Tag Archives: Radio One 91 FM

Show 398: antipodean field : constellations from kings rapid, by david haines.

radia season 29, show #398 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from november 12 to november 18, 2012.

Antipodean Field: constellations from Kings rapid.

by David Haines

“This piece was recorded in Dunedin New Zealand and in the Blue Mountains of
New South Wales, Australia. I thought I would climb Mt Analogue with this
piece, instead I found a deep and dark sandstone gorge. This is where I
live, not far from the Wollemi, which for the local indigenous people
translates as “look out country”. Electro-acoustic and electromagnetic
undulations tear open the firmament to reveal a thin sliver of the multiple
scales of an infernal roar.”

David Haines

David Haines lives in the Blue Mountains, Australia. He was born in London in 1966. His practice in contemporary art is diverse and he has shown his installations in galleries and museums internationally and throughout Australasia. His work encompasses all forms of installation, including working with sound, aroma and digital technology. He is also known for his collaborations with Joyce Hinterding that have won several awards and been shown Internationally including the Sao Paulo Biennale 2004. He is represented by Breenspace.

additional sound : Joyce Hinterding

Show 374: radio d’oiseaux (kokako variations), by radio cegeste

Small, distributed in trees, in hollow logs and on the ground, a flock of radio receivers inhabits a forest area near a large native Rata tree on Kapiti, an island off the coast of the lower North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Slowly, the radios enter the soundscape of the surrounding biosphere, chime in with birdsong captured in field recordings, gathered in the same area on previous days, making audible the signal from a small-radius mini FM transmitter. Down the mountain, a young male Kokako has been calling for the last three months, unsuccessfully trying to attract a mate. The main thing he has been able to attract are the attentions of other, more common endemic forest birds, Tui and Bellbirds, who, being skilled mimics, have started to imitate his calls. Perhaps in response to such unwanted attentions, he has not been heard for the past week, but the radio remembers him, playing back his song in an evocation of both the long history of human vocalisation of birds in this place, and the birds’ own complex mimicry of each other.

Rarely heard but even more rarely seen in the wild, the Kokako, a shy inhabitant of deep forest, and one of New Zealand’s most endangered birds, whose calls have been described variously as “flute-like, organ-like, bell like, sweet, plaintive, haunting and ventriloquial”, has lived on this island since 1991, when thirty three birds were transferred from three remnant populations elsewhere in the North Island. These populations, artificially lodged together into a new environment, yet all sourced from different localities and having their own dialects, originally didn’t recognise each other as the same species, and so breeding was, understandably, unsuccessful. In the ensuing decades, it seems, the development of a ‘Kapiti dialect’ has emerged on the island, and the birds have begun to converse, and to breed, and become tentatively established locally. The South Island subspecies of the Kokako has been declared extinct, and until recently the North Island variant was declining toward the same fate, but in the last few years, due to such placement on offshore predator-free islands, the birds have become one of the recent success stories of New Zealand conservation species management.

A document of a single take performance with no human listeners, beginning and ending as an unadulterated recording of the sounds of the locale in which it was enacted, this mini FM transmission subtly weaves various other recordings from the same location at other times of day into the extant soundscape, a collected sound library begun with the very early morning chorus and progressing toward midday, the time when the piece was transmitted. Shifting sound tonalities are heard, these are entirely due to the aforementioned ‘flock’ of radios and how they are positioned in relation to the stereo microphones used to record the piece. Static is heard when the radios leave this radius of transmission, the territory of the signal marking its place in the forest with song, shards of noise signifying its breach, echoing its placement on an island in a biosecure, highly managed environment forever on the lookout for tears in the fabric, and also birdsong itself as a highly territorialised marker of location and identity. The chiming dawn chorus of bellbirds at the piece’s apex thins out to eventually become a duet of call and response in real time between a live Kokako, attracted by the transmission, and the radios switching off and on as they transmit the song of the same bird, a disjunctive ventriloquistic mediated discourse, not without its own poetry, bird and radio calling to each other for an extended moment over the thick native tree wooded valley.

