Radiophrenia 2019 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2020 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2022 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2016 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2017 Production Commissions

Mineral Disobedience is an experimental soundscape inspired by an unofficial war waged in Sydney, Australia. Known for its natural beauty, the Emerald city is experiencing a period of rampant development; mirroring the wider world. Industry leaders must increasingly engage with environmental concerns raised by the public, as has been demonstrated by the ongoing climate change protests. For the latter group, this is a deeply personal issue which must affect the way we all interact with nature forever; for the former, it seems climate collapse is an administrative nuisance rather than impending reality. I use this context as a starting point to explore how Human, Machine and Animal might interact if the machines and tools we use in our taming of Nature were given anthropomorphic voices. Field recordings of construction sites and the natural world intersect as the machinery rattles to life. How would the diggers, jackhammers, trucks, the frames of the skyscrapers themselves, interact with their surroundings if liberated from their day jobs? The minerals from the ground, re-moulded into the building blocks of humankind, would surely have some things to say.

The piece charts a loose journey through the life of such machines, including the monotony of the construction site, hearing the dazzling voices of many humans, a flirtation with the natural world, and an inevitable return to ordained duty. The natural resonances of these field recordings inform the melodic content of the piece, including the recurring, poignant melody. 

Alexis Weaver is an electroacoustic composer based in Sydney, Australia. Born in the Shoalhaven, Alexis grew up learning flute, voice and harp before commencing study at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2014. Now, she draws on her classical music upbringing in a slightly different way, creating whimsical and adventurous electroacoustic works which celebrate the emotive capabilities of sound. While her principal interest lies in composing fixed-media acousmatic music, she has also composed soundtracks for animations, short stories, radio, dance and theatre, and exhibited audio-visual installations.
 
Alexis is also co-founder of female composer collective lost+sound, who in 2018 launched a series of concerts celebrating established and emerging artists working in experimental music fields. ​

www.alexismarieweaver.com

Alexis Weaver - Mineral Disobedience

Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade (1973), uses the concept of “Reverse Time” as way of interpreting “carnival-time” and the performance of the world turned upside down. Up becomes down and forward becomes backward; the procession moving in opposing time.

Using an autobiographical approach, OHCE is a sonic procession. Field recordings and choreographic directions situate the listener within the liminal position between two places, Guyana and Scotland; using sound, memory, composition and movement to meet an echo backwards.

Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary visual artist and researcher working with dance, performance and movement, alongside sculpture, film, sound and installation. With a focus on re-contextualusing historical narratives, Ashanti’s work explores the movement of people, ideas and things and the wider social implications of these movements. Her recent research subjects have included dance of the African and Caribbean diaspora in Scotland and Speculating the historical legacies of Guyanese women in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. As part of her creative practice, she is co-director for Project X – a creative education programme, platforming dance and performance from the African and Caribbean diaspora; and works collaboratively as part of the collective Glasgow Open Dance School (G.O.D.S) – facilitating experimental movement workshops and research groups. Recent solo shows include: The Skeleton of a Name, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2019); Second Site, Civic Room, Glasgow (2019). Recent group shows include: Being Present, OGR, Torino (2020); In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2020); Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick (2020); Pre-Ramble, David Dale, Glasgow (2020); Walking Through the Shadows Eyes Open, SUBSOLO Laboratório de Arte, Sao Paolo, (2019); BLIP! as part of Annuale 2019, Broughton Place, Edinburgh, (2019); As of Yet, Many Studios, Glasgow (2019); Just Start Here, The Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen (2019); Festival of the Not, Circa Projects, Newcastle (2019)

www.ashantiharris.com

www.projectxplatform.co.uk

Ashanti Harris - OHCE

This piece is inspired by early electronic music, primarily the work of Tod Dockstader, and the retrofuturism of new towns built post WW2 (I lived in Cumbernauld as a teenager and my family still live there). 

Helena Celle is a former audio engineer and Scottish Album of the Year Award shortlisted audio producer, who currently produces an hour or more of original music broadcasts distributed every month via Patreon.

Music for New Towns is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Helena Celle - Music For New Towns

Embodied through words, sounds and voice “From My Window: Dreams, Hopes and Disappointments” is a sound collage that explores field recordings taken from the windowsills in my house, escapes from New York City and reflections on what it means to dream through chaos.

Rena Anakwe is an interdisciplinary artist and performer working primarily with sound, visuals, and scent. Exploring intersections between traditional healing practices, spirituality and performance, she creates works focused on sensory-based, experiential interactions using creative technology. 

Currently, Rena is a 2020–21 resident of the Abrons Arts Center AIRspace performance program. She was also a 2019 ISSUE Project Room artist-in-residence, a 2019 Abrons Arts Center Sound Series commissioned artist, and a 2018 Signal Culture artist-in-residence. She has collaborated, produced, and shown work at New York City institutions including: Dia Foundation, Fridman Gallery, Knockdown Center, Lincoln Center, MoMA PS1, CultureHub, Pioneer Works, and Montez Press Radio. Most recently, under the moniker A Space for Sound, Anakwe released the first in an ongoing audio series titled “Sound Bath Mixtape vol. 1”, through the New York City-based label and collective PTP. 

Rena is based in Brooklyn, New York, by way of Nigeria and Canada.

www.aspaceforsound.com

Rena Anakwe - From My Window Hopes Dreams And Disappointments

Yes, radio transports signals across a variety of distances. But does it leap time…? No. What would happen if it were to jump to the future, passing through both time and space? The sound source of this recording is a series of radio broadcast captured when I visited Morocco in 2010. During the two-week trip to Tangier, Fez, and Marrakesh, I kept making field recordings of daily news or local music programs, recordings which I’ve now randomly edited for this 60-minute piece. Beyond radio’s typical function of frequency relay and capture, I wanted to produce an illusional frequency—collapsing time and space and expanding the territory of our aural imagination. With our activities now delimited by our local vicinity, travel is rare and encounters with others are limited. We have found ourselves hemmed in at a moment of political and social turbulence. I just thought travelling somewhere, even though it’s imaginary, could be refreshing and inspiriting for our minds.

