The sounds of aquatic plant photosynthesis interpreted. 

Taking inspiration from the mixtape format, where versioning and remixing are common tropes, Plant Playback presents sections of subaquatic source material, each initially in a raw unprocessed state, followed by sonic diversions exploring the inherent rhythmic and harmonic properties of these sounds.

Interview excerpts with researchers specialising in freshwater bioacoustics, as well as computer-processed interpretations of the sonic data, such as audio-to-MIDI capture, further illustrate a personal quest to understand and appreciate the complexity and strange unknowable nature of these sounds.

With special thanks to acoustic ecologists Camille Desjonquères, Gea van de Lee, and Jack Greenhalgh for their time and expertise on the subject.

Biography

Tom Fisher is a sound artist and musician based in the marshy edge-lands of North East London. Working primarily under the name Action Pyramid his projects vary from site-specific sound installation and headphone based works for galleries and museums, to experimental radio works, music and documentary.

With a background in electronic music and audio production his creative practice involves using sound and composition to re-examine and reconsider our surroundings, looking at the relationship between ourselves and the nonhuman, and our part in the wider ecologies of landscapes. With a multitude of recording techniques, often aimed at exploring and re-interpreting the seemingly unnoticed and unheard elements of our surroundings, he looks to present compositional and spatial expressions of these acoustic phenomena in a way that attempts to offer up alternative perspectives regarding perceptions of scale, hierarchical bias and the interconnectedness of living things.

www.actionpyramid.com/


Action Pyramid - Plant Playback



That’s what the bucket is for is the beginnings of a radiophonic fiction by Alison Scott, Becky Šik and Rosie Roberts. The work generates and dissolves an amorphous identity who sifts through data and is transfixed and subsumed by facts, stories and observations. The collaboration is informed by an improvisational ‘scrapbook’ approach to science fiction-making. A fragmentary narrative emerges from intuitive responses to both immediate environments and a rangey lot of matter the trio collected surrounding the theme of orbits. The result is a giddy selection of moving people, places and objects created through spinning, looping and reading in each other’s presence, expressed through music, narration, field recordings, and transcription.

It seemed astonishing to them that the most enduring mysteries of modern times could be reduced to a recorded analysis of stolen paperwork. If they were trying to say – what goes around, comes around – I was trying to make it real.

References for materials and publications used in this piece:
Marina Warner, ’ETHEREAL BODY: THE QUEST FOR ECTOPLASM, Seeing Is Believing’, in Cabinet Magazine, 2003. Available at:  https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/warner.php
Edwin Morgan, ‘Space and Spaces’, Selected Poems, Polygon, 2020. 
Joanna Russ, ‘The Female Man’, The Women’s Press, 1975. 
Lisa Parks, ‘Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual’, Duke University Press, 2005.
David Clarke, ‘UFO drawings from the national Archives’, Four Corners Irregulars, 2017
Mark Fisher, ‘The weird and the Eerie’, Repeater Books, 2016

Rosie Roberts is an artist, writer and editor in Glasgow generally working collaboratively through ideas of synchronicity, time, locality and affect. She also works as a tour guide and in a shop.

Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker often working with other artists on projects. Recent work has drawn on encounters with weather, land, and the idea of the commons. She is based in Angus.

Becky Šik is an artist filmmaker based in Glasgow whose work spans moving image, installation, sound, music, writing and publishing, often working collaboratively. Becky’s recent work explores the echo, electromagnetic phenomena and technologies as a way of understanding the body’s relationship to constructs of time and state.




again and again - That's What the Bucket is For

Alëna Korolëva - Premonitions


“Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.“
Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1983

A song is playing, in the background. Hey —

Schock!

Still, alive.

Waste(d) land revisited.

This is an acousmatic cadavre, reassembling thoughts and samples that are rotting on a hard drive in a box, in the downloads folder of my laptop causing slow pace or being captured in the fields very soon. As if it was a prehistoric cave, creatures pass in and out. The traces of another time lie buried in the undefined terrain, but I will arrange and add yet another layer to this palimpsest of sounds and form a loop of sonic references and anecdotes, like a Stone/r/d henge in a sonic sphere. Roll out a carpet of sub frequencies! You may hear the echoes of the sirens, they speak with a German accent in their voice in dramatic tone… still, I feel the same.

With voices of Meta D-1, Gertrude Stein, Anna Oppermann, Fiona and the author and a quote by Lawrence English.

Biography

Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow, born in Düsseldorf, studied archaeology, Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft and Klang & Realität. As artist, sound designer and performer, Beeskow works in the independent scene, radio plays, podcasts, installations, experimental films and in the theater in different collaborations and writes about female* composers and sound artists for the grapefruits.online fanzine.

www.antoniaalessiavirginia.com

‘Ecce, sigh! Siren calls… still, I feel the same.‘ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.


Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow - Ecce, sigh! Siren calls… still, I feel the same



In 2019, a new natural satellite was discovered orbiting our moon. Things have not been the same since.

One day you are here. And then suddenly you’re not here. You’re not anywhere. In “An Oneirophonic Account of a Venture to the Second Moon” a disembodied voice recollects its memories of a failed expedition to the satellite orbiting Earth’s moon: the second moon. This piece – part science fiction radio drama, part fragmented soundscape – weaves a sonic tapestry that attempts to explain what it’s like to be consumed by the unknown – something that words alone can’t describe – creating a narrative set outside time and reality.

Written, recorded and edited by Astrid Björklund.

Several voices in this work have been synthesised using ElevenLabs.

All things in this piece are fictional, except for the things that are not.

Biography

Astrid Björklund is a Swedish visual artist and amateur sound weaver. Her work draws on the theories of the “Chthonic” (of relating to, or in, the underground), fiction, mythmaking, and thoughts surrounding the uncertainty, awe and ambiguity of life, with a pinch of existential dread. Noise, music and ambience for this work have been created using various synthesised, found, created and recorded sounds.

https://astridbjorklund.com


Astrid Björklund - An Oneirophonic Account of a Venture to the Second Moon



Two strangers matched together, their practices intertwine
A blank page
Growing from there
An open cupboard buzzes and humms
Sending snippets in stolen moments
The circle drops, opening a wide and generous hole
Slippage
Talking, passing, exchanging, reasoning, corresponding, joking, transposing
Systems cycle in loops
Accents, language, tones, intonations, cues, pitch, syllables
Prompts
The megalithic Ouroboros fun machine that is Barbie
Touching an elephant
Circles, water, falling sound
Escalators, circular systems, sleep, not sleep
Words that don’t exist
Gleichgewicht
Walking with dizzy spells in saturation
Reflecting, twisting, alternating, translating, modulating, jumping from
On the edges – a Hallwall
Again the elephant, transponder, closed water, eyes
What does it mean to be open and what slips away?
Souffleuse, Echoschwelle, Tonfall
X1, mnemonic, delay
Asking, loops, deathbed
What’s wrong with my eyes, oscillating, brown noise
Pulse
What is an orbit sound
Missing the radiator, voices, vertigo
I could spell it fownetikally/ foʊˈnet̬.ɪ.kəl.i
Meter eater
Mi devas uzi la ŝtuparon

This piece was developed during a week long residency at CCA funded by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow in collaboration with Radiophrenia. We are very grateful for their support.

Biographies

Becky Šik is an artist filmmaker based in Glasgow whose work spans moving image, installation, sound, music, writing and publishing, often working collaboratively. Their recent moving image work explores the echo, electromagnetic phenomena and technologies as way of understanding the body’s relationship to constructs of time and state. 

Becky has presented work across the UK and Internationally, most recently with a film screening at Supernormal festival; Footnotes, a collaborative Radiophrenia broadcast with Sarah Forrest; and the solo exhibition Mercury at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.

Nika Son studied Fine Arts in Hamburg and has since worked as a musician, artist, film composer, curator and DJ. Influenced by Musique Concre te and the outer space of electronic music, her compositions are built from modified and fragmented field recordings, interwoven with analog synthesis, broken rhythms, rare voice scraps and modulated tape. Sounds of various origin are translated into a very unusual musical language, as if one watches the audible. 

She appeared on various labels, such as Mmodemm, Kashual Plastik, VIS, First Terrace Records, TAL, Sky Walking, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray and her own imprint Noctui. Her latest album To Eeyore was released on the label Entr’acte in 2020. A new album is coming this year. 

Alongside her solo concerts, she creates radio pieces, video and sound installations, and has collaborated for many years with various companions, most notably with filmmaker and artist Helena Wittmann and musician F#X (Cwelle). In her work as a soundartist for experimental film, she is among other responsible for the score and sound design of Helena Wittmann’s highly acclaimed films DRIFT and Human Flowers of Flesh. For over a decade she hosts regular art and music events at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg with various international guests. In 2018 she staged a two-day festival called Eruption, freely based on the musician and video artist Conrad Schnitzler. Since 2019, she co-curates the festival Papiripar together with Felix Kubin and Florian Bräunlich. 

www.nikason.de

Supported by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow.

Becky Sîk & Nika Son - TONFALL – Remember, I must use the stairs



‘Like a telepath’ pieces together a week-long journey of remote recordings. ‘Emitting’ and ‘receiving’ from a small island and from a city simultaneously, in order to mimick a radio device. To do this, we would start the recording of our parallel transmissions at the same moment in time, using the distance between us as a space to connect. What you hear is a photograph of a thought, a long, windy line tracing a series of synchronous compositions. Cover a moment, remain standing, crumpling paper in your hands. A phone rings – s in the past.