radio d’oiseaux (kokako variations), through its fabric of forgetting and remembering, of dialect and localisation, ponders the hope for an environmentally aware media that doesn’t approach environment from the perspective of the covetous collector or become a mere one-way conduit for the human ear, but leaves the sounds where they are, taking the advice of the New Zealand environmental care code: Toitu te whenua (leave the land undisturbed), at the same time risking an indulgence of the radio’s secret fantasies of interspecies communication, of not only being a sender but also a receiver, of joining in with the chorus and listening to its localised specificity, of being part of the living soundscape rather than merely part of its museum.

—–

this live transmission was made into the bush at Rangatira on Kapiti Island, beginning at 12:20pm on Thursday the 21st May 2012.

Radio Cegeste 104.5 FM is a mini FM radio station hosted as a platform for radio art by Sally Ann McIntyre. Its projects and programmes cohere around a loose set of circumstances and proclivities, including site-specificity, nomadism, the collection of sound libraries, phonography, museology, memory, the haunted materiality of absent presence, old buildings and other historic sites, psychogeography, the performative fragility of small-scale transmission, bird migration and electromagnetism, the complex idea of ‘dead air’, the recorded and transmitted history of birdsong (sometimes also as a sonification of a New Zealand nationalism), and the possibility of an ecology of the radio that doesn’t represent unstable systems as functioning in eternal homeostasis. Her current residency on Kapiti Island, during which she is conducting research into the soundscape and investigating the potential for radio art as a form of fieldwork, is sponsored by the New Zealand Department of Conservation and Creative New Zealand, in association with the Kaitiaki o Kapiti Trust.

Show 352: Empire(s) by Luke Munn

Mark No. 76344794: “the sound of a brass bell tuned to the pitch D, but with an overtone of D-sharp, struck nine times at a brisk tempo, with the final tone allowed to ring until the sound decays naturally. The rhythmic pattern is eight 16th notes and a quarter note; the total duration, from the striking of the first tone to the end of the decay on the final one, is just over 3 seconds.” Owners of Record: NYSE GROUP, INC.

Taking its cues from the long-duration film of the same name, this work takes a 2 second audiomark registered by the New York Stock Exchange and slows it drastically to 28 minutes. The opening bell and energetic trader shouts are brought to a standstill and become instead a dirge of white noise and ringing drones which replace motivation with malaise.

Luke Munn is an interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin with work focusing on sound, new-media and social engagement, using the body and code, objects and performances to activate relationships and responses. His projects have featured in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Electrosmog Festival, Resound Falmouth, and Q-O2 Brussels with commissions from Aotearoa Digital Arts, Creative New Zealand and TERMINAL and performances in Paris, Dublin, Chicago, Berlin, Auckland, and New York.

Contact:
Selchower Str. 31   /   Berlin 12049 Germany   / www.lukemunn.com   /   luke.munn@gmail.com

a contribution from Radio One, Dunedin, New Zealand
image : David C. Foster, ‘The Old American Stock Exchange Trading Floor; ca. 1980’s’

Show 332: HEARTS/MINDS by Matt Middleton

radia season 26, show #332 ::: a contribution by Radio One 91FM, Dunedin, New Zealand ::: HEARTS/MINDS by Matt Middleton

——

[HEARTS/MINDS]

a new sound/media art composition by Matthew Middleton crafted in the lead up to the 2011 New Zealand parliamentary elections, Hearts/Minds explores how media language influences public opinion during election campaigns. Interweaving a haphazard collection of media samples and spoken word excerpts from media commentators, philosophers and political theorists, Hearts/Minds evolves through various loosely delineated movements to evoke the delirium of the mass mediascape’s presentation of the political arena, while simultaneously turning a critical and irreverent ear toward the Western press’s ideological mechanisms. Recalling the subversive media experiments of W S Burroughs and John Oswald’s concept of Plunderphonics, Hearts/Minds can also be heard as something of a meta-commentary on authorship and censorship, an analysis of broadcast radio as a medium historically harnessed to ideological and political purpose, and the role of the news media as politically collusive information moderator, c. 2011. Presenting initially as a crude radio documentary, the piece develops into an acerbic mulch of industrial psychedelia.

