At 4pm today Carrie Skinner & Alexander Storey Gordon with Chris Skinner present – ‘I am a Magician by the way.’

A member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians from the age of 16, my Dad, Chris Skinner, performed magic in the North of England during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. My latent fascination in the presentation and craft of magic has revealed itself in my own performance practice, most recently a 2017 live-to-air performance for Radiophrenia.Retroactively documenting this ephemeral performance event, I explore in more detail the paradox at the core of the previous work; the necessarily visual medium of magic presented through the inherently auditory medium of radio.

Although I have always been interested in the display of magic I have never learned any. Over the course of a weekend at my parents home, my Dad begins to teach me the techniques of card magic.

The recordings have been handled, shaped and edited by collaborator Alexander Storey Gordon.

SILENCIO PARA RESCATAR

At 3:40pm today Abraham Chavelas presents ‘Silencio Para Rescatar.’

This sound piece summarizes what happened in one of the collapsed buildings after the earthquake of September 19, 2017 in Mexico City. This work honors the efforts of fellow sound engineers, sound artists, sound designers, musicians, etc., who-equipped with professional portable microphones and recorders-supported (as a large part of the population) the rescue actions by listening and detecting possible survivors below the rubble. Soundscapes recorded in the affected area called Chimalpopoca.

The Forbidden Planet Awakens

At 4pm today we have a live telematic broadcast from performers in several locations across the USA, Abu Dhabi and UAE connecting through a central point in the US and streaming back out live to Radiophrenia for this special broadcast event.

The Forbidden Planet Awakens: The Refrain

This episode of NRRF B Radio finds our fearless space pirates in a real pickle. The Snow Pod used to Escape to Snowland has melted upon launch due to a bad calculation involving a floating point decimal number. As the pirates fall back to the surface of the Forbidden Planet, they notice what appear to be creatures resembling marshmallows playing musical instruments. While falling, they speculate on what this strange music might sound like and use their space radios to see if there are any readable frequencies. Will the pirates be able to tune in? Will they land softly?

NRRF B Radio is a collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art and manifests as a series of radio shows mashing b-list genres with radio art. Each B Radio episode features a theme to structure the improvisational nature of the shows, though tangents are frequent and encouraged. The performers sample wildly, speculate broadly, and even sometimes sing. This 2019 international iteration features a core group of noisemakers consisting of Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Steve Germana, Jeff Kolar, Jessica Speer, and Peter Speer. Earlier projects include a series of unlicensed low power FM broadcasts from Chicago and beyond (2012-14).

Almost There…

At 12:40pm today Todd Anderson Kunert presents ‘Almost There’:

Almost there was constructed using vibrators that are sonically controlled and some very trusting contributors. Over two years, these contributors recorded their voices, while masturbating with the vibrators. The audio they were using was composed by myself specifically for this project. Ten participants were included in the project, with a mix of genders and sexual identities. The vibrators pulse in time with the sounds that are being sent to them. The participants made sounds in response to, and in time with, the sounds being heard. These ten recordings were then synchronized to the original composition, and mixed back into it.

Above the Palms

At 2:30 pm today we present ‘Above the Palms’ by Haider Al-Shybani:

As mundane notions of time are perpetuated in our postmodern world; perhaps it is through memories that we can shift our understanding of how experiences are sounded, silenced and transmitted. This piece is part of a larger project currently underway and based on findings from oral histories, archived audio/video and the artist’s personal interpretations of the ideas; a project in development with the CCA creative lab.

As a 2nd generation Iraqi-Scot who has never lived in Iraq, the artist’s investigations look at the way individual and collective memories of the Tigris-Euphrates region shape how the homeland is recollected, imagined, and performed by the diaspora. Using sound, Haider Al-Shybani explores the disruption, in time and place, and the socio-political pressures that shape accessibility to the experiences of older generations. Furthermore, this work hopes to incite an engagement with these processes by the various communities and wider society. ‘ Perhaps engaging ‘memory muscle’ in a practice that views time as less divided, can open space for alternative reproductions of the past and an understanding of where gaps can be found in the collective archive of memory. It is within the transmission of this chaotic and nonobjective cerebral atlas that we may glimpse previously unimagined futures’.

Haider Al-Shybani is an artist working with sound. As part of an ongoing investigation into the ways in which we experience sound, image and text; the artist continues to re-think the relationship between these elements. His work draws on the techniques of early dub pioneer Osbourne Ruddock, the creations of Halim El-Dabh and the Iraqi maqam as sung by Farida. Greatly influenced by the writing of John Dos Passos’s, Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher; the artist searches for other ways of putting things together or, leaving them apart.

Foreground Balloon

At 11.30am today members of Project Ability will be in our studio to introduce their new work created during workshops as part of Radiophrenia’s outreach activities.

