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

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

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.

Gabi Schaffner - Time Is A Sliding Door

Radiophrenia

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