Category Archives: #25

Show 319: Gowanus Over and Out, by Maria Papadomanolaki

Gowanus Over and Out follows the aural traces of the narrowcast audio exhibit Sib Radio Gowanus curated last year for the exhibition “Postcards from Gowanus” (Cabinet Magazine Gallery, March 17-20 2010, Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York). The conceptual backbone of the project was to create a sonic wallpaper that would reflect the aural undertones, both real and imagined, of the area surrounding the gallery. It also served as an organic sonotopia that inhabited the audiovisual exhibits in a process of associative interaction. Responding to a call for works, a total of 44 U.S. and international artists from diverse creative backgrounds contributed works ranging from drones and field recordings to spoken word pieces and experimental sonic artworks. Gowanus Over and Out attempts to offer a glimpse into some of the different facets of the exhibit while at the same time being its own self-expanding universe of sounds.

More information at http://sibradio.blogspot.com/

Gowanus Over and Out is produced by Maria Papadomanolaki for Radia network member free103point9 and their newly launched full-power FM station WGXC-90.7-FM in upstate New York.

The piece features samples of the following works:

Myke Dodge Weiskopf – Helicopter     http://www.myke.me/wordpress/

Sogar – Tapete
      http://www.monohr.com/Sogar.html

Knut Aufermann – avi5
     http://knut.klingt.org/

Sterling Basement – Drowned in the Canal
      http://www.johnroach.net/pages/2002_sterling_basement.html

Solo Andata – Ablation
     http://solo-andata.com/ http://soundcloud.com/soloandata

verdi_spirali – on_earth@in_space
     http://www.myspace.com/verdispirali

Jonny Farrow – Gowanus Walk
      http://jonnyfarrow.net/

Radio Ruido – all artifacts
     http://radioruidotriangulation.blogspot.com

Maria Papadomanolaki – Cabinet
    http://www.voicesoundtext.com/

Lina Lapelyte – MATB1
      http://www.myspace.com/lapelyte

Maria Papadomanolaki – Playground (Radia edit)
 http://www.voicesoundtext.com/

Todd Merrell – As March Times On
     http://www.toddmerrell.com

Mark Templeton – Safely into March
    http://www.fieldsawake.com/

Bryan Zimmerman – Blobs Of Yellow-Green Sun
  http://www.free103point9.org/artists/998

Last Days – Walls
      http://www.lastdaysmusic.co.uk/

A.G – Polygon:08|1
   http://agpolygon08.blogspot.com/

Myke Dodge Weiskopf – VNG
   http://www.myke.me/wordpress/

Maria Papadomanolaki is a Greek artist working primarily with sound in the context of phonography, audience-centered performance pieces, and radio art. Her background in language studies and interest in environmental sound inform her artistic practice. Papadomanolaki often combines these two elements in her work to amplify the intrinsic physical and psychological qualities of an experienced time and space. In 2006, she marked her transition from French language and literature to the sonic arts with Stoma—an interactive voice piece based on Samuel Beckett’s Not I exhibited in the UK and Greece. As a researcher and writer, she has presented at international conferences. Her paper, “Radio as the voice of community, locality, interactivity and experimentation,” presented at The Cyprus University of Technology and the ECREA Radio Research Section 2009 conference, will be published in the forthcoming volume Radio Content in the Digital Age: The Evolution of a Sound Medium (2011, Intellect Books). Papadomanolaki currently resides in New York where she works as a freelance artist.

Show 317: alarmist plot, by Maxime Blanpain

‘alarmist plot’
presented by Radio Panik

Some people say there are only 609 days left for human kind (according to the Maya calendar). Others pretend the Last Judgment is ongoing. Then that is little time to read again Mathew (24-25) or the Book of Revelations.

This work started with the will to use the words of a preacher i recorded few years ago in Basel (CH).

Not that i wanted to discuss the relevance/rightness of an apocalyptic preach, but something in that speech had to be pursued.
That led me to associate the vehemence of the first part with a second one more breathing and rather speechless. Now, that breath of air could either sketch an interpretation of the Noah’s journey on his arch (mentioned by the preacher), or be a response to the alarmists passion, or be a free space of no-response needed.

produced by Maxime Blanpain
mixed by Yann Leguay

Show 316: CYFARFOD

CYFARFOD  by Radio WORM

The second in a series of ‘unradioplays’ by the RW crew. The theme of this one is ‘In A Meeting’. The material is partly found footage, partly self generated, partly self-recorded. The aim of the music in this piece is as an ‘anchor’ for the ‘real’ sounds.
The whole piece just asks one question (or tries to avoid it); ‘So this is real lfe? What quality of recording did you use?’
People who (sometimes involentary) collaborated; Ver 2012, Laslo, nina, Snelwegproject (fire!), Peter Wiesnthaner, H Bakr, Lg 6, Porno 8tr, William Jennings Bryan.