Aki Onda is an artist and composer currently based in Mito, Japan. He is particularly known for his “Cassette Memories”—works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using portable cassette recorder over a span of last three decades. Radio is another medium Onda loves and often uses for creating compositions and performances. Onda has presented his work at numerous institutions and festivals such as documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Présences électronique, Argos, Bozar, ICA London, Counterflows, International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Kitchen, MoMA, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, and Nam June Paik Art Center. In 2020, Onda reissued three of his Cassette Memories albums on Room 40 and released two new solo albums. The other two forthcoming albums include his first duo album with Japanese artist Nao Nishihara on Fttari, and his third album with frequent collaborator Akio Suzuki on Hasana Editions. 

akionda.net

DJ أمواج a.k.a. Aki Onda  - Ghost Frequency (excerpt)

In making Three Sweep Between, their new commission for Radiophrenia 2020, Roy Claire Potter and Kieron Piercy had meltdowns; it’s not an easy time to make work. They used a terraced house layout to build and inform their interrelated recording and writing process, which brings synthesised and manipulated sounds together with visual descriptions to reimagine a total shithole’s lost potential. 

Roy Claire Potter is an interdisciplinary artist mainly making written texts and performances. Kieron Piercy makes audio composition, improvisation and installation. Between them they have audio released by SubRosa, Chocolate Monk, FortEvilFruit, Harbinger Sound and Porta.
They are tired.

Roy Claire Potter And Kieron Piercy - Three Sweep Between

A new radiophonic composition continuing OOR_Scintilla’s dialogue around materialities of intimacy, distance, ‘live’ and recorded dynamics. Ancient spiritual apotropaic markers found within churches and standing stones or ritualistic gestures of contact are taken as reference points for seeking out unknown ‘third’ presences within landscapes, weathers, voices and the making and playing of instruments.

The work incorporates a number of new sited and remotely realised performances recorded along waterways and forests in and beyond Edinburgh, as well as reworked/unheard material from OOR_Scintilla’s recent album project The Whiteadder Tapes situated in the Lammermuir Hills.

voice, crwth, harmonium, violin, hurdy gurdy, gongs, DIY aeolian harps and horns, field recordings, infra- and ultra-sonics, hydrophonics, electromagnetics

OOR_Scintilla (Louisa Love + Clive McLachlan Powell) are an Edinburgh-based collaborative artist duo exploring the material poetics of sound, voice and place. They work improvisationally with numerous forms of resonance across processes of field recording, musical performance, sculptural production, objects, electronics and the voice to produce environmentally-responsive audio works exploring hybrid and unstable conditions. Drawing on ancient origins, local and folkloric narratives, they are interested in the gestures and enigmatic territories that interconnect bodies, places, histories, technologies and natural phenomena, engaging with sounding and listening as acts of embodied archaeological research. The duo have come to define themselves through a humble and intuitive approach which employs only the environment, the human voice, the physicality of materials and mostly traditional instruments as raw material. These form the basis for an unsettled sonic dialogue rooted in multichannel natures and the wilding of latent identities.

In September 2020 OOR_Scintilla released The Whiteadder Tapes, an album of sonic archaeology compositions responding to the Whiteadder Water Valley, Scottish Borders, produced in conjunction with AOC Archaeology through a major project of new community-led excavational research (2019-20). 

www.louisalove.co.uk

cargocollective.com/clivemcsculpturesound

OOR Scintilla - Unknown Thirds

Nwando Ebizie - 

Fire Prevention
Or
How to sing a labyrinth
Or
The rebeing and the burning of the labyrinth

An experiment in an audio-ing a labyrinth;  tangling and untangling the thwarted pathways of a mythopoetisised history towards a transformational fire ritual.

How to weave a story into being when I am caught, tangled in the middle
How to reach the crux when the wyrding way turns me about and about and I know the point is far away. And I have to crawl on bandaged knee to get there
How to share a journey when you were never there to feel the stony ground
What rough beast is waiting, waiting to be born in the embers
When were they burned?

The task of the wild woman is to open and be opened
The doors of perception are always just beyond reach but a constant cycle of life death life, of re-initiation will bestow many keys
The labyrinth will determine the correct key
And you are the whole
The task of the wild woman is to open eyes and open thighs and allow the light to pour in

To pull the thread and follow around the walkways
Then gather it all together and weave the tapestry of her own existence
To gather dead stuff, lay it down, sing over it, breathe from the vagas enraptured soul and begin again, remake the broken body and sing the old song until it is new.

We travel through time and space while we listen
You my friend and I
I guide you and you guide me

Maybe by the end of you listening to me I will have the answers

Includes binaural recordings, headphone listening welcomed.

Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change.

She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.

Works include her immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations, her pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension!) and the building of her long-term operatic experience, Hildegard: Visions. This award winning work has toured across the world. She has performed in Tokyo (Bonobo), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Festival), Berlin (Chalet), Latvia (Baltais Fligelis Concert Hall) and Zurich (Blok) as well as across the UK from Home MCR to the Barbican and Southbank Centre.

Nwando works across media, genre and artforms creating mythopoetic metanarratives and alternate realities. Her work is a drawing together of the pieces that she is in a frozen moment of ever-living infinite regress.

Always political and grounded in a mytho-scientific perspective she invites viewers and participants to join her at the Crossroads. At the crossroads where you can choose to pass through the cosmic mirror and touch alternate realities. The realities of what could have been and what should have been and what may possibly be. She works with speculative fictions, possible dreams and lucid worlds.

www.nwandoebizie.com

Nwando Ebizie - Fire Prevention

The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) is a tape work inspired by allegorical vanitas paintings. Aiming at a moving target, the piece explores the elusiveness of memory by alternating two thematically connected field recordings, each time with overdubs and treatments gradually replacing the original source.

