Radiophrenia 2020 Production Commissions

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

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.
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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

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.

Helena Celle - Music For New Towns

Radiophrenia

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