Show 315: Epic Fail No. 9 mit Paukenschlag by marufura fufunjiru

There are two main approaches to my artistic output. One is based on ideas. Thinking, considering, rejecting, building, destroying – everything inside my head. Mostly without notes, definitely without interim results. And then sooner or later the whole „product“ comes out like a chicken egg, ready to be published, staged….. or thrown away. The other approach is based on experiment. I simply throw myself into a situation with no ideas how to deal with them and work from there. It’s a bit like blindfolding myself and slowly removing the blindfold by running into things with my head.

For „Epic fail No. 9 mit Paukenschlag“ I followed the second approach. I had old but never published material on my computer. Mostly short notes (loops) of noise and beats. So I used chance operations to determine the length of every single track to be used („track“ as in multi-track-recording) and to determine when in time it would appear in my piece. There were over 130 tracks of lengths from a few seconds to several minutes. It all made no sense.

Up to this point I hadn’t used my ears to compose the piece. Then I listened to this first „result“ and it was…… well…… interesting. So I listened again and again and each time shortened some tracks or changed their volume. It was like tidying up a room where „a bomb had exploded“. At first I didn’t allow myself to delete any tracks at all but later changed that rule. My work here could be compared to having a sheet of paper full of random characters and then deleting some to build words of the remaining ones. Without the possibility to get them back after deletion. You have to be very careful not to destroy better possibilities for not so great ones. And you must be very careful not to lose the overview of the whole piece. Often my mind zoomed into the music to work on details and I had to force myself to regularly zoom out again for that overview.

The result is something that I first made just to entertain myself (very much me and my tastes) then „destroyed“ by chance operations (nature and not caring about whoever’s taste it may be) and finally broke down to….. have a tidy room where I could sleep and dream of sheep.

Actually I (and I guess you too) do that many times every day in real life. And usually am  as unsuccesful at it as I was with „Epic Fail No. 9 mit Paukenschlag“.

“Epic Fail No. 9 mit Paukenschlag” is presented by Radio Helsinki.

Show 314: Crossings by Barbara De Dominicis

CROSSINGS is an emporium of memories documenting Naples and New York along the imaginary 41°parallel that ties them on the same latitude line. Two cities in continuous metamorphosis, revealing how fragile the fringes between reality and the imaginary may be. Analog and digital meet to witness  sounds of strangers, unknown horizon, private memories and crowded streets.These sound collecting events are aimed at creating a dislocation in the listener’s uncertain perception of space through sound: a sort of unerasable ‘shadow zone’ for the imaginary city walker to inhabit a no man’s land where the boundaries between the two cities are hardly palpable, proposing a displacing where gaps between audio fragments become for a few instants a sole ‘modified’ city.

credits: most sounds have been gathered in New York and Naples (sometime between october 2009 and february 2011) then manipulated filtered and and re-worked. The track makes use of field recordings, found sounds, synthesizers, filters, Luigi’s Pizza Fritta conversations; liturgical rituals at Napoli Dome (during the days of San Gennaro’s blood miracle) Akira Kasai ‘s Buthoh Performance at the National Museum, Napoli; Porta Capuana Fruit market; Peppino reading excerpts of ‘Alzaia’ by Erri de Luca; Banda and voices during the San Rocco Parade in Nyc; Coney Island subway stations and library sounds from the american radio archive, The Naked City, Union Square Farmer Market (nyc);  student’s protests in Napoli; Marc Ribot concert at the Rose-Brooklyn; New York and Napoli harbours/seagulls/ships; open/broken cables, children; vocal and spoken words and cries, casual frequencies and a few more sources…
Recorded with MD Sony, telephone, Zoom digital recorder with a stereo microphone and in-ear binaural condenser mics, Edirol R4 Pro and Rode Shot-Gun mic.

short bio
Soon Apres (Barbara De Dominicis) likes to record natural or urban sounds and merge them in her music. Her projects include Cabaret Noir (with Pasquale Bardaro), The Body exposed, Poe-Si (with Mirko Signorile and 99 Posse dubber Marco Messina);  Kuul-Ma, an audio-visual project in collaboration with the media artist Davide Lonardi. In 2008 she wrote and produced the songs of her album Anti-Gone based on a narrative theme of Greek mythology. In the same years she met the canadian cello player Julia Kent;  together they brought into existence Parallel 41a musical/visual/improvisatory project. Her growing interest in Sound Portraiture, led her to work on A tale of two cities, an audio collage documenting Naples and New York. In 2011 with a dozen of other artists, she gave life to Exquisite-What! a collective web/project based on surrealist’s Exquisite Cadaver pratice. At the moment she is working on a new solo album under the moniker Apres Soon: an assemblage of drones and field recordings, electronics, voices and string instruments.