Two memories are revisited alternately three times each. The piece starts out from two short scenes recorded on site: a yard sounded by crickets and a piano in a room. Banal yet charged with what is absent: other senses, inaudible sonic details, layers of emotion. These scenes are recreated three times: first with the original source, the second time with part of the source and the third time without the source.

Scene I: The Yard
Date: August 14, 2020, South-West Finland
Setting: An almost empty camping ground. A remnant of the welfare culture of decades past. A remote bay surrounded by forest, houses, cottages and sheds, peeling red paint. An overgrown playground and mini golf court half sunken into the soft ground covered with pine needles.

At dusk, walking across the yard. The air has a smokey quality and is filled with the rise and fall of the sounds of crickets. They are always at a distance, never near, stopping when you enter their field, then starting again a few moments after leaving it, like the wake of a boat swelling back into the sea. A mouse runs across the gravel and freezes motionless under your gaze. Faint movements in the surrounding trees in full dark green at the peak of late summer. The light scent of burning logs.

Revisit the memory of this moment over and over as it evades you, like the crickets, the wake.

Scene II: The Room Upstairs
Date: August 29, 2020, Southern Finland
Setting: A yellow house surrounded by fields. Windows in all but one direction. Afternoon sunlight. A rarely played piano in a large living room. A dishwasher humming in the adjoining kitchen. The presence of people downstairs felt but not heard. Amateur oil paintings adorning the walls. Portraits, landscapes and still lives, mostly. A book case filled to the ceiling with 70’s and 80’s bestsellers. A stuffed snake on a shelf, a cow hide rug, a hearing aid and batteries on a mahogany coffee table, a pair of large slippers. Another scene inhabited by the remnants of hobbies, leisure time, objects to fill out the measures of an afternoon that grows longer with each year.

Play along to the piano.

The piece contains samples of rehearsal recordings from another work in progress with Aino Juutilainen (cello), Johanna Kalliokulju (mezzo-soprano) and Villa Ruscica (harp).

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist and composer working with field recordings, electronics, feedback, magnetic tape and digital treatments. Her work gravitates towards organic textures and intuitive tunings, assembling rough edged yet precise compositions, poetically narrative and rich in detail. Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active as a duo with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.

www.marjaahti.com

Marja Ahti - The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) (excerpt)

Revisiting a shared archive of recorded sounds, it, still is a patchwork of edited, processed and resampled material. Listening for small sounds and moments of intimacy, the work explores the potential of previously disregarded recordings to form new relationships.

soft tissue is a collaboration between Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Working with DIY electronics, domestic recordings and digital feedback, the duo plays within networks of lo-fi amplification, blurring the boundaries between initiated and environmental sounds. 

Recent projects include a self-titled tape release on London-based label Penultimate Press (2019), a commissioned audio-visual piece for West Den Haag, Leaks (2020), and a residency at CCA Creative Lab through AC Projects (2020).

it, still is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.
Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

Soft Tissue - It, Still

Ever and ever, forever and ever, you’ll be the one that shines in me like the morning sun. (This is an audiowork about joy and self-love and their interplay.) Ever and ever, forever and ever, you’ll be my spring, my rainbow’s end and the song I sing. (Initially envisioned as an hour long rendition of ‘forever and ever’ by Demis Roussos, the piece evolved to be a reflection on karaoke as a form of love.) Take me far beyond imagination. You’re my dream come true, my consolation. (Inspired by the philosophies of Audre Lorde, Sonya Renee Taylor, Prentis Hemphill, adrienne maree brown and doggface from instagram, along with the love songs of Roussos, Burt Bacharach and Whitney Houston, the piece evokes joy as an act of resistance to capitalism.) You’ll be my dream, my symphony, my own lover’s theme. (The piece practices self-love by singing love songs to itself. The piece remembers joyful dreams dreamt during lockdown, euphoric dreams of endless space, adventure, friendship and belonging.) Ever and ever, forever and ever, my destiny will follow you eternally.  

Tilly Alexander Hallworth aka tandsmør (she/her) is a poet, musician, sound artist and cycle instructor living and working in Glasgow.

https://tandsmor.bandcamp.com/

Tandsmør - ever and ever (forever and ever)

Time is a sliding door –  but if so, what does it mean?

“Time is a Sliding Door” is a variation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that “Reality is a Sliding Door”. As if that wasn’t tricky enough, substituting ‘reality’ with the noun ‘time’ unravels a kaleidoscope of meanings and implications that turns the ground of our presumptuous existence into a wobbly pudding. If Time is a Sliding Door, and we push it aside, what happens beyond the threshold? The act of sliding means that the other side is only slowly revealed. As well as with a thud, thunder and roll. As radio is a medium which transgresses our notion of time and space, both naturally and effortlessly, how does it come into the picture? If the door opens onto a 5th dimension, and/or still others, how could this be ‘enlistened’ into a radiophonic scape? To be honest, the author of these lines doesn’t actually know, and how could she?

As humans we continue to be tethered to time as a condition of our communication, our perception, our being. It just seemed fit to start with a speedy panorama of the “Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet”. Fasnet (or “Fastnacht”) is also called the “fifth season of the year”, and is recorded in central Europe at least since the 13th century. Its presentation of an inverted world, the parades of Jesters, Fools and Witches, the almost deafening onrush of drums, ‘Fools Cries’, trombones, trumpets and bells truly create a different time horizon.Other acoustic inhabitants of this composition are the cuckoo-clock and clocks in general, as this region of Germany is famous for its clock-makers since the 17th century. And after all, it is not just the shamans of the Northern Tunguska who believe that the cuckoo’s call presages the number of years one has left to live…

 Time is a Sliding Door sticks to the human dimension, playing with the acts of acceleration and deceleration, with the notion of journeying (we shall be travelling from the Black Forest to New Mexico and from there to Slovenia – at least), spellbound by folk tunes, with the whisperings of shortwaves captured in open and discreet places. Hidden stories keep on drifting through radio space, sites and signals keep travelling, and wherever they may go, eventually an alien molecule, touched by radio might spark off the impulse for that door to open up into the unforeseeable. Meanwhile, we’ll keep hanging around this auditory doorstep.

