Each month the contemporary art institution le Palais de Tokyo invite an artist working with sound to propose a piece for their answerphone.

My piece, Miss Time, pays hommage to the first speaking clocks born in the early 1930s, who were in fact telephone switchboard ladies, chosen for their fine elocution and stamina, who every 15 seconds, 240 times an hour, mechanically told the time to an invisible audience, regardless if anyone called or not.

Each country had it's telephone diva, known for her golden voice and accurate timekeeping. Sadly these marathon performances fizzled out in the sixties when technology made these Time Ladies redundant.

The répondeur project is curated by the journalist and critic Rahma Khazam.

Misstime by  DinahBird  (2011)

Jean-Philippe Renoult breathes new life into a forgotten mechanical piano lying abandoned in the corner of a Breton library ( 2011) 
http://radio1001.org/Members/jeanphilipperenoult/le-piano-de-betton





Piano de Betton by Jean-Philippe Renoult (2011)

This is the story of a box
A leather box that is over eighty years old
and has lived in three different countries, and on two different continents.
It contains over fifty 78 rpm recordings of classical music and opera hits of the day.
The box and it’s contents were inherited by my grandmother who was born on the Gulf Islands (BC) in 1910. She grew up on Salt Spring.
She took the box with her when she left the island in 1925 and carried it to her various adult homes until her death in 2000.
In September 2012 I took the box of records back to Salt Spring Island. 
This piece is about rekindling lost, and perhaps forgotten, sounds. Are they so very different to those my grandmother heard ?
It will be released later in the year on the Gruenrekorder label. 
http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=1922

A Box of 78s (extract) by DinahBird (2014)


Two opposing eco-systems and sonic environments are coupled together. Extensive field recordings of a particular habitat are made in one country and then transposed and broadcast to another. We observe how the local population react to these extraneous noises. Do bird sing differently ? Do passers by look up and listen? Does anything change at all ?

During a artist residency in the Senegalese capital Dakar in 2010, we were awoken each morning at around 5 am by the curiously regular and repetitive chirping of a local bird, known to all as the alarm bell. We lay awake listening to the rumble of the city as it gradually came to life, other birds and insects joined the chorus, the megaphone muezzin blasted the call to prayer, miles and miles of frustrated- commuters sounded their horns in the early morning rush hour. These layers of animal and urban noise competed with one another until the sound of airplanes soaring over the city every 15 minutes drowned everybody else out. And so each day begun.

Dakar Morning Birds has been presented at the sound art festival Parisonic in Nor- thern Paris (2010) and at Datscha Radio (Berlin 2012), a mini FM radio festival held in a Berlin garden.

Dakar Morning Birds (extract) by DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult - 2010

European Sound Delta  (Summer 2008) was a boat journey on two of Europe’s most densely  trafficked rivers, the Danube and the Rhine.  Over Summer 2008 two boats sailed slowly upstream from the Black and North Seas to the final destination point in Strasbourg. Along the way resident artists composed sound pieces and experimented with alternative forms of radio inspired by the journey. With the radio artists Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington we joined the boat from Linz (Austria) to Regensburg (Germany) and begun to research the use of basic sonar techniques and echo location to try and to make an audio image of our surroundings. We used a very simple sonar system consisting of speakers facing out from the boat, megaphones,battery run electronic instruments, a harmonica, our voices and microphones that picked up the reflections from the shoreline and the concrete walls of the locks.

 As we drifted past walls, boats, walkers, fishermen, cyclists, under bridges, and trawled through the some of the largest locks in Europe, the reflected sound created an audible map of the ongoing journey. 

