Tag Archives: Resonance FM

Show 305: In an Octopus’s Den by Octopus Collective

The making of Octopus’s Den was initiated by Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington (AKA Mobile Radio) during a short visit they made to our HQ in Barrow Park. They introduced us to the technique of pause-button recording which is a simple way of realtime editing of live recording using the pause button on the recorder (in this case the Zoom H4n) and suggested that we use it to make a piece of work based on the activity in our office and studios. What you hear is drawn from both significant and mundane events in our collective life over the last few months including:

our ancient plumbing system after flushing the loo
an office meeting to discuss the strategy for our application to Arts Council England for portfolio funding for 2012-15
pieces commissioned for our events on the Bandstand in the park from artists Paul Rooney (Spit Valve) and Mark Vernon (Christmas Rewind)
clearing up glass from a window broken by vandals
John learning the violin
moving equipment around
walking upstairs
and much more…..

we hope you find something to enjoy.

Octopus Collective is a not-for-profit Sound Arts company led by three professional artists with an associate membership drawn from a broad range of practitioners working from the old Park Keeper’s house in the middle of Barrow Park in Barrow in Furness. Alongside their own practice they curate the Full of Noises festival which is an annual programme of experimental music and sound art based in Cumbria UK. The first FON Festival took place in October 2009 with a programme that included 4 residencies/commissions, a weekend of live performances, radio broadcasts and a workshop programme.

www.octopuscollective.org
www.fonfestival.org

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 271: Endangered Radio Band by Mobile Radio

replacement programme by Mobile Radio

An intrinsic feature of radio broadcast is on the verge of extinction: interference. Artists have always loved interference. Early memories convey intoxicated sweeps of an old valve radio dial, simultaneous capture of two shortwave stations, the swashing sounds of the in-between as a prerequisite for sleep. The new interference is reduced to metallic distress at the breaking point of digital transmission; the new silence of buffering and disconnect presents a wholly characterless absence. What happens now? Will people forget what a rotary dial is? Will the radio band become an endangered species?
Whilst digital audio technology tries to emulate the analogue sound wave as closely as possible, digital transmission renders the radio spectrum inaccessible. The bits in-between are reallocated or discarded. The noise that changes when you touch the aerial is out of reach. Maybe the caller on the Harmon E. Phraisyar show Album One is correct when she says: “You and your stupid radio programmes, I’m fed up. Tell me this you stupid radio worms: radio interference, often it is that I am getting the interference. Why is it that the interference is always more interesting than the programme itself?” Endangered Radio Band is a performance by Mobile Radio, voyaging the vocal and electromagnetic spectra in search of an answer to this question.

Recorded in Napoli in December 2009 by Etienne Noiseau.
Here is a list of sound sources that were used for the performance (in no particular order) which was distributed on the PA system, and via FM transmitter to portable radios in the room.

– VLF natural radio from Todmorden (UK, 8-8:30pm local time)
http://67.207.143.181:80/vlf1 (live stream)
– electromagnetic sounds from Sony Minidisc recorder MZ30 via telephone coil of a modified analog hearing aid (live)
– broken AM radio (live)
– malfunctioning toy radio purchased in Napoli (live)
– home-made ultrasonic detector (live)
– home-made electronic instrument “Feedbug” via internal fm transmitter (live)
– air traffic radio band receiver (live)
– electromagnetic recording of the journey leaving Zurich for Milano in an Italian Pendolino train on 16/12/2009
– Morse code version of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate”, recorded in Barrow on 22/10/2009
http://fullofnoises.blogspot.com/2009/10/coding-ursonate.html
– Original version of “Ersatzrauschen”, sounds of a defunct Bell&Howard digital 8-track data recorder, recorded in Prague in 2006
http://www.finetuned.org/index.php?aid=49
– excerpt from the Harmon E. Phraisyar show “Album One: Unthinkable” produced in 2004 for Kunstradio
http://www.kunstradio.at/2004A/02_05_04.html
– cut-up recordings of the 15th and final World Chess Championship Game between Gary Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik on 2/12/2000 (French and English commentary, as well as Kasparov in the press conference)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_World_Chess_Championship_2000

Show 268: The Transmission by r.t. bhoustard

Introduction

One of the most annoying things about Radio Art is that you have to download it before you can fast-forward through it. In ‘The Transmission’, I’ve very kindly done all the work for you and it comes ‘pre-fast-forwarded’, so to speak. This, in turn, lends the piece a delightfully impenitent narrative structure – but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Locations
Hopefully, as you listen to The Transmission, the question of location will spring to mind. Where are we, in both a geographical and cultural sense? A clue can be gathered from the presence of the two ‘Cockneys’ who appear in the story. Cockneys, for those not in the know, are a lower class London social grouping somewhat irrationally defined by a geophysical attribute – that of having been born within hearing range of a particular set of church bells. The idea that a social group can be branded for life by the mere fact of, at their moment of birth, being with earshot of a distinctive clanging noise is almost as ridiculous as the church in question. St Mary-le-Bow is an ersatz baroque monstrosity sandwiched off The City of London’s Cheapside between the pomposity of St Paul’s cathedral and the shadowy mammon of the Bank of England. Still, I must admit that the bells sound quite pleasant.