Credits:

Accordion: Olsen auf Aldebaran

Musical Saw: Mimosa Pale

Singers: Sanne Drouhin-Kok, Ulrike Stoehring and Lilli Moors, Fernando (guest appearing for “Adopta una planta”/Datscha Radio, Madrid).

Drums: Paddi (Patrick Guderitz), Toni Brokoli (Pascal Dinser aka Kalle Dinsko) & Junk (Thomas Jank)

Special thanks to: Global Forest e. V., Black Forest!

Gabi Schaffner works as a trans-disciplinary artist within the realms of radio art, composition and performance. Her artistic practice is determined by the methods of poetic ethnography in connection with fluxus-like mise-en-scènes, radio-making and sound art performances. Much of her work originates from journeys. Next to her radiophonic productions, Schaffner creates speculative musical genres and inserts them into music history in order to raise awareness for cultural, gender-related and/or geographical conditions.

Schaffner has been realising award-winning productions with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, radia.fm, Hessian Cultural Radio and ABC Australia. Since 2012 she maintains “Datscha Radio”, a nomadic transmission project that links the medium of radio to current ecological issues.

As a writer and translator, she has published numerous texts; most recently: “RevoltenDiaries”, in: Radio Revolten, 2019. She holds a MA in literature and ethnography and a diploma in visual communication. Gabi Schaffner lives in Berlin.

Current work:
Fazzoletto per un eternità. Performance and vinyl edition, 2020
Rapid(s)Trains: Geolocated audio walk for Open Gorey, Wexford, Ireland. 2020-2021

https://schaffnerin.net

Gabi Schaffner - Time Is A Sliding Door

Alexandra Spence – “Do jellyfish breathe?”

A reworked version of this piece has been released as the album 'a veil, the sea' as a cassette tape or download on the Mappa label. You can purchase a copy here:

https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/a-veil-the-sea

During Sydney’s most recent lockdown I submerged* a 15 minute-long piece of cassette tape in seawater collected from a local beach. The cassette tape contained a field recording of waves, and a recording of my voice offering a (non-definitive, and non-hierarchical) list of things found in the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve been thinking about connection with bodies of water, as well as connections between bodies and water, and how we might reimagine our bodily limitations to examine the things that connect us to each other and to our surroundings. The sea has always felt like home, and having lived on both the east and west edges of the Pacific Ocean it has become a place of connection for me.

I’ve been thinking about the Pacific Ocean as a home – not only to marine creatures and sea currents – but to the obscure movements of global trade, offshore data barges, and sunken satellites deactivated and dumped from space. Vast bodies may seem infinite, but nothing is – the depths hold mysterious, beautiful, and troubling things.

…Bottlenose dolphins, ancient artefacts, Lego pieces, approximately 36 species of shark, underwater mines…

Imagining an infinite ocean has led to overfishing, floating plastic-particle gyres, lost whales (as a result of the underwater din of shipping and naval industries), and an international sense of unaccountability.

“… Do jellyfish breathe?” is a kind of sonic traversing of oceanic layers, exploring imaginary landscapes, entwining and encountering unequal forms, such as breath with wave, fish with fishing line, along the way.

*Submerging the tape in salt water is an expansion of an ongoing project in which I bury tape loops 7-second field recordings on tape loops before burying them in the earth at the location in which they were recorded. I imagine this as a collaboration of sorts — I make a recording and the physical variables of each place and location alter it. While the magnetic coating of the tape retains sonic remnants of the recorded sounds of the place, the physicality of the tape ribbon retains material remnants of the place: sand, salt, other, which, in turn, impart audibly on the recording in the form of crackles, scratches, tape-warp, and hiss.

Alexandra Spence - Do Jellyfish Breathe (excerpt)

Alias Domaines   – “Being On This Boat Is Not Revenge”

Alias Domaines is a cross-Atlantic collaboration between Sukaina Kubba and Craig Mulholland.  
Alias Domaines is a semi-fictional space where exchange occurs by proxy. 
Alias Domaines is theoretically and virtually located on a cruise ship that travels between the ports of New York City and Southampton, UK. 
Our ship is part of the Cunard Transatlantic Fleet, a real cruise ship company. 

CUNARD: The Cunard brand is a nostalgia for art-deco design and lifestyle aspirations. 
From a post-colonial perspective, art-deco functions as sugar-coating or white-washing of harsh modernist and colonialist power relations driving international capitalism.  While it inhabits a space outside national lands and laws, the Cunard is an allegory for British class relations and British colonialism.  
A cross-section of the ship reveals a microcosm and floating representation of the hierarchy of class and racial structures. 

SETTING: First Class Lounge, Deck, Cabins, Storage Unit and Connecting Spaces 

CHARACTERS: 

Beverly Valenzuela: Concierge and Aspiring Fashion Designer
John Templeton: Entertainments Manager and Pianist   

“Being on this boat, it’s not revenge”

Edouard Glissant, filmed aboard the Cunard from Martinique to France, reflecting on the terrible journey his ancestors took in the opposite direction across the Atlantic. From “Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation” directed by Manthia Diawara, 2009

ALIAS DOMAINES (2021-22) is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts

Alias Domaines - Being On This Boat Is Not Revenge

Glass Salt – “Cove”

“Cove” is a radiophonic piece by Glass Salt that documents their creative practice during their residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island. The work is informed by their improvisational approach to music making, attentiveness to listening to their immediate environment, and an intuitive response to the moment. The result is an ecology of moving parts created through reciprocity and presence, expressed through music, voice, field recordings, and conversation.