Brussels – L’Île-d’Yeu, May 2023

Biographies

Diana Duta is a Romanian-born, Brussels based artist working with sound in hypnotic ways, with a background in art and socio-cultural linguistics. Her work focuses on concepts of mimesis, translation and echoic memory, with an ear on our relationship to the non-human, embodied sound and the act of listening. She makes music performances (as DIAN), works for radio, sound installations and collaborative translation projects.

Her project Jambes founded in 2019 is a recording studio commissioning new work by artists experimenting with sound and the voice. Quille podcast is an limb branching out from Jambes that collects interviews with sound practitioners.

http://dianaduta.com

http://jaaambes.be

Florence Cats is a visual & sound artist and acupuncturist from Brussels who uses theremin, light, water, color and energies. Her ‘transparent music’ tunes in to space and ambient silence, and is inspired by natural radio. She has curated of a series of exhibitions around water, signs, transmutations, and is the co-author of several books including ‘Lavori in corso’ (primitive press, 2020). She released ‘Ys’ on ediçoes CN in 2022 and ‘correspondances’ on frissons in 2021. She was also a member of The Asocial Telepathic Ensemble (corvo records, 2022) and often collaborates with other musicians and artists, such as Brandon LaBelle, Clara Levy, Bogdana Dima, Mauricio Amarante, Joseph Charroy.

https://florence-cats.com/

https://florencecats.bandcamp.com/album/ys


Diana Dutta & Florence Cats - Like a telepath

Buy here:
https://unpocofria.bandcamp.com/album/a-blurred-raganella

I received this commission proposal on March 14. The same day, my Grandmother Lea turned 99. On the 4th of May, she passed away. Nearly all the field recordings on it were taken on these two dates, in and around the nursing home where Nonna was cared for, using a bunch of her personal effects like: a pocket radio, a toy ratchet from 1930, a pendant reliquiary, a paper knife, her collection of pencils, a deck of cards etc. Voice, tapes, instrument and electronics have been recorded at home after her departure. 

Biography

Ezio Piermattei (b. 1980) is an italian sound artist living in Turin, Piedmont. He  has released solo and collaborative recordings  through Chocolate Monk, More Mars,  My Dance The Skull, Steep Gloss, Discombobulate, Staaltape, Joy De Vivre, Nashazphone. Piermattei also plays in Triple Heater – a duo with Brighton’s F. Ampism – and runs the label Tutore Burlato. 

https://eziopiermattei.bandcamp.com

http://tutoreburlato.blogspot.com 


Ezio Piermattei - A Blurred Raganella

“Administrative Embrace” grants unprecedented access to the inner workings and concealed logic of the enigmatic Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. This transmission crosses rustbelt landscapes, pedestrian tunnels, flyovers, debris fields, and timelines, charting states of decline, delirium, immortality, and heroic obedience. Listeners are invited into the vast and impressive O.J.A.I. world headquarters. Through spoken word, modular sounds, architectural and bureaucratic fictions, lists, timelines, and ambient musical accompaniment, “Administrative Embrace” offers an hour-long exploration into institutional conjuring, information overload, camaraderie, and magic.

Produced by O.J.A.I. in 2024/25 for Radiophrenia Glasgow

Text and voice by Gary Farrelly
Sound and mix by Chris Dreier
Piano by Tim Löhd

Biography

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.) is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly based in Brussels and Berlin. The work is fuelled by recurring fascinations with architecture, infrastructure, finance, esoteric practices and institutional power manifesting in postal correspondence, installations, sound, performance and walks as well as limited vinyl editions and publications. The work has been presented at Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Damien & the Love Guru (Brussels), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), Marres House for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht), De Garage (Mechelen) and Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, US), among many others.

O.J.A.I. produces a monthly music radio show for Dublin Digital Radio and for Cashmere Radio Berlin.

https://jointintelligence.org/    
@jointintelligence

OJAI -ADMINISTRATIVE EMBRACE

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay - Sonic Psychogeographies II

Pespirito Pisco Sour

For bookings: meagreresource@hotmail.com

Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based sound artist who works with found tapes and acousmatic presence. His work explores themes of magnetic memory, audio archaeology, voyeurism and nostalgia. 

His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples, Flaming Pines, Misanthropic Agenda, Gagarin, Sonoris, Granny, Psychetropes, Persistence of Sound, Flag Day, Entr’acte, Discrepant, Futura Resistenza, Vice de Forme, Calling Cards and Canti Magnetici. 

He co-runs and curates Glasgow art radio station, Radiophrenia and has produced programmes for stations internationally.

Pespirito Pisco Sour

Mark Vernon

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