Cockney is also defined by a dialect. The best example I can think of is the chimney-hugging ‘Bert’ character in Mary Poppins, meticulously voiced by Dick Van Dyke. I’d be interested to know what dialect is used in the dubbed versions of non-English speaking countries. As for Dick Van Dyke – wow – what a fucking great name!!! Dick is better known to daytime TV victims as the sleuthing doctor in the cross-generic medical/crime drama Diagnosis:Murder. Incidentally, Victoria Rowell who portrayed the glamorous pathologist in that show, uses one of the best strap lines ever to market her kiss and tell confessional ‘Secrets of a Soap Opera Diva’.

‘You gotta get dirty before you can come clean’.
http://www.victoriarowell.com/

Should you ever find yourself in the drab and dirty City of London, the best way to seek out and unmask a Cockney is to ask them to say two words – ‘Town’ and ‘Water’. Listen carefully to their replies. In the mouth of a Cockney, ‘town’ will lose its distinctive ‘OW’ diphthong to be replaced by a drawling nasal ‘Aaaaaaaaa’, reminiscent of the braying of a sad donkey.

Thus – ‘Taaaaaaaaaaan’ instead of ‘Town’.

‘Water’ will be stripped of it’s sharp ‘ER’ ending and emerge with the definingly dozy non-rhotic ‘ah’ sound.

Thus – ‘Watah’ instead of ‘Water’. Somehow, the pronunciation makes it sound as though all the ‘Watah’ has dried up or leaked away through a hole at the bottom of the swimming pool.

Sci Fi
‘The Transmission’ is based on a soft and simple alternative timeline sci fi premise – that it was Muhammid XII who defeated the combined Catholic armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Battle of Granada, 1492, rather than the other way round. No wonder things appear culturally amiss. This is a Europe where women are forbidden to speak to other men but their husbands. They even then have to wait for the husband to deliver a complex series of signs before being granted permission to speak. This gives hint of a brutally misogynistic discourse more likely found in Saudi Arabia than in the heart of contemporary London.

In our particular timeline, the 1492 battle (more correctly, a siege) was the endgame in the gradual removal of the Muslim presence from Iberian soil. This had begun in earnest with the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the early 13th Century. The final victory, pompously titled ‘La Reconquista’, was sealed by the fall of Granada and the surrender of the Moorish ruler Muhammid XII. Soon afterwards, Ferdinand and Isabella – two raving religious loonies to put it mildly – founded the Spanish Inquisition and set about forcibly converting both Muslims and Jews to Christianity. Indeed, it was a converted jew who organised the financing of Columbus’ expedition to the New World.

In the timeline underpinning The Transmission, history snakes in another direction and it is Muhammid XII who smash the armies of Catholic king and queen and drive the idolatrous ones out of Spain. This victory leads us onto the eventual conquest and Islamicisation of the rest of Europe and the concommitamt institution of an alternative set of cultural norms. Now, our Cockneys are those born within hearing distance of the muezzin’s call – a muezzin perched atop minaret of the Aisha-al-Bow Mosque (named after one of the prophet’s most beloved wives). Incidentally, here’s one for all you Jerry Lee Lewis fans. Aisha, the Prophet’s third wife, was six maybe seven when she was betrothed to Muhammad and all of nine when the marriage was consummated. He was fifty two.
http://www.burroughs.com/

Text
The language and mores of ‘The Transmission’ are loosely informed by Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Perfumed garden, a book of Arabic pornography written in the 15th Century by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi. The language used is beautifully poetic and strikingly archaic, presumably influenced by the fact that Burton was working from an earlier French translation of the Arabic original. This ties in sweetly with one of ‘The Transmission’s’ themes, the manner in which information is codified and recodified and ultimately distorted into unrecognisable and sometimes delightful forms by the process of cross-cultural transmission.

