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.”
Tag Archives: Soundart Radio
Show 264: Spam2 by Andrius Savickas
Recorded on one shot, on the last half an hour from 23:30 on sunday the 11th April. It’s basically spam from e-mails being read by automatic voice software, there are also sounds of our home environment during preparation for a journey.
Show 249: A New Year Show by Lucinda Guy
This is a traditional story about when the moon fell in the river, became trapped by bad fairies and rescued by villagers. I’ve retold it for Radia including recordings made during the last year, mostly of my children and friends playing in a river. There’s also music improvised by children. There are some hymns and carols, some of which first appeared as part of my ‘swimming in the stream’ radio series, using our station’s webstream to create loops and effects.
Thanks to:
Children at Bidwell Brook school, Dartington, who created some of the music Catherine Guy, who sings Shakespeare’s full fathom 5 with me
Ergo Phizmiz who reads the part of the man who fell in.
Beowulf, Artemis, Marlowe and Demeter who played in the river and chatted.
Ariane Delaunois, Nell Harrison and Kate Paxman who also recorded the children at our workshops last summer.
Happy New Year from all at Soundart Radio
Show 233: Why Don’t You Go Home? by Cathryn Morgan Richards
“Why don’t you go home?” by sound artist Cathryn Morgan-Richards tells the Crowhurst story in the form of a radio documentary.
Donald Crowhurst set sail from Teignmouth, South Devon UK, in the autumn of 1968 on a non-stop round-the-world sailing race in his trimaran ‘Teignmouth Electron’. One of nine competitors, Crowhurst saw his initial high hopes for fame and glory dashed when lack of time, a poorly equipped boat and inexperience all conspired against him. With the realisation that neither he nor the boat were up to the trip came desperation, which led to a faked voyage, a breakdown and ultimately his death.
“Why don’t you go home?” by sound artist Cathryn Morgan-Richards tells the Crowhurst story in the form of a radio documentary, through the accounts of people local to Teignmouth who were in some way witness to what happened. With a backdrop of soundscapes taken from the Teign Estuary, the piece combines spoken voices with an underlying musicality, blurring the boundary between documentary and sonic art.
Show 219: Closing Down by GilbertandGrape
CLOSING DOWN OVER RADIO BROADCAST
During 2009 GilbertandGrape are closing down, reprocessing all their things and returning the Moose to the Sunset. As we do this we invite you to join us on the Radia broadcast to take part in drawing exercises. On the special Radia broadcast we will draw one of our things together with our radio broadcast audience. We will then pass the object into our local economy for further use by giving it to our nearest thrift store.
HOW TO BE WITH US DURING THIS EVENT
GilbertandGrape will sketch the object in front of the microphone. Making the drawing on a chart ruled off into many squares. Radio listeners provide themselves with a similar chart and when GilbertandGrape announce the line is going through a certain numbered square the listners can then duplicate this on their own grid.
YOU WILL NEED
1x A4 paper with 3cm grid (DOWNLOAD HERE www.gilbertandgrape.co.uk or draw your own)
1x pencil
Each drawing exercise takes approx 15mins.
RECYCLE YOUR DRAWINGS
Post us your drawings
Closing Down c/o gilbertandgrape, Soundart Radio, The Gallery, Dartington, Devon, TQ9 6EJ, UK or email them to drawing@gilbertandgrape.co.uk
WHO ARE GILBERTANDGRAPE?
gilbertandgrape is a collaborative project between Helen Pritchard (UK) and Anne-Marte Eidseth Rygh (N). Established in 2003 the artists share a background in performance writing at Dartington College of Arts, UK. GilbertandGrape work within a genre they call performance journalism. The work often takes the form of videos, performance, texts and off-line/online work which explores a longing to collaborate with each other and the people we meet. We make practical and collaborative explorations of the idea of Artist as Reader/ Audience As Reader. Epic actions, amateurish events and gigantic endeavours which share authority with readers in pursuit of disrupting the social roles of reader and writer/artist. The work is driven by a desire to connect with others. It engages with ideas of ‘liveness’ and physical presence/absence. Using the body as the mode of perceiving scale from symmetry and balance, to the grotesque and disproportionate. Central to this is the idea of subjectivity of perspective and the individuality of viewpoint. The contemplation on ideas (especially in relation to technology) and concepts which without the body have no scale of reference. These thoughts surface in performance action/rituals and live reading/writing
We have shown work internationally since 2003 most recently include transmodernage (USA), KISSS, conical gallery (Australia) and Rogaland Kunst Senter (Norway). We recently published a field note book of the three year durational performance Lone Ranging Romance in How2 magazine.
Show 207: Sparkles
This is a joint effort from several artists, some pieces made for Soundart Radio’s “First Spark” festival in February 2009, remixed here for Radia.
We thought we’d celebrate switching on our new transmitter (1000 times more powerful than the old one) by remembering the forgotten festival of Imbolc, and the first stirrings of light and warm weather. You’ll hear me going on about this in the introduction to the show and making some excuse about being a rural station.
