F O R T H C O M I N G   E X H I B I T I O N S

Bodleian Library presents

Sensational Books

27 May - 04 Dec 2022 | Weston Library, Oxford | Free to attend.

Exploring the experience of the book beyond reading, Sensational Books features books and items from the Bodleian’s collections that invite a sensory response across the five senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch and beyond.

Visitors will be able to experience the sound of manuscripts unravelling, the smell of vellum in early books or the touch of an old book cover and have many other sensory experiences with the treasures on display. As e-books grow in use, this exhibition captures the renewed interest in the material book, as evidenced by everything from the recent popularity of gift books to high quality book design.

This exhibition features a programme of sound works, including When Air Becomes Breath and Breath Becomes Spirit by Helen Frosi (SoundFjord). A performance score and installation inspired by feminist readings of embodiment, intimate sensory theatre and historical manuscript culture. Performed by Aine O'Dwyer and Hannah White.

The sonic arts programme is produced in collaboration with Fusion Arts.

E X H I B I T I O N S

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Yann Novak 

Stillness.Subtropical / Stillness.Oceanic 

04 August 2010 - 25 September 2010 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

Opening event (Stillness.Subtropical): 03 August 2010 | 7-9pm | RSVP

Opening event (Stillness.Oceanic): 04 September 2010 | 7-9pm | RSVP 

Stillness takes its inspiration from the two climates Yann Novak have inhabited: Subtropical in Los Angeles and Oceanic in Seattle. In these works he investigates these climates’ almost static meteorological states and their emotional effect on their inhabitants.

Stillness.Subtropical and Stillness.Oceanic are presented as a large scale projection with a 4.1ch sound element. This produces an immersive experience that changes so slowly the effect is imperceptible to the audience and creates a nearly static state. 

The sound element was created using a recording of shortwave radio tuned to static in Los Angeles. Because radio waves are effected by both water vapor in the troposphere and ionization in the upper atmosphere from the sun, the recording contains a unique signature from the atmosphere the waves traveled through. Similarly the video elements is made up of numerous photographs taken over a span of months, always pointed at the horizon. These photographs capture a more literal portrait of the climate.  These elements are then digitally altered to create an ambiguous abstraction, leaving enough of the source to guide the experience and define the location, but abstract enough to create an immersive environment perfect for contemplation and personal reflection.

www.yannnovak.com

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Song-Ming Ang 

You and I 

13 October 2010 - 27 November 2010 | Wed-Sun | noon-6pm

After show celebration: 27 November 2010 | 7-9pm | RSVP

Song-Ming Ang will present You and I, a conceptually-driven interactive work instigated and developed during his residency in August/September 2010 at SoundFjord.

You and I is a project featuring public participation and explores the notion of the community using the subject of sound. The work recycles a practice in the 80s / 90s – of how friends and couples made mixtapes on cassette for each other – and updates the practice through a current audio technology (CDR and iTunes) to highlight contemporary practices such as CD burning and file sharing.

You & I Mixtapes! Write a letter to Song-Ming Ang and he will compile a personalised mix CDR for you. In your letter tell him a few things about yourself, preferably something personal – a memory, a secret, a compulsion, a habit, a relationship, an experience, an ambition. Song-Ming will use this letter as the basis for his selection of audio material. The more detailed and specific your letter is, the more he will be able to customise the recording for you. Please mark your letter 'You & I', and write on only one side of each sheet. Send your letter to: SoundFjord, Unit 3b – Studio 28, 28 Lawrence Road, London, N15 4ER, UK.

www.circadiansongs.com

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Rie Nakajima with Ken Bodden 

I Can Hear It  

11 December 2010 – 29 January 2011 | Wed – Sat | noon – 6pm

Opening event: Saturday 11 December 2010 | 7-9pm | RSVP

Radio show | Framework:afield | Resonance 104.4FM / resonancefm.com | Sunday 19 December | 10pm

Download here: www.archive.org/details/2010.12.19FrameworkRadio 

SoundFjord is delighted to present the work of Rie Nakajima working with Ken Bodden. Rie is an artist working with installation, performance and composition. Ken works as a piano tuner and has collaborated with Rie on a number of listening related works over the past three years. I Can Hear It is a research project first instigated in the spring of 2007 and continuing on, in various guises, into 2010. Rie uses this research to explore sound and tactility in her sculptural practice and her fascinating with the process of tuning instruments, in this case the piano.

www.rienakajima.com

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SAM/OTO Project presents

Rolf Julius & Miki Yui 

Lost Sounds 

11-13 February 2011 (Café Oto) | during opening hours

15 February - 05 March 2011 (SoundFjord) | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

Opening event: 15 February 2011 | 7-9pm | RSVP | Further information

We are sorry to announce that Rolf Julius passed away on 21st of January 2011.

