Category: Uncategorised

Castaway on Beàrnaraigh



From midnight tonight we turn off the transmitter and our FM broadcasts will cease – however, our stream will continue for another whole day with a long form durational piece by Martin Eccles exploring the sounds of a small Hebridean island. Listen online from midnight tonight:

“Beàrnaraigh is a durational, 24-hour work. From 20 days comes one 24-hour day of June, an Outer Hebridean island and walks of my complete clockwise island circumnavigation. Each minute is presented at its recorded time of (a) day; some are in appropriate succession from one minute to the next whilst others may be days away from their neighbour. Beàrnaraigh offers place, time, distance and movement – the chance to consider duration, “time of (a) day” and its relationship with distance and movement across place – distance walked in an hour, walking across hours or walking the entire circumnavigation.”

The Poetry of Titles

Bringing our FM transmissions to a close at 11.30pm tonight Zoe Irvine reads the title of every piece from this years broadcasts in INDEX:

A poetry of titles. Listing, listening and indexing what has taken place over the last two weeks. This half hour piece marks the end of Radiophrenia’s formal broadcasts this year.

Created in collaboration with Helen Clocherty & Rhona Taylor. Additional voice Petros Tsaftaridis.

With thanks to Leonardo D’Andrea.
 
An Eggbox Audio Production

With Apologies, Nessie

At 4.30pm today Ralph Lewis makes a heartfelt apology to Nessie:

With Apologies, Nessie is an improvised conversation between what is probably the Loch Ness monster (as portrayed by a live broadcasting hydrophone (underwater microphone)) and speaker at the edge of a pond. Clearly, the speaker has been an irresponsible oaf and is dealing with the fall out of his thoughtlessness regarding their mutual plans. Will Nessie forgive him? Only tide will tell.

Wet Courage

At 12.30pm today ECCO present a selection of songs from their research-based pop album ‘Wet Courage’.

The album is  based on recordings and publications from 1960s studies on dolphin intelligence and interspecies communication. For Radiophrenia, ECCO enters the ocean in order to transcend the species barrier and understand an intelligence without hands. A selection of songs is accompanied by texts by Loren Eiseley, Joan McIntyre, John Lilly, Gregory Bateson, Charles Doria and Stacy Alaimo.

Songs performed and texts read by the ECCO, or, Elina Bry, Caroline Hussey, Jack Wansbrough, Simon Weins and Feronia Wennborg. ‘Wet Courage’ was released by the Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council in November 2018.

Transmissions on the Bone

X-RAY AUDIO is a project by The Bureau of Lost Culture’s Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield. It tells the story of the underground community of bootleggers and music lovers who defied the censor in cold war era Soviet Union to make their own records of forbidden Western Jazz, Rock ’n’ Roll and banned Russian music. It is now an online archive, a book, an award-winning documentary and an internationally touring exhibition with live events.

For Radiophrenia there will be a live presentation about the X-ray record phenomena followed by a demonstration and three specially commissioned short performances by Glasgow artists that will be lathe cut directly on to X-rays for instant playback. From 7pm tonight – live at the Centre for Contemporary Arts – this event is free but ticketed.

Quinie – The wind and rain


Based on an amalgamation of ballads from the Singing Bone tradition, this version of the song brings together influence from ‘the Twa Sisters’ and other related versions, including “Binnorie”, “The Cruel Sister”, “The Wind and Rain”. S inging bone ballads feature a talismanic instrument, made from the bones of a drowned woman and invested with metaphysical power. The theme of this ballad is common in many northern European languages.  There are 125 different variants known in Swedish alone. 

Quinie, aka Josie Vallely is based in Glasgow. She sings primarily in Scots, in a style primarily inspired by the traditions of Scottish Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins (1929-1993). Collaging together source material, Vallely amalgamates modal melodies, children’s rhyme, Scots poetry and snippets of more traditional tunes to create a bleak and extended blur of narratives routed in an imagined Scotland.

Rebecca Wilcox

Rebecca will perform a spoken word piece that takes some of the physical aspects of the X-Ray records as a starting point; as with many tangible reproductions of sound, they are quite noisy.  The idea of background noise – whether audible or not – and its capacity to be comforting, distracting, scene-making and so on, is the focus of this new piece. Two versions of the text will be set into conversation through a live layering, allowing the constraints of the technology to dictate the form.