——

[MATT MIDDLETON]

a multimedia artist based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Working under the Crude moniker for nearly 15 years, Middleton received modest national recognition with the release of his Inner City Guitar Perspectives album on Flying Nun in 1996. Around the same time he garnered interest in the USA which resulted in the release of Refute a Myth Society on Ecstatic Yod records (a collaboration between Ecstatic Peace and Father Yod records). Riding the U.S. interest, the album My Right To Riches by Middleton’s noise-rock band The Aesthetics was released on Ecstatic Peace in 1998. Around this time he began self-releasing his work via his own Dirtlove imprint, an increasinly prolific publishing project which currently continues as the label Artless Intent.

Middleton received a grant in 2006 to travel to New York City to perform, and it was on his return to New Zealand that he began to explore more seriously the possibilities of installation art and multi-media practice. Middleton’s most recent exhibition, Even More Austerity Measures, at None Gallery, Dunedin, for the week inclusive of July 22–27 2011, explores the relations between current events, political economy and the role of the ‘performer’.

Radio sound and radio art is an occasional but strong motif in Middleton’s recordings, especially the deeply affecting psycho-physical power of short-wave drone. His own show on Radio One 91FM, End Times Jukeboxx, explored the sound worlds of the experimental/electronic/av​ant garde/obscure/eclectic with studio guests and live-to-air performances, and is archived here : http://endtimesjukeboxx.bl​ogspot.com/2011_02_01_arch​ive.html

Middleton’s work can be followed up on his blog La Decennie Brut, or via his homepage. His extensive discography can also be viewed here

——

creative commons 2011, Matthew Middleton in collaboration with Radio One 91FM and the Radia Network. Commissioned and developed by Sally Ann McIntyre. Text by Matthew Middleton and Sally Ann McIntyre. Many thanks to Creative New Zealand for their support in the commissioning of this work.
NB : the following samples from other media sources were used in this composition :

1. Middleton reads a section of an article by political journalist Gordon Campbell – “Horse Race Journalism”, scoop.co.nz, September 2008.
http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2008/09/15/’horse-race’-political-journalism/

2. A computer voice (adobe pdf ‘read out loud’ function ) ‘reads’ a section from Media Argumentation: Dialectic, Persuasion, Rhetoric, by Douglas Watson (Cambridge University Press 2007).
http://www.amazon.com/Media-Argumentation-Dialect-Persuasion-Rhetoric/dp/0521700302

3. Treated section of ‘Budget Debate’ from www.inthehouse.co.nz, featuring John Key and Phill Goff (June 7, 2011).

——

[some further reading] :

“•News Values prioritise stories about events that are recent, sudden, unambiguous, predictable, relevant and close (to the relevant culture/class/location)
•Priority is given to stories about the economy, government politics, industry and business, foreign affairs and domestic affairs – -either of conflict or human interest – disasters and sport.
•Priority is given to elite nations (the US, the UK, Europe etc.) and elite people (celebrity).
•News values often involve appeals to dominant ideologies and discources. What is cultural and/or historical will be represented as natural and consensual.
•News stories need to appeal to readers/viewers so they must be commonsensical, entertaining and dramatic(like fiction), and visual. ”

-definition of ‘News Values’, from Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: Key Concepts; John Hartley, Routledge Key Guides, 2002.