Glass Salt is an experimental music and sound duo consisting of singer, producer and improviser Caylie Staples and artist, engineer, and musician Johann Diedrick. Staples and Diedrick improvise with voice, electronics, custom software, homemade hardware and percussion. Glass Salt creates with values of presence, tactility, transparency, friendship, collaboration, learning, skill-building and playfulness. They released their debut album Greetings on Whatever’s Clever Club in July 2020 and a follow-up album Mer on Cherche Encore in December 2020. 

Caylie Staples is a Canadian-based innovative singer, songwriter, producer and improviser. She is internationally recognized for her unique skill of creating on-the-spot, free form lyrics and vocals.  Current projects include her self-titled art-pop electronica project, improvisational duo Glass Salt with Johann Diedrick focused on voice and custom electronics, co-leading improvising avant-rock ensemble Anthems of the Void with NYC-based experimental luthier Bradford Reed, and co-writing electronica with Morgan Doctor for Aporia Records. Staples has a B.F.A. Honours in Music from York University, Toronto, Canada. 

Johann Diedrick is an artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for encountering the world through our ears. He surfaces vibratory histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is the founder of A Quiet Life, a sonic engineering and research studio that designs and builds audio-related software and hardware products for revealing possibilities off the grid through sonic encounter. He is a 2021 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient, a member of NEW INC, and an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP program. His work has been featured in Wire Magazine, Musicworks Magazine, and presented internationally at MoMA PS1, Ars Electronica, and the Somerset House, among others.

https://glasssalt.bandcamp.com

Glass Salt - COVE

Hali Palombo – “CALL-BOOK”

Often, amateur broadcasts on shortwave radio tend to go undocumented, resulting in hundreds of broadcasts a day vanishing into the ether – never to be heard again. “CALL-BOOK” highlights and emphasizes several conversations, interactions and unusual instances collected over the course of 48 hours of shortwave listening. This will preserve the throwaway broadcasts in relative immortality while framing them in naturally evolving and alien aural environments.

Hali Palombo is a composer and visual artist working in Illinois. Crafting most of her music from a large personal library of CB and amateur radio recordings, her compositions also include Morse code, wax cylinder samples and field recordings she has taken at various Midwestern points of interest.

www.halipalombo.com

Hali Palombo - CALL BOOK

Khadea Santi – “Deep Lake Murmurs“
Deep Lake Murmurs is a mediative speculative fiction on diaspora, water and imagined borders. Accompanied by recordings of various rivers, a soft gliding voice ascends and descends in prayer, creating a psychic vessel for spirits travelling off an imprisoning island. Taking inspiration from the African water deity Mami Wata, it brings together a resistance to post-colonial borders with layers of ancient water folklore. 

Vocals by Fiyin Fakunle.

Khadea Santi is a ceramicist and artist, exploring histories and storytelling through the use of creative workshops as a way to encourage space for self-exploration centred on lived experience. They are interested in critical autoethnography as a method that disrupts ideas on the subject/object dualism and Eurocentrism, instead self-reflecting rooted in diasporic knowledge working across various media including; writing, ceramics and film.

Khadea Santi - Deep Lake Murmurs

https://2022.radiophrenia.scot/artist/manja-ristic/

In January 2020 I found myself in Ljubljana exploring abandoned spaces as a continuation of my obsession with listening to the Third Landscape – Gilles Clément’s concept which considers, among other things, abandoned urban landscapes or those which suffered an explicit human intervention as places good for thriving bio-diversities which are building the genetic reservoirs that an overall Ecosystem is dependant on. I instantly got hooked by the largest city project – The Sport Park Stožice. It was supposed to include sport facilities and a vast commercial area but only the public part was built, the arena and the stadium. Eighty thousand square meters of the shopping centre remained unfinished.

As often, politics and economics are inseparable, and as corruptive mechanisms become more obvious, both reveal deep submergence into necropolitics. A capital cumulation on the detriment of basic social rights leading to a radical devaluation of a human life. To cut the story short, most of the “modern” societies “background” economics can be reduced to arms sales, drugs, and human trafficking routes. Beneath them are stock value of oil and lithium, gold and diamonds. 

“Please be careful, you’ll be trespassing”, said a dear friend.

The private partner in the public-private largest investment in Slovenia since the 1970s went bankrupt in 2012. 

There were irregularities in the expenditure of EU funds, the then-Mayor pleads not guilty in the latest lawsuit investigating the case. 

“There used to be a wonderful pond, and a hilly landscape… now it’s just concrete, wherever you look, there’s concrete.”

It was a crispy January morning, I wore my army boots. The site was enormous. Several concrete terraces were covered in various surfaces, reaching as far as the eye can see. I decided to just walk.

..... (see web link for full text).....

Every time you think “That is somewhere over there. Nothing has to happen”, a child that dreamed of freedom disappears.

The composition is made around an excerpt from my Stožice abandoned construction site field recording archive. Recorded in January 2020 during the reZone residency in Ljubljana.
Poetry excerpts from the collection Stories Untold.
Mastering by La Plant Studio Belgrade.

http://manjaristic.blogspot.com/

https://manjaristic.bandcamp.com/

https://sonicmatter.bandcamp.com/
photo: Nina Pernat

‘Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe’ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Manja Ristic - Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe

Marco Paltrinieri – “Untitled (an anecdote)”

Untitled (an anecdote) is a composition that tells the story of a journey away from reality and towards what could be a newfound awareness for some or perhaps madness for others. But there is no moral to be drawn here. Instead, what matters is the experience of listening itself, to be understood as an act of openness to the possible. In a world largely dominated by the immediacy of vision, I do believe in the role of other senses in bringing a renewed depth to the experience of the world itself and to our role in it.