Rebecca Wilcox is an artist living in Glasgow. She works with writing, audio and video and sometimes with their manifestations as performance and installation. 

Toi-So

Music on ribs : Музыка на рёбрах. Jazz on bones : Джаз на костях. Bootleggers, music lovers.Scratchy hissing recordings.Heartbreak Hotel like Elvis underwater.Obsession and courage.Recording and distribution of forbidden music.Lovingly imprinted, pressed, cut one by one.Ghostly images of bones.Melodies, voices on fragile film.Jazz.Rock & Roll.Russian émigré music.Prison songs. “Gypsy” folk tunes. The intersection of technology, culture and ingenuity.Fuck everything, let’s dance!

Christina Dunwoodie is an international opera singer specialising in Italian repertoire. She has always been interested in innovation of performance and production. In the 90’s she founded the award winning company Opera on a Shoestring for which she was Artistic Director and Diva. The company’s success was based on the fabulous singers and musicians and collaboration with artists, dancers and choreographers. She began directing opera, exploring how visuals and multi media could contemporise productions in the UK and now with a group of European Artists. In collaboration with Tony Morris she has produced and performed new songs/duets with digital music as Toi-so.

Tony Morris lives in Glasgow and for the last 66 years and 8 months has lived his life backwards. Three years ago, on a firm foundation of zero talent and zero musical experience, he embarked upon a completely preposterous performing career; something he pursues with gusto and masses of self-doubt. In collaboration with Christina Dunwoodie he has produced and performed new songs/duets with digital music as Toi-so; Tony is at his happiest providing the miserabilist component to the combo.

We Are Formatives

At 12.40 today anarchic creative play clashes with authority in Helen McCrorie’s We Are Formatives:

Playing among plants, insects and industrial debris, children speak of an underground monolith, summoning a strange dystopian environment from an uncertain time. There is disquieting tone to this forest school. Children and machines are hungry for learning…

Inspired by the innate creativity of children and recorded in a former military camp, We Are Formatives explores nature and technology, as sites of fear and desire.

Helen McCrorie works primarily in video with a growing interest in sound. Exploring work, play and ritual, as sites of emancipation or control, she weaves observational documentary modes with the poetic, disrupting singular narratives. She is a participant in Satellites programme with Collective, Edinburgh, and her solo show If play is neither inside nor outside, where is it? will open at Collective in July and run throughout Edinburgh Art Festival and until October.

Vagina Loquens

At 8pm this evening visual artists Eothen Stearn & Kari Robertson and academic and musician Gill Partington present their sonic collaboration Vagina Loquens:

The project investigated through voice, interview, literature, narrative, noise, synth, pop and hip-hop the evolution of the figure of the talking vagina from 18th century colonial France to the contemporary context. The resulting work is a critical but playful examination of the relationship between the spoken word and the vagina, what we call it, what it calls itself, what it calls us. The piece also attempts to de-essentialise the vagina, to make the vagina a modality, an agent, a circluding form rather than a passive piece of anatomy.

Featuring excerpts from: Les Bijoux Indiscretes – Denis Diderot & On Circlusion – Bini Adamczak.

And samples of: Sheela-Na-Gig – PJ Harvey, Period Piece – Jenny Hval, Our Musical Ode to The Clitoris – Refinery29, Not Tonight – Lil Kim, My Vag – Awkwafina, Pussy – Lady, Boss Ass Bitch(Pussy Rap) – Nicki Minaj, Equal Rights – Ishawna, Pu$$y – Iggy Azalea, P-U-S-S-Y – Azaelia Banks, Straight Outta Vagina – Pussy Riot, Throw That Boy Pussy – Fly Young Red, Time to Tell – Cosi Fanni Tutti, To The Moon & Back – Fever Ray

The Joy Channel

At 4pm this afternoon Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan present The Joy Channel:

This speculative radio art piece imagines a future where the airwaves are used to transmit not just sound but also human emotion. In a transformed social and political and landscape, dispersed nomadic communities practice a form of tele-empathic communion without devices. Corporate powers attempt to control the population by flooding the airwaves with addictive standardized emo-casts.

