The Spectrolite Pool

At 4:40pm this afternoon Cucina Povera goes in search of the perfect swimming pool:

The Spectrolite Pool attempts to revive vernacular storytelling through the ever-prevalent medium of radio. Spectrolite being a labradorite feldspar, an iridescent native stone of South Karelia, the work is about bringing culturally disparate and varied voices together, as is a defining characteristic of her current home, Bethnal Green. Pools are societal leveling factors and places for well-being. In Montreal pools are free for all to access in the hottest months of the year. In Brooklyn too, but they do not let you in if you look rough. In Finland there are try-hards and chancers – natural waters are popular, too. The East London ones are most varied but also have displaced people living in them in favour of more affluent citizens. In an austere and fragmented climate open, shared and public space is scarce. Cucina Povera encourages everyone to give municipal pools more attendance and support seeing as they are a true embodiment of communal leisure and the best creative ideas are thought of in them.

Running Amok

At 4pm today Tom White presents Run Amok:

Run Amok is a composition featuring recordings of an intervention at the location of Werner Herzog’s film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) on the volcanic island of Lanzarote. During the early 1970s Herzog shot two of his most radical early films on the island prior to the tourism boom; sections of Fata Morgana and the entirety of Even Dwarfs Started Small, the location of the which remains much the same almost half a century later. Further recordings were made around the island, utilising the materiality of Lanzarote’s alien landscape and used as source material for the resulting work.

Weirwood

At 2pm today Peggy Nelson (otolythe) presents Weirwood:

Upon learning that the Weirwood trees in Game of Thrones were named after Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, I set out to make an ambient soundscape about our long strange trip. The interiors of birch branches form the base. Over them I used field recordings from Yellowstone, and a cold tide on a black sand beach, grabbed with buried hydrophones. Then I stretched out a cello playing a few notes until the changes in tone were almost imperceptible, and finally wove in the audio illusion of Shepard tones. Providing color commentary is NASA’s John Glenn.

Patch Tape

Live in the studio today at 2.30pm Chloe Charlton will perform Patch Tape:

Through using found soundscapes of local environments, captured on a cassette tape recorder, physically cut and edited together to then be replayed as a whole, the audio becomes a sculptural object.

The sounds recorded will be experimental and universally visual such as the sound of water in the river, water in the swimming pool, church bells, choirs, ambient music, silence and so on.

This will be played live via a cassette tape player so the sound of the working equipment becomes part of the piece and the truth of medium is heard.

A disembodied presence

At 11pm up until midnight – a disembodied presence will be haunting the Radiophrenia studio:

“In the days before 24 hour television, lonely people or even people who were only sometimes lonely, would, when the rest of the world had closed down and gone to sleep, listen to the radio for companionship.

The knowledge that that the end of the dial there was another person also awake; someone that could be heard breathing and intoning and expressing their thoughts (and feelings) partially filled the emptiness in the listener’s life.

I would like to distill that phenomenon into its essence, namely, the sounds of a real human being alive in the studio.

So, for one hour, I am offering myself up as that real human being who would sit in front of a live microphone in the Radiophrenia studio and make sounds that would suggest to the listener that they are not the only one awake.

Obviously, anybody could sit in the Radiophrenia studio chair and do this; I’m volunteering to be that person.

I’ll make no effort to be entertaining in the conventional sense of having anecdotes or pithy observations on offer.

I might speak, I might make exasperated noises, I might play my iPod through a speaker sitting on the desk in front of me, I might sip a coffee. Papers might be rustled. I might just breathe and occasionally affirm that I am still there.

This is the listener as ‘eavesdropper’; rather like the young child who cannot get to sleep and enjoys the comfort of adult voices drifting up the stair.

But, at one point I intend to turn the tables on the listener and objectify him or her. This will be done in a kindly manner so no psychological damage will be done.

I will not break wind.”

Tony Morris

Psychic Folk Disease

At 8.30pm this evening Adam Kinsey presents St Vitus Dance:

St Vitus Dance is an improvised radio work recorded in a single take utilising material developed in the early part of 2019. The work is formed from text, vocals and modular synth.

The inspiration for the text in the work was developed following a period of research looking at accounts of illness in literature and historical writing. This led to descriptions of a ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘psychic folk’ disease in the German middle ages referred to as St Vitus Dance.

Oss Night

At 3.30pm today John Hall presents Oss Night, Short Rising.

Built around a field recording of the 2018 Stretton Oss Short Rising, and drawing on contemporary and archive recordings of its central song, the piece explores the affirmative nature of ritual and the liminal spaces it creates. Reference points include George Melly, Mott The Hoople and Mayday.

The additional music is by Nick Morland and Mike Willoughby. The Archive recordings come from the collection of Denis Copeland. The narrators are Andrew Deakin and John Hall.

ORGONE ACCUMULATIONS

At 7pm this evening Alan Miller presents – The Fall of Orgonon

Imagined as a form of non-visual of theatre exploring and dramatising the history of the psychoanalysis Wilhelm Reich, this 64 minute dynamic sound collage dislocates the techniques of DJ ‘craft’ by referencing audio collage, plunder-phonics and cut-up techniques. Using dialogue, sound effects, musical selections and interludes, disruptions of form, pitch and timing, Reich’s revolutionary treatment of sexuality is illustrated, celebrated/critiqued through a rich fractured narrative sketching his revolutionary socialist politics and progressive psycho-sexual teachings.

Magnetic Blues

At 6.30pm this evening Conal Blake presents Magnetic Blues:

Since moving to London in 2017 I have found multiple musical objects on the street, including:

• a bag of cassettes containing surveillance recordings and Jamaican, Mediterranean & British pop music

• a box of classical, pop and story telling records

• a portable record player

For this 30 minute radio programme I have chopped, slowed down, looped and simply played back some of my favourite moments on these tapes and records, with the help of a sampler, a cheap FX pedal and other found objects.