Starting from these assumptions, Untitled (an anecdote) has a twofold nature: on the one hand it is an homage to the ability of sound to help reconsidering reality and to foster imagination and on the other, it relies on such qualities to accentuate the nuances of the story while experimenting with narrative possibilities.  

—

Written, recorded and mixed by Marco Paltrinieri 
Words by Marco Paltrinieri
Voice by Lucie Page
Mastered by Renato Grieco
Artwork by Mirko Smerdel

Marco Paltrinieri - Untitled (an anecdote)

MME dUO – “I all go rythmus”

I all go rythmus
describes a series of laconic islands
with the most diverse vegetation
of dense voice fragments
and clearings,
which we follow along a Hummingway,
fringed by
repetitive blurred and unfiltered
reflections and recordings

In “I all go rythmus”, MME dUO challenges and explores above all the crazy wilderness of gaps, over and through which to stumble, to explore what is in between, above, below and beside.

Since 2016 Cologne based Patricia Koellges and Tamara Lorenz make use of a variety of instruments and devices: DIY electroacoustics, small synths, loopers, tuning forks, e-bass, percussion and voice are thrown into the game and shape a sound in the tradition of Musique concrete, Post Punk and factual Dada that is as diverse as it is striking in it’s interplay between dissonant sounds and harmonic sequences, breaks between a-tactical accents and continuous rhythms, the supposed familiarity of spoken language, which is nevertheless alienated by fragmentation, give rise to unusual sound collages in the overall work that explores the potential for ambiguity that arises from the interweaving of a variety of disciplines, including video, sound, collage, sculpture, fashion and photography.

www.mme-duo.de

https://mmeduo.bandcamp.com

https://www.instagram.com/mme_duo/

MME DUO - I All Go Rythmus

Siobhain Ma & Rhiannon Walsh – “Journey Through the Auricle”

“Journey Through the Auricle” is a voyage through an elevator centring on exploration and internal and external discovery. Stop one consists of a commission from your ears. They have enlisted our help to clear out the clutter and clatter of what is going on upstairs. Stop two takes you to an unknown land, rich in colour and restorative light beams. While stop three nourishes your roots and provides a sound bath for the senses. Throughout this collaborative piece Siobhain channels the imagined environments through dreamlike synths, while Rhiannon uses metallic and machine-like sound and voices that are not her own.

Siobhain Ma is a sound artist who explores themes of identity, environment and (sometimes) the supernatural in her work.

Rhiannon Walsh is a sometimes audio maker, writer and Reiki practitioner. She enjoys producing content centred around the body, nature, rest and meditation – including ASMR.

Siobhain Ma & Rhiannon Walsh - Journey Through The Auricle

A series of sound poems performed as part of Radiophrenia, a week-long radio art station broadcasting from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts in April 2015.
www.radiophrenia.scot


Nichola Scrutton - Sonnets (excerpt)

Prior to the Internet, I grew up on a Scottish island, feeling deprived of many a thing. Popular radio was broadcast on both AM and FM, but due to harsh weather conditions, inconvenient landscapes and general far-awayness, signals often experienced interference or were limited. At midnight, the music I listened to on the crackly but more reliable AM would be interrupted half-way through by a jolly male voice, repeating a warning that broadcasting on this frequency would, due to a government decision, be phased out altogether to be replaced by better, more modern FM. Night after night, I lay in contorted positions in my bed, holding onto a wire aerial so I could receive and cling onto a mangled FM signal, all in a desperate battle to preserve my grasp on the here and now of mainstream pop and contemporary late night chatter.

This is an experimental narrative that attempts to re-enact my experience as a radio listener, and consolidate two opposing characters: the slick hiss of FM and the dull thud of AM. Aerial Holding Hands will be aired as a split broadcast with a different channel on the FM broadcast and the Internet webstream. Two separate pieces, each 27 minutes long, one no better than the other. They can be played simultaneously, or individually, depending on your listening circumstances at the time.

Written and produced by Catriona Shaw except ‘Transmission’, written by Joy Division (Curtis; Morris; Hook; Sumner)
Co-production by Fred Bigo Shaw.
Recorded in The Padded Cell, Berlin, Germany and Le Chantier, Louverné, France in 2016.

Catriona Shaw grew up on the Orkney Islands and studied art in Edinburgh, Munich and Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice combines drawing, performance, music and participation, as well as a number of collaborations including the band Queen of Japan, and art collectives Club le Bomb and gooeyTEAM. She has performed and exhibited in diverse international venues and festivals.

www.misslebomb.net
www.gooey.de

Catriona Shaw - Aerial Holding Hands - Stereo Split

What You See is the third sound work Dinah & Jean-Philippe have made inspired by aerial disappearances and crashes. In June 2016 during a residency in Kilpisjarvi, Northern Finland, they came across the crash site of a WWII German Junker bomber plane, brought down in the midst of the bleak Arctic landscape in 1942. Over seventy years later remnants of the aircraft are cleary visible, possible wing parts, piping and rusty metal are fused and fossiled into the stony lunar landscape, like a decaying dinosaur carcus, or perhaps a forgotten memorial to those who perished. The recordings in this piece were made almost entirely on site.

DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult are sound and radio artists based in Paris. They often work together making radio works, installations and soundtracks.
Recent works include Take Flight, a composed soundscape starring planes, drones and frequencies, made for ABC’s Creative Audio Unit and A.V.I.O.N, a sister installation inspired by the parallel world of aircraft navigation systems. DinahBird’s radio relay record A Box of 78s is having a rest after it’s 18 month trip around the world. Jean-Philippe’s audio graffitti project, TagAudioLoops was last seen and heard at Waverly train station…

bird-renoult.net

What You See

Dinah Bird & Jean-Philippe Renoult - What You See

Part of my continuing exploration of a ‘distended’ abstraction rooted in everyday activities, Arena On Energy On Tape is a drifting, layered composition woven from field recordings, appropriated and altered sounds, discrete performance, and time stolen back from work.

