Radiophrenia 2019 Production Commissions

Mobile Radio residency - Glasgow Calling Scale live with Elina Bry
At the CCA Glasgow, Creative Lab
Performed on 15 February 2022 for Radiophrenia 2022

In collaboration with Radiophrenia and the Goethe Institut Glasgow ‘Mobile Radiophrenia’ is a cultural exchange and radio residency that will result in five new live broadcast works. The artist duo Mobile Radio (Sarah Washington & Knut Aufermann) from Ürzig in Germany have been invited over to work with five Glasgow based artists or artist duos on an intensive daily collaboration that culminates in a live radio performance.

Mobile Radiophrenia Residency - Collaboration with Mobile Radio

Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest

Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France.

The piece is comprised of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel’s tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.

In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.

Empire Of Dampness

Renditions Of The Beat - A Resuscitation Recital

Manja Ristić/Joana Guerra/Verónica Cerrotta, Slani pejzaži

Second Sketch for Larry Shipping - live at CCA< Glasgow, as part of Radiophrenia, 5 September 2016. Starring Tam Dean Burn (voice) with  Ed Baxter (text, direction, electronics), Peter Lanceley (electric guitar, voice, melodies), Kim Moore (viola) and Milo Thesiger-Meacham (electronics). 

Second Sketch For Larry Shipping

A Hörspiel triptych of psychic melodrama, set in a London both past and present:

1. Greenwich Aggregates - 2. The Three Compasses - 3. A Blackened Emirates.

Disparate narratives coalesce in a trail of crime and misdirection stretching across the city, leading us ever closer to an unknowable truth. Everything connects, nothing is reconciled. “Only now & then, something would make me remember…”

Musical interludes courtesy of Bernard Herrmann’s Concerto Macabre.

Debuted on Radiophrenia 87.9 FM (Glasgow) - 29/08/16


Hörspiel

A London Noir

A riotous mash-up of endings, goodbyes and farewells… that refuses to be silenced.

Produced for Soundproof (ABC Radio National, Australia) and Radiophrenia (Glasgow) 2017

The End

Voice-over: Victoria Chen Wei

Narrative sound work, focusing on how the body, the mind, and technology become entangled within inter/intra-personal relationships. The piece is inspired by interviews with my brother regarding his use of GECI viruses to map neural networks, the parallels of working within a hermetic studio and laboratory, and the possibility of slipping into the voices in one’s head. The narration leads the audience through nine hallucinatory episodes within which the narrator slips in and out of consciousness, losing the ability to distinguish inside from outside, body from space, and itself from the ‘you’ it is addressing. By playing with the desire to become-with another, the machine and space, the work addresses notions of personal agency.

Aired as part of Radiophrenia 2017, Radio Space Borealis (Bergen 2018) and Wave Farm (London 2019)

eeeeeeeee Excerpt

Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast series. 

Across this series, Gareth K Vile (Theatre Editor of The List Magazine. He also blogs wild critical theory) will chat to some of the amazing people who make, produce and contribute to our programme; from artists, curators and programmers, to community organisers and social clubs. We'll take a deep dive into exhibitions, gigs, performances and events - exploring the ideas and ethos that underpin our approach to Open Source Programming and how you can get involved. 

In this episode, we hear from CCA Director Francis Mckee; exhibiting artist Shadi Habib Allah; Take Me Somewhere producer LJ Findlay-Walsh; the 'Torvill and Dean of the avant-garde', Radiophrenia producers Mark Vernon & Barry Burns; and Glasgow-based Mexican artist, Catalina Barroso-Luque.

Francis Mckee - (50s) 
*Music* - Otoboke Beaver | *Suki Suki Darling* (14m 03s)
LJ Findlay-Walsh - (16m 48s)
Shadi Habib Allah - (24m 08s)
Mark Vernon & Barry Burns - (37m - 13s)
*Sound* - Radiophrenia excerpt -  (42m 20s)
Catalina Barroso-Luque - (49m 55s)

Thanks to everyone who participated in this show and to Unclassed Media & Sunny Govan Community Radio.

CCA Podcast #1|Francis Mckee/Shadi Habib Allah/Take Me Somewhere/Radiophrenia/Catalina Barroso-Luque

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.

Alicia Mathews - Click Bait

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