RADIOPHRENIA

Saturday, 14th November

BBC presenters cultural picks for lockdown entertainment:

“Radiophrenia is a Glasgow sound art radio station that’s streaming 24/7 until 22 November. I was listening to an Italian sound artist called Tobia Bandini. He’d interviewed all these people asking for their response to the apocalypse and then he’d mix their stories – they’re all in Italian – with electronic soundscapes.

If you want to tune out of the news then this is a really nice place to escape to. There’s all sorts in there, and a lot of it is just really pleasing and quite hypnotic.”

Elizabeth Alker, BBC 3

Saturday, 14th November

At 9:30am today:

John Hall presents ‘The Tide Will Turn / The Whitby Horngarth Service’. John Hall hacks down and weaves interviews, field recording, archive material and cassette recordings made by participants to evoke the threads of superstition, social obligation and inconvenience with which we can trace the Whitby Horngarth Service from its roots in rituals of rogation to the present day, through 900 years of recorded observance.We hear several generations of the family that delivered the service on pein of losing their land, the current Court Leet Bailiff of Fyling, various explainers and commentators, and the service itself.

The piece was made for the Bifocals Ritual Exchanges project:

bifocals2013ritualexchange.blogspot.com

Friday, 13th November

At 2pm two back-to-back pieces by previous Radiophrenia commissionee, gobscure.

‘dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over’

“a ‘support worker’ once said what dya need books for yr homeless? our revenge was 13 years of reading, graduating from the open university after 13 years. heres experimental radio from fragments including responses to engels condition of the working class (one of the most important course books) – 2020 is 200th anniversary of engels birth. plus 1929 song how can a poor person stand such times & live, music box playing chant des partisans (french resistance anthem) plus (post)-industrial locations engels wrote about. part of our project ‘provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth’ which includes solo show.”

‘night gale’

“nightingales move across europe, africa and asia to sing hard-won songs. woodlands are now managed. there is always is new growth. during our worst sectioning (before that homeless hostel) we could only cope with watching trees yet had to deal with insanities of staff, torn books, press headlines – not word-salad but ward-salad. we finally escaped to sit on a rock in middle of river tees (above middleton-in-tees), watch milky way and sing our version of fiddle and drum (a joni mitchell song we knew only from cassette of june tabor in the eighties). new songs are needed”

Friday 13^th November – 7.50am – 9am

This morning on Radiophrenia – a sound journey that explores the musicality of the landscapes of the Val di Fiemme.

All of the voice elements in this piece are in Italian – click here to read along to the translation in French and English as you listen.

Initially, “The violins forest” was a sound art documentary produced for Italian Swiss Radio released in September 2020. Sound artist Benoit Bories spent the whole month of June in the Val di Fiemme in the Dolomites with Francesca Bolognesi, the co-author of this documentary creation. They followed the men of this region sounding out an endemic species of fir tree in order to choose the best specimens to make into violins. By surveying the mountain paths for a month, recording the different sound elements of the environmental and social landscape, collecting anecdotes from the inhabitants on their unique relationship with this location, it seemed natural to develop the documentary into a longer, more musical form – a sound stroll in the Val di Fiemme. “The violin forest”, in this version, tells about the strong bonds between the people of a valley and their closeness with the environment, through the prism of the sense of hearing.

In ‘buffer zones’ at various times in the schedule.

During May 2020 Māpura Studios, a creative space for people living with disability & diversity, had to take its programs online due to the Covid 19 lockdown. These recordings of some of those classes capture the students & tutors adapting to the situation. Connecting through conversation and a mask making project, we shared artworks, ideas, poetry & music. Wrestling with technical issues, bad connections & scary times they stayed in touch & kept each other company.  

Recorded & Edited by Stefan Neville.

All sounds made by struggling internet connections & the people on the end of them.