Referencing a found motivational tape, and the BBC2 arts strand (and it’s Eno title music, appropriated previously in my 2003 video Arena) the piece is a soup of binaural immediacy, approximate noise, elusive periodicy, and mangled guitar and natural forces, all filtered through saturated tape loops, and a cannibalised Leslie cabinet.

Stuart Gurden is an artist working primarily with sound and video, he is drawn to the tensions between creativity, technological evolution, and the processes of cultural recuperation. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA in 2000, and has exhibited across the UK and abroad, receiving various awards including the Scottish Arts Council Film & Video Award. He was short-listed for the 2012 Margaret Tait Artist’s Film Award.

soundcloud.com/stuartgurden

Arena On Energy On Tape

Stuart Gurden - Arena On Energy On Tape

The Edible Pet by Zoë Irvine and her son Logan, with contributions from family and friends in Edinburgh, Cornwall and SW. France. A story that crosses continents, travels from pet keeping to dining table, taking in some back garden ethics, pet psychology, trans-species music making, dramatic mishaps, life, death and recipes.

There are some scenes of a graphic nature, this programme contains meat and may not be suitable for vegans or vegetarians.

Featuring in order of appearance: Daniel Manson, Rab Lendrum, Chloë Manson, Gilberte Manson, Juno Neil, Rebecca Palmer, Eva & Nicole, Logan Young, Alexia Allen, Doreen Young, Jill Lendrum, Michelle Davitt, Pauline Wilson, Morris Young, Robert Young, Geraldine Brenner, Osvanira Alves & Jane Hunter.

Extracts from A Household Book for Africa by E.G. Bradley read by Michelle Davitt.
Extracts from humane animal harvest video with Alexia Allen by Paul Wheaton. https://richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp
Bird calls by Elise Rouanet & Aimé Souyri from ‘Charmeurs d’Oiseaux’

Original music by Zoë Irvine & The Galloanserae Experimental Ensemble.
Additional songs Le Poulette Grise – Alan Mills ; Poullette – Béatrice Maillet; Ain’t Nobody Here but us Chickens – Louis Jordan.

With love to Grandma and in memory of Jackie.

Zoë Irvine is an artist primarily working with sound. Her involvement with Bill Furlong’s Audio Arts Magazine from 1994 – 2007 as a sound editor sparked a lifelong interest in the idea conversation and voice as potential artefacts in themselves. As a field recordist, Irvine has a particular love of soundscapes in which distance and space become perceptible.

zoeirvine.net
soundcloud.com/zebraphone
listenrecordcreate.blogspot.co.uk

Zoe Irvine - The Edible Pet

Embracing and updating the Radiophonic tradition, Sarah Angliss presents a spatialised sound poem inspired by The Signalman, Charles Dickens’ ghost tale for the industrial age. In this fractured retelling, Angliss plays with psychoacoustics and liminal sounds to conjure spectral resonances, ghostly cries and the gloom and dampness of a deep railway cutting. As sounds and music unfold, an isolated signalman becomes all too aware of a future horror he can do nothing to undo. This piece is created in collaboration with vocal artist Colin Uttley. For maximum spatial effect, please listen with headphones.

Voiceover artists: Colin Uttley (adult) and Nicholas Gowing (child).

Sarah Angliss is a composer, musical automatist and sound historian. Her work combines acoustic and robotic instruments with Max, electronics, found sounds and field recordings. Sarah’s work explores the uncanny properties of technology, revealing resonances between European folklore and early notions of electricity and sound. A prolific live performer, Sarah also works in theatre, creating distinctive sounds which blur the boundaries between sound design and musical composition. Her theatre sounds have most recently been heard in The Old Vic, London, where she evoked the overwhelming clamour of modernity in O’Neill’s Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape (directed by Richard Jones).

www.sarahangliss.com

Sarah Angliss - Signalman

Julia Drouhin and Phillipa Stafford, as Sisters Akousmatica, investigate mysterious radio broadcasts known as “the Silent Key”.

Radio: drag the dial across frequencies at any given time, any given place and you will hear a cacophony of sounds. Static, pops and crackles, whistles, the tap, tap tap of the world and the universe going about its electromagnetic business. In between those sounds are stations: broadcasts that are music, news, chatter, cryptic messages and espionage. Stretching out around the world in a network of terrestrial communication, bouncing off the heaviside and landing back again to be collected by radio-listeners – in cars and in kitchens. Sisters Akousmatica are always listening – seeking out the strange broadcasts destined for…? Well, who knows. NM, SK begins to examine some of the recordings they have made in their quest to research “the silent key” – a series of broadcast messages that they discovered in the winter of 2017.

Sisters Akousmatica - NMSK

“So…s… so what we’re seeing here is that there are things you can’t immediately control… you can’t control the motivations and the actions… but what we are seeing them seek to control is the physical space around this as much as they can… there are people as we’ve been speaking to…who are locked in… into other locations… they are now clearing the space around it and they’re… controlling what they can… they can’t control what’s in the mind.”

Edited quotes from panelist Hugh Riminton, Studio 10 News, Network Ten, Australia, 15/12/14

Radio Presenter: Fletcher Mathers

Thanks to: Ronan Breslin at La Chunky Studios & Pete Dowling.

Jess Worrall & Rob Kennedy - The 3 Ring Circus Comes to Town

A radio performance based on Carl Sandburg’s Four Preludes to the Playthings of the Wind, with vocalist Laura Wiens.

