recording of my set from Bend and Shake at WHQ in nov 2023

bend and smh

Tracklist:
Imperfect List (Andrew Weatherall mix) - Big Hard Excellent Fish
Glass (feat. the Spaceape) - Kode 9
Plays Cornelius Cardew (Part 1) - Ekkehard Ehlers
Quote from Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - kpunk
Conversation with poet and writer, Alex Niven
Come Let us (Feat. Gregory Whitehead) - Mark Pritchard
Myopia - xin
Quote from Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - kpunk
You Only Dub Twice - Olivier Julien and Floyd Afrika
Conversation with cultural worker, Clare Smith
Mountain (Jam City Remix) - LA Priest
Sunny Stories - Gazelle Twin
Among The Living - Trim
Quote from Island Story - JD Taylor p. 133
The Shock of Hope - Laurence Pike
Milton Keynes - A Taut Line
Idontknow - Jamie XX
Conversation with artist, writer, educator and activist, Susan Kelly
Listen and See as They Take - Klein
Your Body - Ikonika 
Quote from Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - kpunk
Conversation with writer, JD Taylor
Making Love to Volca - Gavsborg 
Elephant Man - Time Cow & RTKal
How Many Ways - DJ 3D
Because You’re Frightened - Magazine
Conversation with artist, writer, educator and activist, Susan Kelly 
You’ll Never Walk Alone (Recorded at the Durham Miners Gala, 2012) - Pittington Brass Band
Conversation with writer and poet, Alex Niven
Good Lads, Bad Lads - Jam City
Wooden Bag - Richard Dawson
A reading of Gallowgate from Newcastle Sonnets - Alex Niven
Going Home - Alice Coltrane

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As part of Residency 11:11 Online, this week, we shared conversations and tunes, loosely orbiting questions of care and (counter)culture, their roles in cities and their affects in forming collective resistances. Tracing an unravelling of the future, reciting the time and space from 1960 to the present moment, as an attempt to conjure the absent collective subject as we talk (and walk). From under modernist architectures of a welfare state and undoubting civic confidence, through dismantled collective capacities and class war, into the austerity of the present moment, we’ll be asking what obstructs a collective capacity to act and care. Through our conversations with artists, writers, activists and cultural workers, we ask in what ways we can move from the incapacitating grips of fear and into a lucid collective confidence.
 
Revolving round a personally treasured k-punk blogpost from 2015, ‘Abandon Hope, Summer is Coming’, written in the face of political defeat after the 2015 General Election, this week's broadcast thinks about the production of resistant and reflexive counternarratives to inhabit and to find solidarity from within 
 
This show features chats with Alex Niven, musician, poet and author of New Model Island, about 1960s Newcastle, socialist modernism and the blind confidence of T. Dan Smith’s provocative Labour council, as well as soundbites from Clare Smith, a cultural worker in the city, whose experiences at the turn of the millennium, recounting times of increased cultural outreach, provide a trajectory for where we stand now, scrambling in austerity's schisms. We also spoke with author of Island Story, JD Taylor, about communities of care and how they can and must be recognised within a wider patchwork of resistance. Artist, writer, activist and educator, Susan Kelly, who taught us both at art school, discusses the extitution, communities and business as usual, as we reflect on the  commitment to militant political organisation she instilled within us, foundational to our collaboration and to our friendship.

FROM HERE #2

This FROM HERE broadcast begins roughly where we left off last week, conjuring resistance and confidence through and in communities, exploring how counternarratives can retell histories and unearth alternative stories for our cities to, in turn, retell alternative futures.
We will be exploring the ways in which art practices can construct new futures in our cities and for our communities, looking to archiving as a method for holding, preserving and presenting the histories forced into forgetting by dominant narratives. We’ll share more about our work, thinking about the processes of collecting and collaging we engage in as a form of archiving, addressing the complexities implicit, as well as a conversation with Archive For Change, a film archive and community project, gathering and exhibiting some of the many stories of urban change from the West End of Newcastle upon Tyne, site of one of the largest regeneration areas in the UK.

FROM HERE #3

In FROM HERE #1, aside from learning entirely in a day how to make a radio show, we tried to share the roots and route of INCURSIONS. We clumsily walked through our collaborative project, mainly inhabiting a day in Newcastle’s centre after the 2019 general election, presiding over abject defeat as something that summoned histories from the city’s tarmac in that midwinter moment. Defeat is not a productive place, as we highlighted, but helped us articulate a lack; and helped us grapple with ways of breaking through architectures of repression, to reimagine this cityscape, and others alike.

FROM HERE #1

For the final FROM HERE broadcast we regressed into the sentimental realms of love and friendship, as political projects and personal joys, as modellings for new ways of being with others, now more than ever! In this final chapter, we turn to our own experiences of friendship and community as literal sustenance; the euphorias and the complexities, chatting about collaboration and hosting and new ways of communicating, to gather people into gatherings. 
 
Featuring a conversation with collaborative tour de force, Abel Shah, asking each other, duo to duo, questions about collaborating and communicating, as well as chats with our friends about our own personal, lovely, challenging and deeply important networks, rooted and cemented in personal and political ruptures, in clubs, pubs, undercommons and pop cultures. There's music and memories, love letters to the spaces, times and initiatives that gather us, plus more from Dan Taylor about political empowerment through friendship, ways of forming community and the joys of the confidence produced through it. 
 
With a foundation laid throughout the last three weeks, from abject defeat, in to confidence and community, articulated through countercultures and counternarratives in this city and beyond, FROM HERE #4 tis up some loose ends, whilst leaving enough unlaced, to keep the lattices of a network open, from here and into outer worlds.

FROM HERE #4

A mix for September

Incursions is a collaborative walking project based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, facilitated by Archie Smith and Kitty McKay. Through practices of psycho/socio-geography, collective research, mapping, archiving and friendship, they work to shift dominant neoliberal narratives of space and place, co-authoring ‘counter-narratives’ for how we inhabit civic worlds and build active solidarities. 

Their ‘walking forums’ in the North East, drawing on social histories, pop cultures and personal experiences, form part of a broader project that utilises moving-image, radio and sound production, archival techniques and community cooking to deepen relationships between people and place.

Incursions

Pinned to spotlight

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