The French translation of The Perfumed Garden has gathered an amount notoriety in that it excised the last part of al-Nafzawi’s manuscript – the explicitly gay stuff. In later life, Burton set to work on his own version from the Arabic, a translation that was to include all the original material be called ‘The Scented Garden’. We don’t know how Burton got on because his staunchly Catholic wife, opting for a proto-nazi position, flung the manuscript into the flames.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perfumed_Garden

Credit where credit’s due – the ‘Why do you call me “O Man”’ idea that takes the form of a running joke in ‘The Transmission’ is a straight lift from al-Nafzawi’s (and Burton’s) book.

Technology
At what point can a technology be considered dead and buried? How redundant does it have to become it vanishes completely. The other day I saw a blank C90 cassette for sale in Central London for the price of about nine Euros. ‘Ah’, I mused, ‘The cassette is at last becoming an object of rarity, an exoticism, hence this ludicrous price for something you could pick up for a few pence ten years ago.’ Ask yourself this: Who stocks minidisks these days and does anyone remember how wide a five inch floppy disk is?

In ‘The Transmission’, the two main characters are collectors of the priceless and the extinct, prepared to travel the world and undergo many trials and hardships in pursuit of exotica. The humble compact cassette tape (that space age invention that sealed the fortunes of Dutch multinational electronic company Phillips) has joined the list of desirables having become an object of extreme scarcity. And even though a few tapes still exist, there is nothing to play them back on.
http://www.says-it.com/cassette/

Narrative

Kristine Brunovska Karnick has written that ‘Humour complicates and frustrates the spectator’s inferences about the narrative’. While humour is employed for this very effect, comedy is not itself the primary goal of ‘The Transmission’. My objective is to array elements of comedy (the running joke, unpredictability, incongruity-resolution) alongside stock b-movie themes of acquisition and impending disaster to create a delightfully disruptive text. When the Soviet system crumbled, the only regrettable result was that it took away the sole state-scaled opposing reality to the technologically astonishing, economically brutal, environmentally lethal Western society we have allowed nationalistic and globally corporate greed to conjure into existence.
We live in a mono-reality into which we are supposed to slot our strivings, ambitions, japes, joys, loves, lies and permeable madnesses. Personally, I find it a bleak and inadequate container.

My conception of a disruptive narrative is one that exposes or at least provides an index for a vast subset of practical realities. Not fancies, feathers, ideals and fantasies but empirically sparkling incarnations of ontology. This attempt at an exposition of sorts is the actual transmission that takes place in the course of the piece.

http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-karnick032902.asp

r.t. bhoustard may 2010

Show 253: RADIO WORM for Resonance104.4fm

In December 2009 the WORM STUDIO organised a ‘philosophical’ workshop about field recordings.
We invited Derek Holzer & Justin Bennett to tell their side of the story, told our side of the story as well (nothing is true, everything is permitted, etc.) and let all the workshop members work in the WORM studio to complete their pieces. And the results were great! So we had to shorten the pieces a bit to fit them in this RADIO WORM number 120, Radia edition.
And that’s the other side of the story; the Electronic/Experimental Radio monthly ‘RADIO WORM’ exists for 10 years now. And we never missed a beat! (never looked for it). So starting in January 2000 we come now to number 120, and we’re very proud to present this to the Radia Network.

http://www.wormweb.nl
http://wormstudio.blogspot.com/2009/02/studio-productions.html

Show 239: Morsonata by Mobile Radio

replacement for cancelled show

This is the radia edit of an hour long live radio show produced by Mobile Radio for the FON festival in Barrow-in-Furness, England.
With Barrow being home to Europe’s biggest submarine shed and neighbouring Lake District having hosted Kurt Schwitters for the last years of his life we decided to combine these two influences. Schwitters’ Ursonate performed in morse code by one of Barrow’s retired submariners is the underlying thread to the show that includes live music and field recordings by FON artists in residence Haco, Susan Matthews, Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann.

Show 237: Reheat: the Schnitzel

Every year now a strange kind of gathering takes place close to the very eastern border of Austria at a barn called the Kleylehof. Viennese artists of many backgrounds have taken over this barn and converted it into a multifunctional performance and studio space, complete with a homemade emergency slide and a swing garden hut. In August they celebrate the Reheat festival, that brings together local and international artists, performers and scientists who ride towards the hungarian border on home-made rocket propelled bicyles.
This years festival theme was ‘electromagnetism’ and therefore an ideal place to capture sounds for a radio show. The proceedings of the whole day included video installations, gps guided tours, lectures, many concerts and much more. The best way to represent this multitude was to send all recordings through the cut-up software called ‘Schnitzel’ written by one of the festivals co-organizers Dieb13.
It was a great festival, next year you should go there in person. Until then there is this show.