In keeping with Rolf’s wishes, the Lost Sounds performance and exhibition will still go ahead as planned. He had been working for some time on these new pieces and left detailed plans of how they should be installed and performed should he not be able to be present. The pieces represent Rolf’s most recent work and we are extremely grateful to both him and his family for enabling us to show them. We hope this event is a fitting tribute to both him and his work. Lost Sounds collaborator Miki Yui had been in regular contact with Rolf until his death and will be present both to perform and install her own work and to oversee the installation and performance of Rolf’s pieces. Our thoughts are with Rolf Julius' family and friends.

The first UK exhibition by late German artist Rolf Julius and Japanese artist Miki Yui, Lost Sounds is a collaborative experiment in sound performance and installation, exploring sounds, the environment, objects and one’s visual and acoustic perception. Yui and Julius’ collaboration will begin with an evening concert that will form the foundations for an installation that will reside within the different architectural spaces of Café Oto and SoundFjord. Utilising sounds collected during their performance as a point of departure, artefacts found within Café Oto’s four walls will be given unfamiliar lives. During the hubbub of usual café life, furniture, cutlery, utilitarian objects and other items still to be imagined will be reinvigorated to those that care to listen. The installation will further develop in a migration to SoundFjord, after the two-day settlement at Café OTO.

Produced by: Rie Nakajima in collaboration with Helen Frosi of SoundFjord as part of SAM/OTO.

www.mikiyui.com | www.cortexathletico.com | www.estatic.it | www.rienakajima.com

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R/E:

As an ongoing series of research and experiment-led, short-run exhibitions, R/E: focuses on new and previously unexhibited works. The remit of R/E: is to foster a nucleus for debate and to encourage the questioning of sound practice and its concerns; to act as a platform for works at a pivotal stage in their development/production; and to provide the artist and the work with space for contemplation, within a nurturing environment, whilst the work is exhibited to the general public.

Tim Yates

Drone Room 

07-12 March 2011 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

After show celebration: 12 March | 7-9pm | RSVP

The Drone Room is the resonating chamber of an interactive musical instrument in which both the perfomer and audience are in the belly of the instrument they’re hearing. To become the performer, an audience member simply steps up and takes control of the interface.

Exploring ideas of change and control, the drone room subverts traditional synthesiser design by allowing the player real-time access to elements that are normally fixed and hidden in the depths of traditional synthesisers. Giving access to the underlying wave shapes from which the sound is constructed, attention is drawn to the subtleties of timbre in time and space that often get lost amongst the higher levels of musical form and structure. Small changes to the shape of a sound wave can result in dramatic changes to the character and experience of that sound both as a direct consequence of the change and as a result of the complex interactions that happen when different sounds interact in space.

The listener/performer is encouraged to explore these changes in the character and experience of sound spatially, temporally and through direct interaction with the abstractions we use to describe the fundamental attributes of sound in the digital world.

Tim Yates is currently studying for an MMus in composition at the Royal College of Music, with a special interest in electronic and electro-acoustic composition. He is a founder member and organiser of the college laptop orchestra and runs the college free improvisation group. He has also studied Philosophy at the University of Leeds, Classical Guitar Performance at Trinity College of Music, and spent time working as a database developer and IT teacher.

Tim is particularly interested in exploring the way that we listen to and interact with musical materials and instruments in the digital domain, and in finding new ways of making and listening to music that make use of the extraordinary power that new technologies offer. He designs and builds software instruments for laptop orchestra, solo performance and gallery installations and is particularly interested in finding ways that novel musical interactions can be facilitated by the use of digital technology. An integral part of this work is the exploration of the space between composition, performance and improvisation using both the electronic and acoustic sound sources (including traditional instruments). As a performer, he is also an active member of the free improvisation community in London, in particular as a regular attendee of Eddie Prevost’s influential free-improvisation workshops.

www.drakemusic.org/team/tim-yates

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International Group Show

Exquisite Corpse

13-30 April 2011 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

Opening event: 12 April 2011 | 7:30-9:30pm | RSVP

In April 2010, before SoundFjord opened it’s doors to the public, we (the creative team at SoundFjord) devised a plan for an exhibition, populated by artists’ works created using the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ model as a point of departure.