Gregory Whitehead - Nothing like Us Ever Was

Eliane was my step-mother. She died last year from Alzheimers. In this piece I’d like to explore radio’s potential to evoke memory, disorientation and memory loss. Using her favorite songs on tape. And other memories. Sounds. Texts. Hers, mine. Ours.
sandstorm of memory/effacement/mental landscapes/details/temporal slide/bribes/cut-up method/erasing/éclats/sandstorm of details/memory landscapes/temporal cut-up/bits of landscape/erasing method/snipets of memory
Asking: In the end, is there anything to remember at all?

With the voices of François Cau, Isabelle Hainaud Griffiths, Eliane Ravanat, Gilbert Ravanat and Isabelle Stragliati.

noearnosound.net

Isabelle Stragliati - Nothing here now but - a tribute to Eliane

Jason Lescalleet assembles recordings to create a narrative meditation on the passage of time and our perception thereof.

Jason Lescalleet - Sketching An Arc

Legend of the Necessary Dreamer is an ambient novella, a multi-sensory essay, an excavation of the historic Palácio Pombal, a work of impatience and death. Maria Fusco reads the whole book, acting as an ear and a mouth, creating embodied entanglements, paying close attention.

mariafusco.net

Maria Fusco - Legend Of The Necessary Dreamer

Hexagon Heart is a sound poem/musical story of Marjorie Van Halteren’s emigration to France in 1992 and what has become of her heart.

Marjorie Van Halteren - HEXAGON HEART

The work I have devised is a 19 minute sound piece that explores the tensions often experienced through extensive use of social media, hand held devices and digital dissemination of information.
I used screen captures of my online journeys while researching this composition as moving images to create scores from. The sonic narrative of these works echo the jarring imagery that was produced as a result of my low concentration span and complicity within the distractions of the web.

Inspiration for the sounds featured within the composition include: monitor refresh rates, loading and buffering rates, the speed at which information is sent and received, malfunctions, scrolling rates, 140 character limitations and push notifications. I reimagined these elements sonically to form the tonal palette of the piece.

Alicia Mathews - Click Bait

Line Clean 9-6 was a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Resonance Extra as part of Strands, supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Line Clean 9 – 6 is composed around a series of abstract, rhythmic recordings made on shift at work (in the cellar of a pub), household objects (bins, bikes and cookers) and snippets of found sound recorded on a phone. Using a process of layering and splicing plus augmenting with ‘traditional’ instruments, he aims to draw out the beauty and musicality in everyday sound exploiting the harmonic and structural qualities inherent in everything we hear. The resulting collage combines, water pumps, beer kegs, bin lids, sound checks, bouzouki, clarinet, MS20, cowbells, choral polyphony, pipes and whistles.

www.oliverpitt.co.uk

Oliver Pitt - Line Clean 9 - 6

If I were to tell you how I arrived here, I would have to explain the voicemails. The voicemails have been in the back of my mind for some time. They had accumulated over several years, in fits and starts. A waxing and waning of words spoken into the void. For months, I watched them arrive but I did not listen to them. When I eventually did hear the messages, certain things were immediately clear. The condition of his lungs was deteriorating. His breathing was laboured. The messages had never been easy to follow. They were often slurred, because of the drink. But now when he spoke his words were interrupted by coughing fits, more and more so as time went on. By groans and gasps. Belly-speech. Gurgles of outflow.

In The Absent Body, Drew Leder writes that the healthy body is ‘transparent’. In illness, the body loses its transparency by ‘dys-appearing’. In a state of dysfunction, it appears. When I read this, something about the idea of the loss of transparency seems familiar to me. The pregnant body is not transparent, but it’s not dysfunctional either. In fact, the cis female body is perpetually troubling this idea of transparency in health. I am not the first person to point out that the question of the body’s transparency is not as simple as it seems.

Breathless is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

I try to listen to the groans and gasps between the words as sounds in all their electronically-mediated materiality, perhaps I am being evasive. I am finding it hard to breathe as I listen: the body impinges, despite myself. And they call this ‘reduced’ listening. The absent body, on the other side of the voicemails, of the radio. For something so absent, it weighs heavily. Dissipated, dys-appearing.

Hannah Ellul - Breathless

A radioplay by the X-Static Tics (Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis)

The story is set in the year 2222. Dead Henk, a living corpse brought to life from a previous century (he died in 2121) is forced to be interviewed about his attempt to stabilize the world by introducing people to art. Was it due to his efforts that there are no more wars in 2222, that everyone has made peace? There are no more conflicts. Weapon manufacturers only make space ships. part of humanity is migrating to other solar systems although that is not really necessary; the earth is clean, pollution has been banned. The curiosity about dead Henk is great because with the disappearance of traumatic and conflict situations all forms of art are wiped out. Only the music has survived this genocide on the uncomfortable; after all, you must have something to listen to.

A live version of ‘the day of the great tit’ will be performed as part of an outside broadcast at Platform at 3pm on Saturday, 18th May.

The Xstatic Tics - Day Of The Great Tit

Hermits wear boxes of Kleenex on their feet instead of shoes and keep plastic trolls in the sofa, birds bring them bread, they count their days with potatoes, they live inside their own grave, naked and hairy or wear woven coats of camel hair.

Glass Enclosed is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Glass Enclosed is an epic, solitary incantation performed by one voice. Its points of departure are the ‘Ancrene Wisse’ and ‘Speculum Inclusorum’ – instructional texts on how to be alone written for recluses, anchorites and hermits in the 13th/15th centuries. Glass Enclosed combines myth, testimonial and trope into a placeless, cocophanous soliloquy spoken from beyond.

Kari Robertson - Glass Enclosed

Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – an exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. The broadcast schedule will include live shows, pre-recorded features and a series of ‘live-to-air’performances. The majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound and radio works.

Broadcasting across Glasgow on 87.9fm, and online at www.radiophrenia.scot 

Supported by Creative Scotland.

Radiophrenia

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