Wednesday, 11th November:

At 9am today Una Lee presents Faràn

This work of audio storytelling depicts the fictional myth of an island (Faràn) in five monologues, conceived as an ode to the phenomenon of ‘tide’. The monologues are quasi accompanied by five pieces of music each of which takes inspiration from different seascapes created by varying states of the tide. Each composition is led by a specific imagery of sea alluded to in the respective monologue. For the storyline, Una has drawn from diverse folklores and traditions such as Breton, Korean, Torajan and Mexican, representing some of the ways in which these cultures deal with tide and/or death.

Image by Richard Davis

Tuesday, 10th November:

At 9pm tonight Paul Nataraj explores loss, grief, family and love in ‘Cobblestones and Kitchari’.

Paul began writing the piece in January 2013, the month before his father died and it was eventually completed in 2020. The work is presented as a continuous narrative exploring places and events from his life, through childhood, his father’s illness and unexpected death. Each of the works included are produced from sounds connected to his father and his immediate UK and extended Indian family. The individual sections are expressions of sonic memory, audio testimony and the shifts in the perceptions of those memories over time. . As well as being a portrait of a family, this work also explores transnationalism, and minority identity formation and is in many ways an ethnographic study through the prism of sound. This work is an exploration of the transitory points of listening and how they change and change us over time.  Acts of listening and creating memory are in constant flux, not fixed. Making memory and identity formation is dynamic, non-generic and a labile process especially through traumatic times. It is the merging of spaces, places and objects, it is skewed repetition, it is voices unremembered, fragile and moving, timbres rather than words, one sided conversation, echoes and the liminal intersections of dreams, perception, reality and emotion – it is not just one song.  These memories coalesce around words, move across worlds and drift as people, either absent or present, adding to the layers we accrue over time. They become the threads in the fabric of who we are and the practice of our everyday lives. Movements, re-tellings, gestures, and their concomitant sounds both recorded and transient, rest in these liminal spaces, and maybe that’s where this should be heard. 

Tuesday, 10th November:

At 4pm today:

Carlo Patrão presents ‘Second Hand Third Eye’ – a radio collage that mixes themes related to self-image, consciousness, perception, existentialism, media theory, and other dimensions. The creative process for this piece started with a survey of academic literature anchored on selfhood and a compilation of terms orbiting the construct of self. This list of keywords was the starting point for creating a dedicated archive of over one thousand voice samples from radio and tv shows from the 1950s to the present day. Often contradictory, non-sensical, or meta-referential, these samples come together in a collective search for meaning, both local and cosmic.

This radio piece was initially commissioned by People Like Us (Vicki Bennett) as part of her exhibition First Person, Fourth Wall at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY.

Tuesday, 10th November:

At 10am today:

Cathy Lane presents ‘Synthesizer and portastudio: their roles in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation struggle.’

“In 1986 I was invited to set up a music development project with the cultural troupes of the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front or TPLF. Our brief was extremely vague….We spent six months in the remote Kaza valley in Northern Ethiopia, working with the cultural troupes working to notate their music; arrange traditional Tigrayan music for modern electric instruments and to record and produce their work. In 2019 we returned to Tigray and met up with some of pour former students to find out what had happened to both the liberation struggle and the legacy of the Gureza music school”.

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective.

Monday, 9th November:

At 4:30pm today Rainbowpeel 475.13 present “As we there are”

The long night of Finnegans Wake is back again. ‘As we there are’ is a musical narration of passages of chapter 2.2 in 4 voices, using instruments, objects, tape recorder and electroacoustic sounds to create a faithfully unfaithful re-narration of the story. In this chapter also known as “night studies”, the central text is constantly interrupted by sides and foot notes, making the reading a disorienting experience.

For the 2020 edition of Radiophrenia Rainbowpeel 475.13 made a re-mix of a recent performance that took place at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven on the birthday of James Joyce. Rainbowpeel 475.13 is a Dutch Belgian band devoted to reading and translating Finnegans Wake into music, consisting of Mariana Lanari and Sjoerd Leijten.