Radiophrenia 2022 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

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

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)

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

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.

Glass Salt - COVE

Radiophrenia

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