ll hear is a 28 minute composition assembled out of the recordings we made during the experiments with the installation Circuit 02. If these experiments can teach us something, it must be that the aesthetic pleasure of the Brechtian utopian symmetric communication system is an ambiguous one. Any prophecy expecting perfection from communication systems or forecasting utopian dimensions in (new) media risks to become another dangerous joke for history. It’s in the nature of communication systems to fail, to be imperfect and to be replaced and complemented by new media. Too smooth or too much communication kills communication. In fact imperfections are exactly what makes communication work. The beauty off course derives from this imperfection and it’s this uncanny pleasure one can hear in the folds of Vandesande’s piece CIRCUIT02 BROADCAST.
INFO
http://www.jeroenvandesande.be/
http://radio.vub.ac.be/xlair/
Show 287: You’re on Next by Tom Wallace
“You’re on Next”
Interviews with DJs from the London free party scene. Produced by Tom Wallace.
This piece explores the experiences of six DJs who have all been involved in the vibrant free party scene in the 1990s. The interviews explore how they got involved in the scene, how they view their craft and recall the magic moments and mishaps along the way. These are set against the warped sonics of the sound systems they played on.
Featuring: Neil Controlled Weirdness, Gizelle, Louise +1, Rowan Megabitch, Jason Warlock and Jerome hill.
Show 286: Personal Number Station By Disphilharmonia Sounds
Initially, we are a laptop quartet of five individuals, one robot (barely automated, slightly sentient) and four fleshy humans. Furthermore we host a radio show on Kanal 103 in Macedonia which usually contains much of what we do in our separate electronic production projects, alternative ego’s, or what we do with Disphilharmonia. Since music is taken very lightly lately, we consider that the act of listening to music/sounds should return to a more primitive time where it represents a totem, a symbol of gathering around which special attention should be invested. Our live performances attempt to create this effect by accentuating the visual part, forcing audience to participate with more senses, ritualizing the act of listening music. This time, for Radia, we prepared an almost fake Numbers Station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station) live, that relays a secret message, when converted/cracked and sent to our mail, results in access to not-yet-released materials of Disphilharmonia and/or affiliates. Visit www.disphilharmonia.blogspot.com for more free downloadable music, videos, info, crickets, cake and everything.
Show 285: Hirondelle by Beatriz Rodrigues and António Silva
While contemplating the mysterious life of the landscape, plants, birds,insects,we dive into the magnetic space where the swallows and echoes of things and their spirits live.
There is iron and straw and the light’s reflection on the water follows the eye, as the beating of the heart echoes through the landscape’s melancholy.
Beatriz Rodrigues and António Silva are two artists from Viseu-Portugal, working together as a couple.
They explore different types of media, such as sound and drawing.
Making use of composition, balance, structure, simbolism, significance, rhythm, etc., they organize emotion and memory that lead us to non-places, abstract and shapeless spaces, in a mixture of noisy and melodic environments.
Show 284: Semantik live @ Radio Sonic
This show is a live performance made during Radio Sonic, the 4 days long webradio that Radio Campus Bruxelles operated the previous week, to announce a sound art festival in Belgium called City Sonic. (Works and exhibitions are open until the 12th of september, in Mons. Come and visit !)
In the place we were working (Les anciens abattoirs), we met a sound artist working with devices that interrogate our relation to the body and territories. Audio Geolocalised derive & sound installation. He kept sounds he made and transformed to create this live performance one night. Here’s the copyleft result.
Show 283: Fruitcake by Cheyenne und Calypso
The title of “Fruitcake” evokes a lost world of English teatime, as well as the mixed up and unpredictable nature of this piece.
Produced by two teenage girls as a response to growing up in a quiet but strange Moorland town in the South West of England, “Fruitcake” contains a blend of interviews with older residents of the town, dramatised sections set in an imagined 1950’s community, improvised music and a bit of giggling and mucking about. In their words:
“We’ve been cutting and pasting and things. Basically our story is about two friends growing up in the 1950s in Buckfastleigh. It’s a very hearwarming tale of joy and friendship. And it’s sad and it’s lovely and you’ll love the people in it. You will laugh and you will cry and you will make new friends in this amazing world of Buckfastleigh. Come and visit us. We’re not a bit crazy.”
Show 282: False beginner by Anna Raimondo
Alors… the Italian as a field… hmmm… of roots. As a thread that ties your own life up, an engine of memories and hidden emotions.
The Italian language course as a game. Languages that run one after another, overlapping each other, recalling themselves in an attempted translation, just like Naples and Marsiglia soundscapes emerging from memoirs of Monique’s, Therese’s, Vivianne’s childhood. All of them are pensioner over sixty, living in Marseilles, with Italian origins. Also meet Flore, Danielle and Eliane that present themselves in the street with their translated names Fiore, Daniela and Eliana.
Immersion in a soup based on Italian, Neapolitan and French, where to find right gender concordance and how to get the right pronunciation.
The Italian class is not a psychoanalytic session.
Yet, speaking Italian gives form to a carnal relation with language, to the childhood memories of “le Panier” known as the “Petite Naples”, and of “la Cabucelle”, two districts in Marseilles that are “really like Italy”. A dream of Italy, warm, sunny and sublimated.
Defined sometimes as babi, spaghetti or ritals, French people with Italian roots are beginners, false beginners, or advanced….
“False beginner” is something like faked beginner, maybe the feeling we have when we speak a second language; maybe the society’s condition with migration’s phenomenon…
“False beginner” is a show based on binaural recordings in Naples’s Quartieri spagnoli and in Panier and Cabucelle districts, recordings in different Italian classes, interviews and dialogues in public spaces.