Radiophrenia
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Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – a two-week 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. PLAYLIST Martin Heslop / Helen Tookey, “Beautiful Error”, 4’39” These three tracks are part of an ongoing collaboration between poet Helen Tookey and composer Martin Heslop. While the original texts use fragmentation to try to convey a particular experience – a sense of the language sliding, piling up, or of a mind going over and over a question – the fixed, written work can only create this effect to a limited extent. Here, the words are cut and spliced, repeated and layered to make the language move and track over itself, while the soundbeds pulse and shimmer, creating a texture of volatility and urgency. Helen Tookey is a poet based in Liverpool. Her debut collection Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize. Her pamphlet In the Glasshouse was published by HappenStance Press in 2016, and the CD/booklet If You Put Out Your Hand, a collaboration with musician Sharron Kraus, was released by Wounded Wolf Press in 2016. Martin Heslop is a composer and writer based in Newcastle. He has written scores and lyrics for short and full-length theatre shows and film, and has worked on many collaborations with poets, playwrights and visual artists for live performances, recordings and installations. https://helentookey.wordpress.com https://martinheslop.wordpress.com/ Gregory Kramer, “Riis”, 7’13” Riis was composed using the sounds of the Marine Parkway Bridge across Rockaway Inlet. Gregory Kramer (BFA in Film/Video from Pratt Institute) is an artist who composes with field recordings, found materials and musical instruments. Taking inspiration from his archaeological curiosity of abandoned places, he searches for ghosts among the ruins and seeks to unearth evidence of forgotten histories through sound. He recently returned from the Sonic Mmabolela South African residency, and had work selected for Sonom International Sound Art Festival in Mexico. He has performed and created installations, had work in a Movement Research dance performance and participated in a Norwegian Experimental Co-Lab on a lighthouse island. Katapulto – Wojtek Rusin, “The Garden”, 13’39” The Garden is an absurdist piece. The vocal delivery refers to popular styles: the new age yoga teacher, the TV nature programme presenter, the narrator of fantastical children stories. The sound sets the tone for the voice, works as an emotional support for the voice but also as a dense and multilayered set, an autonomous character in its own right. Wojciech Rusin composes music for theatre and film. He wrote music for the award winning show ‘No Guts No Heart No Glory’, which was filmed by the BBC and broadcast on BBC4 in November 2015. He works with digital and analogue technologies, sensors, solenoids (electromagnetic hammers), synthesisers and anything that can be used as an unique sound source. As Katapulto he released the LP ‘Powerflex’ on New York label Olde English Spelling Bee. Vile Plumage, and The Burselm Community Radio Players, “Daphne and The Barron are Stranded at the Station : Episode 1″, 10’02” ‘Vile Plumage’ is a collective consisting of Duke Burnett and Peter ‘Bunny’ Cropwell , with occasional input from the ‘Burselm Community Radio Players’. Our primary focus is the ‘reality oscillation’ – there are no straight lines or static points. Strange myths and urban banality exist at precisely the same co-ordinates. The crowd. You think you recognise those faces… but most of them are doppelgangers. We live in an area called The Burselm. Every Sunday we trudge around the streets, sometimes sheltering in Bingo Hall doorways. Always with the record button pushed firmly down. Sound is transferred directly, MAGICALLY to tape. We butter these recordings with paranormal research. Strictly local. Strictly. These sounds are bashed and boiled into radio shapes. Melodrama. Soap opera. Pulp. “Daphne and The Barron are Stranded at the Station” is the first episode of a soap. A melodrama. A voyage to the depths. The murk. Drug cults. Inter-dimensional beings. Demonic possession. The dark movements of a Parish Council. Grim business in a market town. https://www.facebook.com/BurselmCryptRecordings/ Marcelo Armani, “Volcanic Lungs”, 8’00” Volcanic Lungs is a sound piece composed of field recordings made on a beach formed by volcanic spill, located on the Reunion island, France during October / November 2013. The soil of this place presents porous stones containing small holes inside formed by the abrupt cooling of volcanic lava meeting with the waters of the Indian Ocean. The composition depicts a typical and unique acoustic landscape: blows, bubbles, water, the continuous movement of natural actions that are encroaching on this coast. A “lung” that inspires and expires continuity of these gestures, while silence conducts the mountain. http://marceloarmani.weebly.com/ gobscure, “chalybeate aka the bees sleep”, 6’23” sound by gobscure / words by sean burn. of llandrindod wells including chalybeate spring. part of our residency with celf, mid-wales a whiles-back, now extensively reworked & dedicated to all folks celf – past-present-futures. spoken-word comes from a poem published as rust never sleeps in otata april 2017 c.e. completed commission from radiophrenia 2016 – lonecrow make some hullabaloo blends poetry with sound loosely round recurring dream of intense relationship with survivor crow. a previous composition was švejk’s journeyings – responding to obscenities of world war one thru eyes of ‘the good soldier švejk’ premiered at the international artists anti-war exhibition b-side, casarsa della delizia, italy, 2016. other completed soundworks include those for carlisle arts festival; celf mid-wales; cesta czech republic; didsbury arts festival; dragonfly festival sweden; hipersonica brazil; humber mouth festival hull; loudspkr london; arts access australia; odins glow north york moors; new gallery walsall; ultrared Lin Li, “Happy 40th birthday”, 5’28” A voice only audio work derived from the change ringing method ‘70th Birthday Delight Major’. Originally from Hong Kong, Lin Li is a visual artist based in Edinburgh. Having painted for years, Lin started in 2011 to explore moving images and sound as a creative medium. Being a choral singer, she is particularly interested in expressing and experimenting with the voice. Clara Lou, “The Furniture Supper Club”, 12’33” The Furniture Supper Club is a haunted radio play about telephone miscommunication and fraught domesticity. A couple has trouble recalling the name and age of their son, and goes on to enact this senility for another pair of speakers. Voices speak furtively over the telephone, their utterances mingling with those of the operators. Two wanderers attempt to remember if they’ve met before by recalling the particulars of a book one may have loaned the other. These narrative threads overlap and intermingle, creating a layered sonic landscape. Clara Lou works with text, performance, and radio. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, USA. https://twitter.com/clara_louu Marjorie van Halteren, “The Man on The Street”, 10’25” An improvised story performed by Marjorie Van Halteren and Raphaelle Duquesnoy on the upright bass with effects. This is an excerpt from the ‘That Tuesday’ podcast. Rhubaba – Nazia Mohammad and Holly Pester, “Planula Reverie”, 12’34” In May 2017 Holly Pester performed her experimental verse fiction Planula Tales in three parts over three evenings at Rhubaba. Planula Tales tells the story of a ghost living on the seabed, attempting to voice subject positions of waste, rather than body; of plotting from the seabed, rather than mapping the sea voyage; a poetics of abortion rather than creation. Artist Nazia Mohammad was invited to make this sound work using recordings of the readings, an immersive world that draws out the materiality of the words, created to be listened to whilst lying down under a blanket. Nazia Mohammad is an Edinburgh-based artist, interested in creating through her work a reductive language using materials, shapes and sounds, examining intuitive reactions to balances and textures whilst touching on Sufi imagery and concepts. Holly Pester is a poet, writer and researcher and performer. Rhubaba is an artist-run gallery and studios in Leith, Edinburgh, committed to generating a supportive workspace and a dynamic platform for local and international artists. |