“The Ad Hominem, or personal attack, argument is now highly familiar in politics, especially in the use of negative campaign tactics in elections. This form of argument has been studied previously in the argumentation literature, but it has some special features of interest as a mass media argument strategy….it is shown how it has some features comrable to apeals to fear and pity when it is used in mass media as a device of persuasion….it is shown how he or she must use prolepsis by probing into the commitments of the respondent and confirguring them in a certain way prior to the attack. These insights into the multi-agent structure of the ad hominem reveal how the proponent must collect evidence proactively, and then use this evidence to attribute a plan to the respondent. The aim is not just to reveal how to use such a tactic of personal attack in the mass media. The analysis is meant to be helpful to both voters and political campaigners, giving them a better understanding of how to deal with ad hominem arguments by identifying analyzing, and critically evaluating them. The ad hominem argument is not a new phenomenon is american political discourse. A pamphlet was circulated telling of Andrew Jackson’s “youthful indiscretions”. In the 1860’s, Northern newspapers attacked Lincoln’s policies by attacking his character, using the terms “drunk”, “baboon”, “too slow”, “foolish”, and “dishonest”. Steadily on the increase in political argumentation since then, the argumentum ad hominem has been carefull efined as an instrument of “oppo tactics” and “going negative” by the public relations expert who now craft political campaigns at the national level. It has been so prominently used in the major political campaigns, debates, and ads of the past few years that there has even been a reaction against it – a feeling that we have gone too far in this direction and that some kind of restraint is needed. But there has been no evidence of such restraint in the argumentation used in recent campaigns.”
Media Argumentation: Dialectic, Persuasion and Rhetoric; Douglas Watson, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

“The centre of captalism, the bourgeoisie, is a neutral, unmarked, self-evident centre. Ideology, or at least, the overarching ideology which defines the others, is in the system itself, and precisely this all-encompassing ideological character of capitalism makes its ideological nature and characteristics invisible. They are ‘normal’ and ‘normative’: other ‘ideologies’ are measured against the ideological zero-point, capitalism. The ideological enemy, in Barthes’ view, is thus not liberalism, Gaullism or communism, but ‘l’ennemi capital (la Norme bourgeoise)’ (1957:8), the invisible and self-evident systemic core which we fail to recognise as ideological because it is OUR ideology.”
Discourse: Key topics in Sociolinguistics; Jan Blommaert, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

“There were individual cases in which the news media appeared to have been decisive , and not simply influential. The role of television appeared to be crucial, for instance, Brazil’s 1989 presidentials contest, when privately owned TV Globo – the fourth largest television network in the world – gave a disproportionate amount of favourable coverage to the conservative candidate Fernando Collor de Mello (De Lima, 1993). According to others, it was the tabloid newpaper The Sun that had won the 1992 British General election for the conservatives, in the evidence of a disproportionately large shift in electoral support amongst its predominantly blue-collar readership (see McKie, 1995). But in spite of such studies, there has been ‘little agreement’ on the nature and extent of media effects, a failure that appears to owe something to the ‘complexity of the processes and the inadequacy of research design and methods’ (McQuail , 2000, pp 416,419) , and the literature is still characterised by a ‘great deal of uncertainty and contradiction’ (Street,2001 p89). Bartels, indeed, goes so far as to describe the current state of research on media effects as ‘one of the most notable embarrasments of modern social science’ “
Media Effects and Russian Elections , 1999-2000; Stephen White, Sarah Oates & Ian McAllister