Crossings is presented by Radio Papesse.

You can download the show here

barbara de dominicis at the market/al mercato/au marché

Show 313: Art’s Birthday Cabaret

Celebrate Art’s Birthday with CFRC on Monday, January 17.  Art’s Birthday is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French Fluxus artist Robert Filiou, who suggested that one million years ago, on the 17th of January, Art was born when someone dropped a sponge into a bucket of water. Filiou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives.

On January 17, 2011, CFRC presents a day-long program of Art On Air. As part of this broadcast CFRC hosted the Art’s Birthday Radio Cabaret live and direct from The Artel, a local artist-run-living space. The following is an excerpt from that live broadcast. Three unique performances by local Kingston audio artists. The first is a performance by SouB?; Kingston’s only interventionist, improvisation, pop-culture riffing, avant-music group. Following that, Decomposing Pianos performs an evocative piece. And finally, Christine Dewancker and Emre Amasyali, offer a found-sound collaboration

Show 312: the miserable idea of measurement (refrain), by David Clegg

P1030395

David Clegg is a contemporary artist based in New Plymouth, New Zealand. ‘the miserable idea of measurement (refrain)’ is a radiophonic reworking of audio from an installation of the same name, commissioned by Artspace, a contemporary art platform based in Auckland. Sourced from raw audio files gathered while walking the arcades, streets and parks of the gallery’s immediately surrounding urbanscape (as the artist writes, a tracing of spatial co-ordinates “from Meyers Park, St Kevin’s Arcade and the short walk on Karangahape Road and Pitt Street to Beresford Square”), Clegg’s aural psychogeographic sketchbook is left deliberately partial, wary of totalities, its ear open to the street.

In previous works such as The Imaginary Museum and Archivedestruct, Clegg has layered acousmatic soundscapes back into environments, with the layering nevertheless remaining inconclusive, full of gaps, aware of its own immediacy, the tension between creating meticulously categorised archives that are never set, but re-shuffled and modified over time, being an essential part of such works. Radio, with its indeterminate listenership and distributed networks, is an appropriate vehicle for the extension of these ideas, and this radiophonic edit, without relation to the images also present at the Artspace exhibition, structurally underlines the de-narrativising of sound as it is heard in the contemporary urbanscape – fragmented, twisted, free-floating from its signifiers, yet remaining locally teritorialised, a ‘refrain’, in the Deleuzian sense of the word.

A sound-library of fragments designed to be shuffled, ‘the miserable idea of measurement (refrain)’ presents an imaginative landscape which in formal as well as material terms is digital, non linear, while playing with the linearity of radio as a medium, and suggesting its existence as one fragment of a wider sound field of the contemporary city. While having some relation to early radiophonic Musique Concrete, such as ‘Wochenende’, Walter Ruttman’s c.1930 sound portrait of Berlin, Clegg’s work sketches a temporal/durational drive that suggests the formal fragmentation of the Modernist city and its utopian technologies and narratives – in this piece, the meaning is user-driven, and it is our task to stitch a narrative together. Clegg’s use of home made binaural microphones inserted in his ears to record the fragments suggests a phenomenological reflection on the recording process and creates an embodied feedback loop of listening, reminding us that walking in the city is the ‘static between stations’ of everyday life. Commercial music bleeds from radios, combining with the sonic crush and clatter of the cityscape, and we hear the drone of cicadas, juxtaposed with voices that are non-communicative, declaring to no-one, at once banal and frenetic. Nevertheless, the standardisation of sonic material as a measured quantity cuts everything listenable into precise blocks of time. The artist further underscores this constellation of audible segments as non-linear, and non-narrative by his use of the dead silence of digital media, inserting short, equally standardised silences between sound files. The dropping away of audio becomes a shock of absence : in effect, playing with the radiophonic no-go of ‘dead air’