The Exquisite Corpse is a method made popular by the Surrealists, and is similar to Consequences, the old parlour game. Words, images or sounds are collectively assembled in a specific way, using rules set in advance, for instance, one is only allowed to see/hear the last section/measure of what was previously contributed.

This exhibition documents the works produced, and finally, reveals the artists who worked on the project and whom have hitherto remained anonymous.

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Emmanuel Spinelli 

Padstow Cosmesis 

04 - 28 May 2011 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

"The 8.1 channel installation, explores the soundscape of the Obby Oss ritual in Padstow (Cornwall) on the 1st of May every year. To be more precise, it explores the day before Mayday and the day after. It aims to celebrate the sonic beauty of the place and its community as well as highlighting the socio-political issues of this highly touristic centre where most locals cannot afford to live there and most of the old village now belongs to second-home owners and is slowly loosing its nature." - Emmanuel Spinelli

Emmanuel is a composer, sound designer and music lecturer and has collaborated with film/theatre companies and artists in France, Switzerland and the UK. He has been involved in electro-acoustic composition, live electronics and free improvisation since 1998. Increasingly, Emmanuel has become more and more interested in issues related to soundscape transformations, manipulations of historical data, and memory, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. He is also interested in the potential of free improvisation and live electronics (Max/Msp) to develop interactive audio-visual works. Emmanuel is developing his compositions and research around the notion of Acoustic-phenotypology, that is to say the perception of individual identities through sound. His practice, at one level or another, explores human presence and history, through the cognition of the disembodied voice, sounding body, and environment.

www.emalorienweb.webs.com

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Catherine Clover 

birdbrain 

18 June - 30 July 2011 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

Opening event: Sat 18 June | 4-6pm | RSVP

Bird Survey (in association with World Listening Day): Sun 17 July 2011 | 8am | Tottenham Marshes | Free - donations welcome | RSVP

birdbrain looks at our relationship with urban crows and seagulls and explores our mixed relationship with these common noisy and highly intelligent birds through voice and language (animal/human), including the spoken and written word (human). While we admire these birds’ obvious abilities in terms of survival, intelligence and ingenuity we also feel threatened by these very attributes that we share with them. The project consists of audiovisual installation work including field recordings, bird mimicry, spoken and written texts as well as an artist’s book posing as a kind of mock field guide (which is for sale at the gallery during the exhibition for £5). Four performers and ten writers have contributed to the project.

The four performers are: Kate Hunter (PhD research candidate Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia); Vanessa Chapple (Performer, dramaturge and director, Melbourne, Australia); Penny Baron (Performer and director, Melbourne, Australia); Melissa Alley (Artist and performer, London, UK). The ten writers are: Geraldine Barlow (Senior Curator, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia); Giovanni Aloi (St Mary University London and Editor of Antennae, UK); Steve Baker (Emeritus Professor of Art, University of Central Lancashire, UK); Clare Halstead (Arts writer, UK); Cathy Lane (Sound artist and co-director of CRISAP, London, UK); Andrew Whitehouse (Teaching Fellow, Dept of Anthropology, Univ of Aberdeen, UK); Robin Tassie (Writer, UK); Michele Faguet (Arts writer, Berlin, Germany); Jessica Ullrich (Universitat der Kunst, Berlin, Germany); Rene ten Bos (Prof of Philosophy/Organisational Theory, Radboud Univ, Holland)

Catherine Clover was born and brought up in London, UK, and trained at Wimbledon School of Art/North East London Polytechnic in Fine Art [Painting]. After several years practice based in Angel Studios, EC1, she pursued a residency with Gertrude Street Artists Spaces in Melbourne, Australia and has been based there since the mid 90s. Her current practice explores sound, digital imaging and installation to look at ideas surrounding our changing relationship with nature, and in particular, other animals. The everyday - the quotidian, the common - inform this exploration.

Recent projects and installations include Calling the Birds II Trocadero Art Space Melbourne AU Oct 2010; Pigeon Post Mailbox 141 Melbourne AU June 2010; billing and cooing Billboard@Trocadero Melbourne AU May 2010; Sounds of my Neighbourhood MusikTriennale Koln Germany May 2010; Alternating Current: Sound Art Now Dragonfly Festival Sweden April 2010; coroocoo Anna Leonowens Gallery NSCAD University Halifax NS Canada Feb 2010; Pestival Radio broadcast on Resonance FM, London UK 2009; Minding Animals conference and exhibition The Lock Up Newcastle NSW AU 2009; Sound Diaries Conference Presentation Oxford Brookes University Oxford UK.