So this show starts with Chris Mockridge’s recording of building and lighting a fire in their (old, cold) home… then an Imbolc piece by Jackie Juno, like me she’s interested in new ways of engaging with these ancient festivals http://brianabbott.info/jackie_juno.htm
Then there’s quite a big chunk of our new neighbour Ergo Phizmiz‘s “The invention of Birds” which was an installation in the Dartington Gallery. Actually this bit is from the opening night so it’s Ergo and DJ Salinger together sort of DJing along to the installed piece. I didn’t intend to use quite so much of it but it was hard to choose a short bit. There’s a bit more of it later on.
Then there’s “For Emma” a spoken word thing by Isobel Anderson, who used to be a student.
There’s a thing by Joe Prosser, a writing student here at Dartington… does it have a title? I don’t know.
Lastly “For Bridget” by Graham Burchell. Bridget is St. Bridget and a goddess too, the “Bridie” that Jackie mentioned earlier in the show and Imbolc is her time.
Show 190: Black Water Brown Water by David Prior
Black Water Brown Water is an evolving sound piece, originally commissioned as a sound walk for the Stourport canal basins in Worcestershire, UK. The basins form an intersection between the Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal and the river Severn and the piece is really about the relationship between these two water systems.
My ‘way in’ was the experience of standing on a lock-gate that separates the canal and the river and on one side there was this chaotic, gushing, brown water and on the other, the water was controlled, black and serene. Black Water Brown Water. The piece is based on an imagined dialogue between the great canal engineer James Brindley and Sabrina, Goddess of the river Severn – but in a way it is a dialogue between the two water systems themselves with these two characters giving voice to the myths that represent them.
The language of the work draws heavily on John Milton¹s Comus and to a lesser extent Michael Drayton¹s Poly Olbion, both of which make reference to Sabrina. Additionally, I¹ve taken a lot from the biography of James Brindley – both real and imagined.
In the original walk, visitors pick up an mp3 player and listen to the piece on a small, man-made island that sits between these water systems. This version though has been re-edited specifically for RADIA.
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In Black Water Brown Water, the readers were John Hall as James Brindley and Ella Turk-Richards as Sabrina.
The Pieces was commissioned by British Waterways with funds from the Arts Council of England, Arts & Business new partners, Advantage West Midlands, Wyre Forest District Council, Heritage Lottery Fund and Stourport Forward.
Black Water Brown Water was created by David Prior for liminal and this radio mix comes from Sound Art Radio, Dartington.
For more information on liminal, please go to www.liminal.org.uk
Show 175: How far from home are we?
An Illustrated Radio Journey By Anna Keleher and Claire Long Journey Collaborators, Rebecca Beinart, Claire Long and Anna and Mark Keleher.
Based on a journey from the UK to Helsinki and back by land and sea, the “illustrated radio journey” sits somewhere between sound art and travel documentary.
Based on a journey from the UK to Helsinki and back by land and sea, the “illustrated radio journey” sits somewhere between sound art and travel documentary. On-site recordings, ambient sounds, creative reflection and narration are woven together to give the listener glimpses of the experiences of the journey. Collaborative drawings and tally-sticks also created on the journey provide a visual counterpart to the radio piece. The illustrated radio journey lives on the web at http://journey.uber.com and through a series of coordinated installations and radio broadcasts.
Visit the Radio Journey Project website at: http://journey.uber.com
Claire Long and Anna Keleher have been collaborating since October, 2007. Their collaborative practice arose from shared interests in archaeology, Dartmoor, walking and sound collection and has evolved through continued exploration of place, site-specific and sound-based works.
Show 161: Reading, UK, Seville, Spain by Duncan Whitley
Reading, UK, Seville, Spain by Duncan Whitley for Soundart Radio
The piece weaves together a series of field recordings from two projects, the first of which examines, critiques and celebrates the language of football crowd sound, the other, a collaboration with sound artist and composer James Wyness, takes as its subject the ritual Holy Week processions of Seville, Spain.
These two phonographic projects develop through growing archives of multichannel sound, which Duncan uses as raw material for his sound installations.
“My artistic practice is orientated towards sound installation, and radio presents quite a different challenge. In this piece I wanted to see how it felt to slip between the two dynamic and contrasting soundscapes of Holy Week in Seville and a football match at Reading FC’s Madejski Stadium. The editing is simple and transparent, working with real-time events and with few cuts.”
Duncan’s work appropriates forms and conventions of sound installation, field recording, oral history, and sonic archive. In ongoing sound recording projects Duncan has focussed on collecting, analysing, categorising and editing raw material extracted from the social and urban fabric. Underpinning his work is an interest in the social and documentary value of sound as a medium, and the use of sound and new media to develop alternative narrative forms. Whilst displaying a critical interest in sound and audio work, Duncan remains committed to producing intuitive, accessible work for broad audiences.
James Wyness is a sound artist and composer, working almost exclusively in the electroacoustic medium. He produces soundwalks, work for radio, sound installation and multichannel concert works. He is currently studying a PhD in composition at the University of Aberdeen.
Show 149: collage for radio by Richard Povall
Radia 149 is a collage for radio made by Richard Povall of Aune Head Arts, a contemporary arts organisation based on Dartmoor National Park. Aune Head Arts uses the arts to develop and nurture understanding about rural life, trains and mentors younger professional and pre-professional artists,
encourages and supports cross-artform working and works closely and collaboratively with communities. This programme features sound recordings made at various events over the last year. Richard also produces a regular show for Soundart Radio.