 


Blowing With Ghosts by Jean-Philippe Renoult (2008)

Fracking Futures - a spectacular artwork and mini-disaster by the Paris-based artist duo Hehe, (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen), who in collaboration with The Arts Catalyst, turned FACT Liverpool’s main gallery into an industrial landscape in a timely, playful and provocative commentary on crises of global economy, threats of environmental catastrophe and struggles of public institutions in times of austerity.
HeHe asked us to come up with a soundtrack to accompany the piece, to imagine sonically what fracking might actually feel and sound like. This is our interpretation.
For more info : 
http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/turning-fact-inside-out/hehe-fracking-futures/
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/06/ail-artists-in-laboratories-ep-28.php#.U4W73C_qG3U


Fracking Futures soundtrack by DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (2013)

DinahBird followed Valentin Lacambre, the French internet pioneer registrar from a tiny dank cellar that housed his first server - a simple computer in the 1990s - to a historic Parisian datacentre implanted near the Père Lachaise cemetery. Inside kilometres of cables and server upon server churn out, day and night, fresh new spam to keep your 'in folder' unhappy. 
Recordings made in 2022. A four channel performance version exists.

Sound Of Spam By DinahBird

Mavis Moyo has a wonderful voice. I didn't quite know how to approach this remix projet, but her voice and her deliberate way of speaking and careful pauses stuck out and made me listen. She is a storyteller. The sounds I have added around her are field recordings made by both myself and Jean-Philippe Renoult on a trip to Dakar in 2008 (Senegal) and a wet afternoon under a metal roof listening to the rain fall in the Norwegian mountains. The sounds are small, detailed and domestic : metal cups spinning on the floor, a wobbly table, and a thumb piano played rather badly. Like Mavis' voice, they somehow 'caught my ear'. 

Edit : DinahBird 
Recordings : DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult. 

Miles&Miles

Surface Bruit is not the type of sound we usually try to reproduce.

This performance uses home made records and field recordings. It is about what early records were made of and how they were made. Using low-grade home-made 7″ records, a Teppaz record player, a gramophone, and forgotten elements of her growing collection of 78s Dinah continues her research into surface noise and shellac production.

DinahBird Platines & Gramophone Live Studio 22 - 09 - 2024


2min 35 (2014) 
Sound installation made with radios. 
A limited edition of vinyl records, and stickers were also produced for the occasion. 

In the 1950s and 60s a scientific report compiled by the record industry stated that teenagers, due to their very short attention span, were unable to listen to a piece of music that lasted more than 2 minutes 50 seconds. This is perhaps one of the reasons that rock’n’roll and pop songs from that period only last around 2 minutes 35. 
In 1967 Sylvie Vartan sung the song “2 minutes 35 de bonheur” (‘ 2 Minutes 35 of pleasure‘) 
With this in mind we decided to make life - and listening to music - easier for the ageing adolescents of yesteryear. We sampled hits from the 1960s and 1970S, some are easy to recognise, others not. We then played these loops on radios and ghettoblasters in different places around Paris. Whilst the loops were being played DinahBird, in the manner of a radio continuity announcer, filled in the pauses and described what she saw going on around her. 

We call them : Pop Field Recordings.


2min 35, was commissioned for the group exhibition “Reformer le Monde Visible” au centre d’art Le 116 in Montreuil, Greater Paris. 

Curator : Marlène Rigler
Sticker artwork : Coraline Janvier. 


2min 35  - Kunstradio edit by DinahBird & JP Renoult


A Bit of Bird (2003-2016), all works by DinahBird, unless otherwise stated.

    Island Radio Magic
    SuperEgo
    Snoring by Numbers ( extract) with JP Renoult
    Bruit de Papiers
    Noiz Nicht
    Vito Goes to the Dentist with Vito Acconci
    2'35 (with JP Renoult)
    Wake Prattle and Toll
    Flower Heads and Skinny Cows
    Alwayssssssss 

A Bit Of Bird (2003-2016)

By DinahBird &amp; Jean-Philippe Renoult made whilst on the Beljiu residency.
http://www.belju.blogspot.com/

One track platform

An extract from a radio collage first performed at the Sonors Festival, Nantes (2010) inspired by an archive of old radio programme scripts.


Bruits-de-Papier-extract-one



A second extract from a radio collage first performed at the Sonors Festival, Nantes (2010) inspired by an archive of old radio programme scripts. 

Bruits-de-Papier-extract2

A third extract from this radio collage first performed at the Sonors Festival, Nantes (2010) inspired by an archive of old radio programme scripts. 

Bruits-de-Papier-extract3

Sound works by DinahBird and some collaborative pieces made with Jean-Philippe Renoult. Happy listening.  

DinahBird

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