This project is funded by Arts Victoria.

www.ciclover.com

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Simon Whetham 

Active Crossover 

10 August – 01 October 2011 | Wed - Sun | noon-6pm

Opening night (external event): 10 August 2011 | doors 8pm | entry free 

Venue: Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL. 

With crossover performances from Scanner, Iris Garrelfs, Lee Gamble and Simon Whetham.

Closing week (external event): 28 September 2011 | doors 7:30pm | entry free 

Venue: secret location - email for details.

With crossover performances from Douglas Benford, Martin Clark, John Grzinich, Kaffe Matthews, Jo Thomas & Simon Whetham.

Workshop and presentation (in-house activity): 01 October 2011 | 1pm | free 

Venue: SoundFjord, Unit 3b - Studio 28, 28 Lawrence Road, London, N15 4ER. 

Simon will also present past and present work, and introduce participants to ‘Active Listening’.

Active Crossover is an electronic circuit used in speaker construction, which enables a speaker to transmit sound information consistently and accurately across space. Simon Whetham’s project reflects this process, both in terms of the way the space is actually set up, and in the way the work continues to emerge out of social relationships formed through travel and communication. Simon’s work is as much about the ‘social’ as it is the ‘sonic’.

The installation consists of two darkened, acoustically treated spaces that can be entered into from the main exhibition space. In one space is a surround sound composition created from field recordings made while Simon was artist-in-residence in Tallinn, Estonia, and also from Bristol, Brighton, Bracknell, Reading, Liverpool, Leeds and now London, charting the journey the project has taken so far. The second space features pieces by artists that Simon has performed and collaborated with through running the project, and through their ongoing cultural exchanges, recordings and events. If you stay in the main exhibition space you can hear the sound bleeding out and mingling from both spaces, forming a new and evolving communal work. 

Integral to the project is a series of performance evenings which investigate improvisation and collaborative working methods, as well as an ‘active listening’ workshop. The experience of listening reflects the conditions of the work’s creation, and the conditions of his own journey – one of interpersonal exchange and interaction – around Eastern Europe and now the UK. 

Simon composes with ‘field recordings’ – sound recordings made of the immediate environment using an array of microphones and a recording device. Field recordings are a form of sonic documentation, but by overlaying and reordering them Simon has created a new configuration, no longer a straightforward representation of a real place or situation, but rather a collage of places and times. It acts a lot like memory; based in real experiences and places, but altered by one’s personal and emotional recollection of them; reordered and recomposed – like memories – by influences other than the pure data involved. The work, purely sonic, may remind you of listening to a film without seeing the screen. 

Simon Whetham has performed extensively and shown in many galleries in the UK and in Europe. His sound compositions have been released through specialist record labels Monochrome Vision, Unfathomless, Dragon’s Eye, Impulsive Habitat, 1000fussler, 3Leaves, Kaon, Trente Oiseaux, Entr’acte, Gruenrekorder, Con-V,  Mystery Sea, Install and Lens Records, with forthcoming releases from Cronica and And/OAR.

www.simonwhetham.co.uk

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LIVE RADIO! Curated by Matthew MacKisack

Cast and Figment: Radio as Metaphor and as Such  

15 October - 05 November 2011 | Online and in-house | Various times (see below)

Opening event: 15 October 2011 | Richard Hughes’ A Comedy of Danger (Broadcast 6pm sharp) | Celebrations: 5-7pm | Free | RSVP

An apparatus, whose technical peculiarity simply consists in enabling sounds made at a particular spot to be simultaneously reproduced in as many and as far removed places as one wishes by disrespectfully breaking through boundaries of class and country, signifies a spiritual event of primary importance.[1]

It is considered unquestionable that technique and science undermine superstition. But the class character of society sets substantial limits here too. Take America. There, Church sermons are broadcast by radio, which means that the radio is serving as a means of spreading prejudices. Such things don’t happen here, I think – the Society of Friends of Radio watch over this, I hope? (Laughter and applause) Under the socialist system science and technique as a whole will undoubtedly be directed against religious prejudices, against superstition, which reflects the weakness of man before man or before nature. What, indeed, does a “voice from heaven” amount to when there is being broadcast all over the country a voice from the Polytechnical Museum? (Laughter)[2]

[1] Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: an Art of Sound, 1936 . 

[2] Leon Trotsky, Radio, Science, Technique and Society, 1926

Cast and Figment consists of a series of live broadcasts by artists and writers, exploring the medium's aesthetic, political and ontological implications, making it produce concepts, images and problems. Cast and Figment can be heard, with information on the programme, at: castandfigment.org.

