Featuring interviews with Cheryl Porter and David Batchelor.

First played on Between The Ears, BBC Radio 3, September 2021.

Chromophonia

Live performance

Ekmeles, directed by Jeffrey Gavett
Moore Musical Arts Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
22 November 2021

Madrigal book in 31-TET (2012-16) after Nicola Vicentino
Texts adapted from Jacques Arcadelt's Primo Libro de' Madrigali (1539)

Primo Libro

Bhavani Esapathi is a maker, writer and social-tech activist working on the intersections of autoimmune diseases or invisible disabilities, migratory politics and access to healthcare. Voice Recognition is a sound art piece which explores the experiences of migrants accessing the healthcare system in the UK.

Bhavani Esapathi: Voice Recognition

For RA.1000, DJ Sprinkles' first mix in over a decade is a powerful meditation on the genocide in Gaza.

Dance music often relies on simple narratives: release, escape, unity. But those narratives can often feel inadequate, and even at times, hollow. Or, as Terre Thaemlitz might bluntly put it, just "shitty."

For her first mix in around 15 years, Terre Thaemlitz AKA DJ Sprinkles, challenges us to think differently. "I felt this 1000th podcast should reflect the moment in which it was made," she told us in her Q&A.

And what is this moment? Every day since Israel's 2023 assault on Gaza began, an average of 28 children have been killed. That's an entire classroom, every day, for over 600 days (at the time of writing). It's a staggering figure that only captures a fragment of the listless cruelty imposed on the strip.

Faced with such a genocide, what can music really do? How political can it truly be?  For their RA.1000, Thaemlitz gives us an unflinching rebuke to the idea that music should provide escapism. The mix weaves ambient fragments and jazz passages, woven around samples from Israeli media and the voices of outspoken Jewish critics like Gabor Maté and Norman Finkelstein. 

The result is not just a protest, but a document of our time. For Terre Thaemlitz, music is never just music. Her RA.1000 serves as a reminder that in an age of relentless suffering, the most political act is to reject the illusion of escape, and search for something greater.

Read the interview and find the tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1013. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at https://1000.ra.co

RA.1000 Terre Thaemlitz / DJ Sprinkles

Rehearsal_170920_155657

A sketch of a new sound collaboration with sound artist Gemma Nash.

Taking inspiration from canonical stories of the voice throughout time (the Bible's 'Tower of Babel', the Greek myth 'Narcissus & Echo', Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Little Mermaid')we explore the voice and its relationship to self-hood in a future where technology can capture and alter our voices beyond recognition. 

These sketches are soundscapes that will be used as the background for a live performance of music, text and movement.

CUTTER // NASH: Keep Singing (Running Out Of Time)

NTS Radio - FAUZIA, A Love Letter 2 Somalia 22nd May 2020

(Dis) Connect

Lyrics:
All of the lines are gone
A sudden shot of blue
Creeps into the corners of the map

And the things that I want to do
Are hidden in the gaps
Free from all the corners of the map

Audio description:
A mid-tempo, relaxed song with echoey, distant guitars; electronic drums that stop and start, almost hesitant; fragments of a man's voice singing in a loop; and a pulsing bass sound. The same man's voice sings the lyrics breathlessly, becoming louder and more resonant as the song continues.

Background:
For this month's track, I wanted to create something that was looser and less reliant on samples and melodic loops than what I've made over the past few months. Keep changing. 

The basis of the track is the guitar, recorded into Ableton with some very heavy reverb and delay, improvised in response to a short animation I made in iMovie using landscapes I painted, and computer generated graphics I made at livecodelab.net. I then recorded some vocals with the lyrics, "I want tears from the mountain - cry! cry! cry!" - an image I'd been playing around with for a little while. 

The room where I record is right above the kitchen, and my partner overheard me. 

"Sounded like you were trying quite hard...," he commented, when I said I was finding this whole singing practice fun, but hard. Reader, he was not wrong, and I appreciate his honesty. 

Around about the same time, I watched a YouTube tutorial by musician and producer, Bad Snacks turning a recording of her playing the violin into midi notes and playing them in Ableton. As an experiment, I applied it to the voice recording. Instead of getting the splicing to work on a regular quarter note or eighth note basis, I set it to transients - the result being lots of fragments of different lengths. Some long and languid. Some small and rapid. This is the chopped up vocal you can hear at the beginning.

I created a short midi drum loop to help ground the voice samples, and had kind of forgotten the guitar recording, but Ableton being Ableton, it started playing and I found it kind of matched up to rhythm. Or maybe the playing was so loose and impressionistic, it didn't really matter. So the drums stayed.

The song was moving in a certain direction. But what about the lyrics? How to capture the desire for, and feeling of, freedom? We are nearing the halfway point of the residency, and have support to launch a project of our own choosing. Many, many possibilities. The images of maps being flooded arrived quickly, and I improvised something on the spot. First thought, best thought. The melody was twice as fast, and felt rushed, so I slowed it deliberately. It would be nice if 'first take, best take' was always true, but I ended up doing probably close to 40 recordings of the vocals, and the finished product is a mix of the best ones. My singing lessons continue, and my confidence grows. I'm learning to think about the emotion behind the performance, to locate the breath in my body and understand how it enters and exits. 

This is a song without a chorus. I think of the sketch from Limmys Show. "One way...down a one way strreeeEET!" "You wrote a bit of a song? Not a whole song? Just...a bit of a song?" Yes, exactly. It's a bit of a song. I like it.

CUTTER // NASH: Keep Singing (Running Out Of Time)

Gareth Cutter

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