As Clegg himself writes : “i wanted to juxtapose the porosity and interconnectedness of these neighbourhood spaces with the very dislocated and enclosed room above Artspace, and to question the possibility of establishing/re-establishing a connection between the two in an other than physical way, as some sort of voice or signal/ transmission, between here and there, so the recordings are mostly focused on the different types of voice or signal of a location (in the way that a bird call, or radio broadcast establishes its own territory), as well as those calls and signals that are also entering a location from the outside within the sampled passages of radio and the local ambient sounds, as a series of overlapping refrains and superimposed voices, calls and signals.

what if any new locations are being constructed / reconstructed by the listener, the headphone wearing passer-by? certainly any created location is a highly contingent one, producing itself moment-to-moment, impossible to be returned to (maybe in part if its being recorded?). i’ve become very interested in the territorially-based nature of transmitted sounds and signals, in terms of their reception, as they sometimes go in and out of phase, where interference or the loss of signal can be misunderstood as the right signal, and the extent to which the headphone wearer is in a sense continuously changing and constructing new territories of their own.”

with many thanks to the Creative New Zealand Media Arts fund for supporting this contribution to season #25

read more about ‘The Miserable Idea of Measurement’ on Artspace’s website, here : http://www.artspace.org.nz/exhibitions/2011/davidclegg.asp

Show 311: Different Looks At Experimentation by YHT

YHT : concepts of experimental sound design for cinematic
audio-experiences and Francois Sallé with Tatsumi Ryusui : free live
experimentation with instruments and electronics between Noise and
Ambient

YHT is an artistic project in the field of electroacoustic sound
experimentation. Having worked together for 6 years now, the two
artists Claus Störmer and Johannes Krause from Halle/Saale can look
back on a large number of different projects. The spectrum of their
work encompasses free sound work and experimental short film scores as
well as radio plays. They regard their sound compositions as being on
the edge of film and its narrative and imaginary character.

This compositional and aesthetical point of view is reflected in their
piece “RE”, a combination of recorded live performances and produced
radio plays. With structure-borne sound converters which have been
attached to metal plates and with several field recordings, real and
computer-generated rooms have been brought together. As a consequence,
the listener perceives sounds which can either be recognized or not.
The intention is to establish a listening experience at the
intersection of realness and fiction.

The second part of the show will present the current project of two
artists living in Berlin. Francois Sallé (France) and Tatsumi Ryusui
(Japan) bring together their vision of experimentation – each in his
own way: Ryusui by playing guitar in his very own style, Sallé by
contributing field recordings and computer-generated sounds.Their
teamwork yields very intuitive performances with constantly different
progression and character.

reboot.fm 88,4 mhz Berlin
http://reboot.fm
Prod.: Henning Schärfke

http://ypsilonht.com/yht.html
http://www.myspace.com/tatsumiryusui

Show 310: Idea of North

The Idea of North Revisited.

In 1967 Glen Gould, a famous Canadian pianist, produced a radio piece called “The Idea of North” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  The original “Idea of North” consists of five overlapping interviews mixed with ambient noises and has since become iconic in its representation of the Canadian themes of isolation, withdrawal, and solitude.  I always felt that perhaps the most interesting thing about this peice is that Gould neglected to interview a single Inuit person about his or her “Idea of North.”  So I felt that it would be an interesting and rewarding experiment to re-mix this peice with different perspectives of the north.  The Idea of North Revisited splices and dices the original radio work along with field recordings of the north; beat-boxing; phone messages; news footage of Canadian military expansion in the north; throat singers Ida Oweetaluk, Margaret Miner, Lisa Kasudluak, Anisie Nowkawalk; hip-hop beats constructed by youth from the Inter-Tribal Youth Centre in Montreal through the CKUT beat workshop; elders speaking about climate change in the arctic from the film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change by Zacharias Kanuk and Dr. Ian Mauro; DJ Mad Eskimo, spoken-word artist Mosha Folger; field recordings by Nimalan Yoganathan; and a collage of sounds from Jana Winderen’s installation Energy Field.  Thanks to everyone who participated and left all those great messages on my phone!

Artist Bio: Cathy Inouye co-hosts the radio-art show Easy Sonic Living on CKUT.  She has previously collaborated on the Radia show Snow Squabbles with Neil Griffith and Caroline Kunzle.  As Ovaries of Steel she has performed at the Megapolis Festival in Baltimore in 2010 and in the 2011 edition of Nuit Blanche in Montreal.  She also plays tuba with the radical street marching band the Chaotic Insurection Ensemble and has played with Nic Caloia’s Ratchet Orchestra.

http://easysonicliving.wordpress.com

www.inukjuaksoundmap.com

www.isuma.tv
Radio CKUT 90.3 FM