The Prime Minister is defending his decision to loan $43 million of taxpayer money to private media companies. John Key claims the loan scheme was designed to help the whole radio industry. But a ONE News investigation has revealed MediaWorks was the big winner after some hard lobbying. Key is known for being media friendly, but he’s facing criticism from Labour that he’s become too cosy with MediaWorks which owns TV3 and half of New Zealand’s radio stations. It has been revealed the government deferred $43 million in radio licensing fees for MediaWorks after some serious lobbying. Key and the former head of MediaWorks, Brent Impey, talked at a TV3 Telethon event. “I just raised it as an issue but we’d been looking at it for sometime. My view was it made sense. It’s a commercial loan, it’s a secured contract,” Key said.It’s believed the loan is being made at 11% interest. But in answer to parliamentary written questions, the Prime Minister said he had “no meetings” with representatives of MediaWorks to discuss the deal. Two days later that answer was corrected, saying he “ran into” Brent Impey at a “social event” in Auckland where the issue was “briefly raised” and he “passed his comments on” to the responsible minister. Labour MP for Hutt South Trevor Mallard said he doesn’t believe the Prime Minister with his first answer,”I mean you have a meeting with a chief executive, it doesn’t matter if it is social, he asks you for money, you get a system going, you remember it,” said Mallard. The government maintains that all radio companies were allowed to delay payments of radio licences and says it’s not a sweetheart deal for MediaWorks. But MediaWorks are the big winners. The total government loan for all nine radio stations is $43.6 million. Of that, MediaWorks were loaned $43.3 million and the other radio stations were loaned $300,000. And official documents obtained by ONE News show a request was made to rush the deal through Cabinet for MediaWorks. The documents said: “An urgent decision is necessary due to financial restructuring decisions facing MediaWorks at the end of October.” Key defends deferring the stations’ licence payments. “Frankly I’d rather see people paying over a longer period of time if it means they stay in business,” said Key. ONE News reported on Thursday night that the $43 million loan was made to MediaWorks despite official advice warning against it. In the documents obtained by ONE News, the Ministry of Economic Development said it “does not see a strong case” for the loan, and warned the deal will “carry a financial risk” for the government. Treasury said the loan would effectively see the government “acting as a bank” and taking on additional risk. Initially Communication and Information Minister Steven Joyce had declined the deal. But then Impey had taken the matter higher, lobbying Key during the Telethon, and eventually Cabinet approval was given. Joyce told ONE News in Thursday’s report that the lobbying didn’t have an impact on the government’s decision.”
TVNZ One News website, April 8 2011

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 294: sound, light, locality : the frederick street sound and light exploration society, by Sally Ann McIntyre

intermingling audio and interviews recorded at the experimental music festival ‘Fredstock’, which gathered together together 62 performers over 4 days (Wednesday 27th – Saturday 30th October 2010) in Wellington, New Zealand, this documentary amplifies some of the voices from the diverse and cross-pollinating experimental music culture associated with the central Wellington artist-run performance space ‘the Frederick Street Sound and Light Exploration Society’ (affectionately known to its community as ‘Freds’), while asking wider questions around the history and practice of experimental music in Wellington, the particularity of localised micro-scenes, the role of key figures driving the culture, and, implicitly, how underground artistic communities can build strategies for their ongoing survival.

deliberately emphasising the tentative, exploratory nature of the current discourse surrounding NZ audio culture, the documentary formally structures itself as a listening experience with loose links to Glenn Gould’s documentary methods, although it is also akin to a critically minded yet casual conversation that might be had at a night out watching a gig. It can be listened to as a companion-piece of sorts to the earlier R1 documentary contribution to the network ‘Lines of Flight : a Sonic Community’ (s20 n231), and forms part of an ongoing research interest in charting the sonic territories of New Zealand experimental audio culture.

interviews with : Jeremy Coubrough, Daniel Beban, Torben Tilly, Bek Coogan, Chris Prosser, Mark Williams, Noel Meek, Campbell Walker, Erika Grant, Sean Kelly, Thomas Lambert.

music / audio by : Full Fucking Moon, Peter Wright, Ming, The Doubles, Claypipe, Seth Frightening, Chris Prosser/Erika Grant/Art Sushi, and Douglas Lilburn covers band the Urinal Bulldogs.

interviewer, editor, producer : sally ann mcintyre

produced for the Radia network 2010, a contribution from member station Radio One 91FM, Dunedin.