Sonic Polar Explorer

At 2pm today Matthias Urban presents SiAI:

“Four years of pristine Icelandic recordings converge, unfolding as the story of a sonic adventurer, plunging himself into polar temperatures, daring the surf to swallow him whole, gingerly approaching the local seal population and asking for ~ no, stealing ~ an interview. A cacophony of surf and snow that sounds as bracing as the conditions in which it was recorded.” (https://acloserlisten.com)

Recorded in Iceland during 2013 – 2016, originally released 2018 on cassette via Dinzu Artefacts.

The Joujouka International

At 8pm tonight Cashmere Radio present The Joujouka International – the story of a musical tradition of The Master Musicians of Joujouka dating back more than six centuries. It explores the current state of this ritualistic Sufi music consisting of percussion and traditional pipe instruments by looking and listening to the people continuing to practice it in its spiritual birthplace – the village of Joujouka, in the Rif mountain region in Northern Morocco.

The story of Joujouka has many unexpected twists and turns throughout their long history. From explicit reference in the cut-up novels by William Burroughs, through tales of Islamic mysticism and even featuring on the Pyramid Stage of Glastonbury Festival, the unique sound of The Master Musicians of Joujouka’s pipes and drums have resonated far and wide. This radio piece attempts to retrace some of these key steps, and to understand why people — as distinct as Brian Jones and Ornette Coleman — have flocked to the mountains of Northern Morocco to experience this utterly singular music. What is, precisely, the Joujouka sound and what makes it one of the most radical musical forms living today, and which has attracted the ears of intrepid sound explorers from all over the world?

Sufi, trance and drone might be the recurring tropes that capture the spirit of this music most concretely. The connection to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, dates back to the coming of the Sufi saint Sidi Ahmed Schiech. Sidi Ahmed Schiech brought Islam to Joujouka in the 15th century and passed on a form of music with the specific function of healing disturbed minds and hearts. This music was passed on to The Master Musicians of Joujouka’s ancestors. The shrine of Sidi Ahmed Schiech is still to be found in Joujouka, and so is his blessing (Baraka) that is carried on through each generation of the Master musicians to this day. As a music that is played continuously for several hours without any breaks or pauses, and with tight repetitive rhythmical structures, it possesses without doubt the trademarks of transcendental music (trance). Furthermore it relies strongly on the connection between the musicians and a dancing crowd, culminating in the Boujeloud suite, a potent piece of music, with dense ritualistic symbolism, where a half-goat-half man creature raves around a bonfire and provocatively engages the crowd in a frenzy dance-chase. The harmonies play a key role, insofar they create a call-and-response game, as well as dense unison drones that result in oto-acoustic emissions and aural overdrives in the ears of the listener. Extended (three to four hours, sometimes more) exposure to these psychoacoustic phenomena, as well as to engaged dancing and rhythmical movements to the point of physical exhaustion create a heightened and somewhat altered perception of the self and of the environment around the self – as well as giving an ecstatic sense of presence and awareness once the music has turned to silence (while the ears keep on ringing and pulsating).

This reportage has a dual focus: on the one hand, it deals with The Master Musicians of Joujouka sound in a somewhat unorthodox way. Instead of showcasing the music as it is, it employs sonic treatments of the original material to expose the intrinsically experimental and radical potency that this music has as a subjective listening experience. It retraces this sonic experimentation back to Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones, who in 1968 first recorded and subsequently produced the Master Musicians. Rather than strictly musicological in intent, Jones produced the now cult album ‘Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka’ in London, an act that explicitly connected The Master Musicians of Joujouka to his own ethos of psychedelic music currently developing in the UK at the time. On the other hand, the piece is structured in such a way that the organisation of both sound and word material doesn’t create a linear narrative but is instead structured in an open and fragmentary manner. Textual and sonic elements are repeated and superimposed to produce in a circular network; a reference to William Burroughs’ own method during his cut-up period, itself heavily influenced by the Music of Joujouka (‘the panic pipes from the blue mountain’, as read in The Ticket That Exploded, 1962).

Voices: Ahmed El Attar, Abdeslam Rrtoubi, Mohamed El Hatmi, Laila Hida, Frank Rynne, Rikki Stein Narration: Rosie Peraza-Bragg

Written & Produced by Aladin Ilou & Matteo Spanò for Cashmere Radio