Show 223: Fragments of Stratford Shopping Centre by Martin Williams

A patchwork portrait of the shopping mall at Stratford , east London , blending music, field recordings and spoken narratives.
Stratford Shopping Centre. I go there every day. It’s unmissable. Not because of the magnetic pull of Percy Ingle’s cheese and onion pasties or the many bargains to be found in the 99p Shop. And not because the place itself is distinctive or eccentric in any particularly appealing way. If anything it’s an unremarkable small shopping mall, with its chain stores and discount shops, bright lights and the sonics of a crowded swimming pool. It’s unmissable—for me and thousands of others—simply because it is the only way to get from Stratford town itself to the very busy tube and rail station there. In a feat of hubristic urban planning the shopping centre sits in the middle of a teeming ring road and is the only route from one side to the other. I’m funnelled through this dystopian high street every day, and respond with a conflicting mix of feelings about the place. So this programme is both paean and protest, a tribute with its tongue in its cheek.

Show 211: Nine Nights in Newcastle

replacement programme

The AV festival 2008 in Newcastle included three festival radio stations. To avoid having to program nine nights with playlist material I offered to build a sound installation that would fill the radiospace with its live output. The installation was loosely based on Lee De Forest’s invention of the vacuum tube by only using feedback between audio and radio equipment to create sounds.

Two of the three festival radio stations (Resonance FM at MIMA in Middlesbrough and Soundscape FM in Sunderland) were created especially for the festival, the third was a recently established community radio station in Newcastle. After two nights of broadcasting the sound installation the Newcastle station became too concerned about the loyalty of their listeners and reverted back to their usual europop night loop. Kunstradio’s Heidi Grundmann commented that she was surprised that we got that far at all and declared our attempts revolutionary.

So here are the nine nights in Newcastle again in condensed format, ready to test the loyalty of your listeners, whatever that is.

A show brought to you by Knut Aufermann for Resonance.FM London

More sounds at http://knut.klingt.org/installations.html

Show 209: Even The Dead Wear Headphones

Recorded live at the London College of Communication, 12 March 2009.

Ed Baxter writes: This is a large-scale ensemble work which relies on bricolage. It follows the traditional (quite English) detective procedural format, chosen for ease of generating material. The script was developed in a couple of sessions with John Wynne’s undergraduate students at the LCC. About ten of them contributed to the text in one way or another, ranging from small ideas to large portions of the finished dialogue. Others worked on gathering sound effects, providing incidental and live music and sound beds. Others still worked on the technicalities. Some people did a lot, and a few didn’t turn up. We recorded it in one take as a 45 minute piece, with some longish scenes designed to be edited in the Radia mix. The final take was interrupted by a fifteen minute forced break (computer malfunction, inevitably) which threatened to destroy the momentum of the performance. No one of the performers (about 25 of them) could hear the whole thing as it unfolded, so there was a lot of trial and error and guesswork involved. The idea was that by sticking precisely to the script it would somehow work. In this edit you can hear the joins, flaws and false starts. I think it has enough charm to get by – and apologise in advance to the majority of Radia listeners for the very English and very text based nature of the work. Thanks to John Wynne for the gig, Ciaran Harte for his Wellesian vision, Chris Weaver for support and Nick Hamilton for the edit.

NB this drama contains strong “post-watershed” language. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Cast List: Clinton – Russell Callow; Close – Alan Shotter; Weiner – Valdemar Gudmundsson; Mower – Daniel Scroggins; Lousier – John Wynne. design, music and effects production, script development and performance by Alberto Sanchez, Alexander Williams, Allan Shotter, Andrew Wordsworth, Ashkaan Fattahian, Calle Buddee Roos, Daniel Scroggins, Dawid Wasilewski, Drew Campbell, Giuseppe Giunta, Greta Pistaceci, Jakob Gierse, Janno Vaartjes, Jonny Hill, Luciana Bass, Max Thornton, Mikko Virmajoki, Niall Farrell, Philipp Köster, Robert Kubicki, Romain Heaf, Ruben Ganev, Russell Callow, Ryszard Salmanowicz, Sean Simpson, Stefan Newcombe-Davis, Sutchara, Thomas Laxton. Written and workshopped by Ed Baxter and first year students on the LCC sound-art course. Produced by Ciaran Harte. Directed by Ed Baxter. With thanks to Chris Weaver, John Wynne and Nick Hamilton. The full 45 minute version of this piece is also available: contact info _at_ resonancefm.com