Show 276: I Am A Strange Loop (radia mix), by Full Fucking Moon

Documentation of a live event which doesn’t merely reiterate it, Full Fucking Moon’s ‘I Am a Strange Loop’, with its kaleidoscopic shifts, fragments and interwoven threads of live streams, opens the listener’s ear to the multi-dimensional non-linearity of radio space, its mazes, veils and etheric folds, its membranes and mirrorings. This piece’s original life was as a dual-stream simulcast across both FM and AM channels (the stations Radio One 91FM and Toroa Radio 1575AM, respectively), which began at 1pm and ended at 2pm on Saturday 20th April 2010, in Dunedin, New Zealand, a commissioned work by The Blue Oyster Art Project Space as part of their annual performance series.

In a gesture toward a form of ‘Rorschach Radio’, the AM stream became an inversion of the FM, and the artists also de-stabilised this dualism by opening up a third-space (at the historic Otago Pioneer Womans Memorial Association Hall, Dunedin) as a public listening arena / performance venue. At first empty of the physical presence of the artists and allowing the audience to roam, the space contained a scattering of radio receivers embedded in the nooks and crannies of its colonial architecture, as well as a social space where tea was drunk, conversations were had, newspapers were read, and eyes were closed in meditative listening. With the intimacy of the home-wireless set being something that could only capture the ‘total work’ in a sequence of twists and fractures, requiring the radio to be physically tuned as an instrument betwixt and between bands, (an action itself revealing the miasmic, shifting cloud of radio space), listeners present both at home and in this more public space (the latter by walking around the rooms where radios were distributed) each found their own stream within the cloud of possibilities, this listenership evoking radio as both intimate and communal, both territorial and boundless. The artists inhabiting the radiophonic streams then literalised their presence by arriving in the space, dressed in outfits that both evoked the spirits of colonial women’s meetings and more recent outsider pop ensembles, activating the instruments that had until this time remained a tableau of props amongst the other still-lifes in the room (radio receivers placed next to posies of fake flowers being a repeating theme in particular).

As befits radio’s multiform and fluid potentialities, this 1-hour performance was not the piece’s only destination, and this new edit speaks to the radia network as a series of distributed nodes, and to radio’s strangely present invisible material. ‘I Am a Strange Loop – Radia Mix’ begins with the radiophonic glossolalic cloud, clearing a way for the arrival of a human channelling of a spirit-radio, in which a psychic presence casts ideas on “transmissions” (dictations) from the cosmos as a poetics of the medium, and ends with a song called ‘Litany of the Oceans’, an FFM ballad about the moon, in which singer Bek Coogan intones the names of the astral body’s craters, thought to be the sites of frozen lunar seas, evoking the moon’s tug on the ethereric tides (and also perhaps calling to mind the United States military probe Clementine, whose investigation known as the ‘bistatic radar experiment’ in 1994 used a transmitter to beam radio waves into the dark regions of the moon’s south pole).

I Am a Strange Loop is a work created by artists who are deliberate misreaders of traditions, who shift mercurially within critical and primordial texts and methods. It is radio aware of its own material presence and spiritual history, as etheric and boundless as it is consolidating of community, as its artists shift effortlessly within the worlds of art and music, high art and pop culture, and their audiences and forms, calling for a listener who is equally multiple, who can inhabit not one cultural reference point, but many.

-Sally Ann McIntyre, July 2010.

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Edited and mixed by Bek Coogan & Torben Tilly from original recordings of the one-hour performance ‘I Am A Strange Loop’ by Full Fucking Moon, performed on Saturday 20th March 2010 at the Otago Pioneer Woman’s Memorial Association, and broadcast live simultaneously on Radio One 89FM and Toroa Radio 1575AM as part of the Blue Oyster Performance Series, Dunedin.

Radio One signal recorded by Gilbert May.
Toroa Radio signal recorded by Hugh Dingwall.
Otago Pioneer Woman’s Memorial Association audio recorded by Oliver Of The Sky.

FFM wishes to thank: Sheila Wall and Todd Wall, Kate Anderson, Tom Bell, Hugh Dingwall and Toroa Radio, Violet Faigan and Modern Miss, Edie Stevens and None Gallery, Gilbert May and Radio One, Oliver Of The Sky, Otago Pioneer Woman’s Memorial Association, Sally Ann McIntyre, Jaenine Parkinson, The Wright Family. FFM also acknowledges support from Blue Oyster Gallery, Creative New Zealand and Dunedin Fringe Festival.