Foreground Balloon is a collaboration between Anthony Autumn, Joanna Peace and artists and writers at Project Ability. Beginning with constructing noise-making objects from the contents of the studio supply cupboards, together they improvised ways to play and record the objects through movement. A second group responded to these recordings of abstract sounds through deep listening and creative writing, giving voice to the results individually and collectively. When layered together in Foreground Balloon, sonic and textual languages are stretched and cut and repeated in a celebration of both the lyrical and the incoherent.

Project Ability is a Glasgow-based visual arts organisation creating opportunities for people with disabilities and people with lived experience of mental ill-health, aged 5 years to 80 plus, to express themselves and achieve their artistic potential.

Noisemakers and Poets: Adnan Mohammed, Christopher Newman, Frank Mullen, Grace MacArthur, Jaqui Smyth and Roddy Woods; Alan Moore, Alan Straiton, DevaOne, Esme MacLeod, Jane Fisher, Jim Graham, Morag MacGilchrist and Stuart Low.

Radiophrenia Remix

For the next two weeks Radiophrenia will be receiving a constant simultaneous remix courtesy of ‘Resynth for Radio’ – a collaborative generative composition together with Chronopolis, a special format on Cashmere Radio that seeks to explore the duration and fragile time unique to the radio listening experience.

“Resynth for Radio” feeds and processes the different shows aired by Radiophrenia and Cashmere Radio in real time, together with evolving electronics, being programmed to run simultaneously on its own stream, as well as in selected slots during the fourteen days on both stations. The live processing has a direct effect on the structure and process of the composition itself, leading to an organization of sounds which are generated, developed, and modified from, through and for Radiophrenia and Cashmere Radio.

We will be turning our broadcast over to the live remix at various points throughout the broadcast but you can listen into it anytime at Cashmere Radio.

Creators, Lukas Grundmann and Hugo Esquinca will be in the studio all the way from Berlin to present the piece and do a special live remix of the remix at 10.30am today.

Hugo Esquinca is a Berlin-based sound researcher from Mexico. In his work he investigates the diverse spatial-temporal relations deriving from transductive interactions between indeterminacy, thresholds of instability, micro temporality, digital signal processing and sonorous modulation at various perceptual, physical and material degrees.

Lukas Grundmann is a sound artist, one of the co-organizers of Cashmere Radio and teaches for the Master’s course in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts. In his art, he deals with the relationship between medium and message, signal and noise, time and sound.

Finding Occult Queer Futurities

At 4pm today N. Adriana Knouf presents ‘A Trans Woman Reads the Harvard Sentences, With Necessary Modifications, or, Finding Occult Queer Futurities’

Trans-women who want to develop a higher voice during transitioning must undertake an arduous process of vocal training, as taking estrogen does not raise the pitch of their voice (while testosterone will naturally lower the voices of trans-men). Trans-women must practice on sentences that mimic their spoken language, and there are a variety of sentence lists that can be found online. Here I read from the 720 “Harvard Sentences” from the 1960s, originally used to test telecommunications equipment, and modified by me to transpose misogynist phrases about women into queer futurities.

Can We Try That Without Sound?

At 12.30pm today Stevie jones presents ‘Can We Try That Without Sound?’

Radio broadcast offers a unique opportunity to subvert hierarchies of theatre (which prioritise text and performances) and theatre production (where lighting & set design are foregrounded.) Can We Try That Without Sound? is a radio play without words, embracing sound design and theatre composition decontextualised and severed from a script and the physicality of the stage, allowing an unprescribed narrative to emerge.

Stevie Jones is a Glasgow based composer and sound designer. Recent theatre work has included Richard III (Perth Theatre), Arctic Oil (Traverse Theatre) and MIANN (Scottish Dance Theatre). Film work has included Where You’re Meant To Be, Chicago & Athens Film Festival Documentary of the year 2017. He has collaborated with artist film makers Lucille Desamoury, Stephen Sutcliffe, Luke Fowler and Anne Marie Copestake, most recently on her LFF premiering A Blemished Code. Jones composes for his exploratory acoustic ensemble Sound of Yell (Chemikal Underground) and has played within a wide range of other groups and contexts, from the Ashley Paul band to Arab Strap.

@soundofyell
www.soundofyell.co.uk

Black Mayo

At 10am today Johann Diedrick presents a 30-minute soundscape piece created from sonic explorations of Newtown Creek, one of the largest superfund sites and the undisputed most polluted site in New York City. The site serves as an example of what our global climate change future could look like. Environmental disasters rendered here won’t be dealt with in our lifetimes, and its unclear how much damage has erased potential futures that could have been. The piece, made from field recordings and original music, proposes what sounds might have existed here and imagines what sounds that could have existed in the future.

Johann Diedrick makes installations, performances and objects that let people play with sound. He surfaces the histories and past interactions inscribed in material and space through vibrations, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques with the public through listening tours, workshops and open-source hardware and software.

http://www.johanndiedrick.com/