#81. A programme with independent sound art, radiophonic projects and other audio non-visual misunderstandings and findings.
1. A Box of 78s by Dinah Bird.
This is the story of a box.
A leather box that is over eighty years old, has lived in three different countries and on two different continents. It contains over fifty 78 rpm recordings of classical music and opera hits of the day.
The box and its contents were inherited by my grandmother who was born on the Gulf Islands, British Columbia, in 1910. She grew up on Salt Spring. She took the box with her when she left the island in 1925 and carried it to her various adult homes until her death in 2000. In September 2012 I retraced the box’s long journey and took the records back to the island where they were first played. Using my great-grandfather’s diary and daily notes on the weather as a guide, I played the records outdoors, on a portable gramophone in spots around Salt Spring where my grandmother and her family had picnics, played tennis or danced, and I recorded what happened. I also talked to today’s Salt Springers, and my late Great Uncle, about their memories and reasons for being on the island.
This composed sound work blends memories, observations, field recordings and music. This piece is about rekindling lost, and perhaps forgotten, sounds. Are they so very different to those my grandmother heard? It is a personal response to the people and places of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.
DinahBird | A Box of 78s – Radio relay project by DinahBird.
It is not a race, quite the opposite. It is a playful protest against the way sound is propagated in the digital age. The idea is simple. I have made a piece of radio pressed to vinyl available on Gruenrekorder. I would like the same copy of the record to be relayed between the different partner radio stations, so that no single broadcast sounds the same. The scratches formed en route will become part of the piece, mirroring the journey my grandmother’s records made. I will also ask each station that plays the record to fill in a listening log, a bit like the piece of paper that used to get stamped when you took a book out of the library. So far twenty one radio stations from places as far flung as Newfoundland and Dunedin have agreed to take part and play the record whatever state it might be in after all its travels. It is a radio relay, a kind of chain letter if you like. I am hoping that sometime around October 2015 the record and the physical traces if its journey will be returned to me, accompanied by the written observations of those who have played it.
21st Dec – Kunstradio RadioKunst, Vienna.
27 Jan 2015 Radio On – Berlin.
The Lake Radio, Copenhagen, DK.
Radio Nova, Oslo, Norway.
Radio Klangendum Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Radio Panik, Brussels, Belgium.
Radio Papesse, Florence, Italy.
Radiophrenia, Glasgow, Scotland.
Nova, on RTE Lyric FM, Ireland.
ResonanceFM, London, UK.
Soundart Radio, Devon, UK.
Radio Grenouille, Euphonia, Marseille, France.
Voice of Bonne Bay, Newfoundland, Canada.
Wave Farm, WGXC 90.7 FM, Accra, NY. USA.
CRFC 101.9 FM, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
CKUW 95.9 FM, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Tree Frog radio, Denman Island, BC, Canada.
Radio One (91 FM) Dunedin, NZ.
Creative Audio Unit on ABC Radio National, Melbourne Australia
Radio Campus Bruxelles, Belgium.
HRT _ Croatian Radiotelevision, Zagreb.
Radio Campus Grenoble, France.
2. Friso Van Wijck: NYRD.
"… I made this piece from a few soundslices of a piece for piano and percussion that I composed in 2003.
I’m mostly inspired by a few details that I hear in a particular sound, and the possibilities they offer to transform them into something different, preferably making them unrecognisable. I try to deconstruct them and build something out of it that will inspire me to discover some of the many different shapes they could take, and find a musical form to fit them in.
Nyrd is partly about large gestures that nevertheless contain a lot of inner detail and movement. After a moment of impact, a lot of small particles give way to many contrapuntal possibilities, eventually resulting in -or interrupted by- another collision.
It also deals with expectations that are sometimes met, sometimes not, or in a different moment then anticipated…"
3. Hours after Hours by Samuel Longmore. (for radia.fm)
This composition was recorded at night in six different rooms and liminal spaces within a certain building in central Auckland, New Zealand. The history, location and daily life of the building itself may or may not be relevant to the piece, but this set of conditions is as follows. This building houses the Audio Foundation, Auckland’s most recognisable locational node of sound culture and experimental music. It was, formerly, a tie factory for a local manufacturer which, in an Antipodean bid for faux-continental sophistication, called itself Parisian ties. Now no neckties, and indeed hardly any clothing, are made in New Zealand. But the building is still busy working, nurturing a resolutely self-aware locality in regards to the sonification of place, with rooms containing a sound library, a gallery space, a small performance venue, studios and workshop spaces, an office and small shop housing hens-teeth rare local runs of multi-format limited edition pressings, as well as its own low power FM radio station, AFM.
about Samuel Longmore
Grounded in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Longmore’s practice and research occurs in the spaces where his interrelated concerns for the experience of aural perception, the phenomenology of architectural space, field recording as compositional action and the para-ontologies of sound:silence / signal:noise, overlap. The work of Merleau-Ponty affirms a position regarding the importance of subjective, corporeal perceptual experience which is central to his practical investigations, fueling an ongoing interest in the ephemeral and spatiotemporally specific ontology of sound. Sam has a BVA in Sculpture from the Dunedin School of Art. He now resides in Auckland and is working towards an MFA at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Art.