Show 260: The Village is Quiet

Australian artist Patrick Hartigan exhibited a series of water colours in 2009 entitled “The Village is Quiet” – a show which was complemented by the publication of a series of short stories and a limited release dvd under the same title. Producer g.bert invited Hartigan to record a reading of a selection of the stories as a gesture toward a continued multiplication of media in Hartigan’s work through (and despite) which the ‘village remains quiet’.

Hartigan’s facility in isolating and expressing the subtleties and idiosyncracies of the simple everyday life of an unnamed contemporary Slovakian village in fact borders on a mythical expression – a kind of singular exemplarity. Littered as his work is with post-soviet remnants (the public address system that still ‘broadcasts’ via loudspeakers, for example) and the consequences of EU expansion (the evident desertion of youth), Hartigan’s village and its eloquent quietude speaks a kind of obscure generality (seen, as it is, through the eyes of an antipodean outsider finding feet and language in the village’s almost empty streets and homes).

A simple radio production (artifacts of recording included) accentuates the simplicity of Hartigan’s means. Visit http://www.brettmcdowellgallery.com/patrickhartigan09.html and http://www.darrenknightgallery.com/artists/hartigan/artist.htm for Hartigan’s visual story

Show 246: Memento: Internationale by Adrian Hall

This an atmospheric work for radio which takes place inside the head, and the history, of an elderly man.

He dwells on moments and places he may have been, and the life in turn of his father.
The work is initially set in the shaving mirror of his home, and touches on mortality, and the trades of working men everywhere, be they learned in the military, or as an apprentice.
There is too a hint of criminal violence. Another way of making a living.
A recurring theme of blood, consumer objects and the nostalgic history of radio itself allows him to meander in his mind, and to reflect on a life of change. A single human voice is contrasted with recordings of vintage radio commercials extolling the virtues of the workers behind production lines, now derelict: and the narrations of the old man are largely carried by synthesised voices from a computer. The purring of a cat overtakes and completes his domestic reveries.

Show 231: Lines of Flight – A Sonic Community, by Gilbert May & Sally Ann McIntyre

This, the inaugural contribution to the Radia Network from Radio One (Dunedin, New Zealand), offers an impressionistic account of the biannual, and somewhat secretive, experimental music and film festival “Lines of Flight”. Running in Dunedin since 2000, “Lines of Flight” has provided New Zealand improvisational and experimental musicians with an intensive platform for performance and interaction and has organically evolved a space for a much stronger formation of a sound practioners’ community. Although the improv./experimental scene from which the festival grew – recall the musicians associated with the labels Metonymic and Corpus Hermeticum in the 1990s – has changed considerably since the festival’s beginnings, Lines of Flight has become a kind of default constant, a fluid forum, a relatively regular ‘symposium’ for many in that evolving scene.

Radio producers Sally-Ann McIntyre (a.k.a. ‘Radio Cegeste’) and Gilbert May took the opportunity which the 2009 Lines of Flight festival offered to interview a number of the organisers and performers (particularly those who have had a long standing relation to the festival) to obtain their reflections on the history and significance of the biannual event. Combined with an equally partial selection of music, a limited and impressionistic editing process provides a far from comprehensive, yet nevertheless enlightening, introduction not just to the “Lines of Flight” festival, but to a part of a wider New Zealand scene.

[Featuring: Peter Stapleton, Kim Pieters, Peter Porteus, Alex Mackinnon, Bruce Russell, Matt Middleton, Dean Roberts, Rachel Shearer as well as samples from Sleep, Flies Inside the Sun, Birchville Cat Motel, Handful of Dust, Crude, Eye, Rotor Plus, Tillakaratne and Adrian Hall’s Red Carpet. Many thanks to all involved…]