With broadcasts from: David Berridge, Bridget Crone, Karen Di Franco, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Homeland, David Howells, Mikko Canini, Matthew MacKisack, Tamarin Norwood, Hal Silver, Dan Smith, Jonathan Trayner, and many others. (See schedules for details.)

www.mmackisack.org

Schedule - Week 3 (Final week)

Saturday 05 November | Closing event - 2:30-5pm

3.00pm: Dan Smith, Modern Conditions (2010/11)

3.30pm: Mikko Canini, title tbc

4.oopm: Bridget Crone, EASY LISTENTING MEETS FLICKER-TIME /A conversation between analogue and digital broadcast transmissions about time and affect (2011) Audio/Video work

Saturday 05 November 2011

On the last day of Cast and Figment SoundFjord is open to the public.  

RSVP to info@soundfjord.org.uk if you would like to attend, and please arrive before 3.00pm, when the final transmission will begin with a live reading by Dan Smith.

Modern Conditions is comprised of the words of radio broadcasts made by H.G. Wells for the BBC, drawing out a sense of utopian potential and possibility within these extraordinary recordings made for a mass audience. This is followed at around 3.30pm by another live reading in which Mikko Canini considers White Noise on the Radio. Most analyses of media draw a historical line from the telegraph, through radio, to the internet, and do so by focusing – for example in McLuhan’s analysis – on form rather than content. Thinking, instead, about the form of the content produced by these technologies would divide the historical stream into two groups: one that begins with the telegraph and leads to the telephone, and one that begins with radio and leads to television and the internet. While these groups might conventionally be distinguished in terms of public versus private receptions, the distinction to be pursued here is the capacity of the latter group to produce noise. The programme concludes with the 1st screening – and 2nd broadcast of the soundtrack – of Bridget Crone‘s video Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time, a “conversation between analogue and digital broadcast transmissions about time and affect”. By 5.00pm we will be ‘off air’. Please return to this website and subscribe to our newsletter for announcements regarding future auditions of Cast and Figment: Radio as Metaphor and as Such.

Wednesday 02 November

The final week of Cast and Figment includes broadcasts from Mikko Canini, Bridget Crone, Karen Di Franco, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Homeland, Hal Silver, and Dan Smith. Cast and Figment ends on the afternoon of the 5th of November with a live public event at - and simultaneous broadcast from - SoundFjord (free, please rsvp here); see also castandfigment.org for details.

This evening’s broadcast begins at 7.30 with Karen Di Franco‘s Concrete Radio. Concrete Radio attempts to describe the relationship between producer and  the originator by exploring the liminal space of transmission and reception. Broadcasting within the Soundfjord studio, Music for the Next to Die will present a fractured dialogue for two radios, describing the economics of traversing the nameless zones, overlays of the near future and recent past as performed on the gold trading floor of the World Trade Centre and how to make the most of Time. Click here for programme details of Music for the Next to Die. Next Lawrence Abu Hamdan will introduce a new work from the Aural Contract Audio Archive. Part of an ongoing research project into the politics of language and the conditions of voice faced by the Druze community in Palestine/Israel, On the Borders of Bilingualism, writes the artist, “offers an account of how borders, jurisdictions and colonial occupation become inscribed and worn on the voice of its subjects.” The work will then be discussed within the context of the Aural Contract Audio Archive (accessible here) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Karen Di Franco and Matthew MacKisack.

Tuesday 01 November

Two artist-groups take to the airwaves this evening. At 7.30, Hal Silver speaks. Hal Silver has collected transcripts from a wide-range of speeches, manifestos and articles of public address, focusing on those whose rhetoric assumes the mantle of speaking on behalf of “the people”, the singular that speaks to and for the plural. Hal Silver will re-make these speeches – edited and redacted – as six voices speaking the terms of collective command and affirmation, sometimes overlapping, sometimes punctuating the silence. Then, at around 7.45, the collaborative project Homeland will hold A Conversation Around Presence, a broadcast for both analogue and online radio. Depending on their chosen medium, listeners will encounter one half of a conversation which addresses what it means to be live, in dialogue and in occupancy, as well as it’s own fragmented nature. As a framework, the conversation opens up to a range of concerns explored through Homeland including communication across boundaries, the domestic space, utopian potentials and the psychological effects of technology and capitalism.

Monday 31 October

Tonight’s listening begins at 7.30 with extracts from Orson Welles‘s dramatisation of H. G. Wells‘s The War of the Worlds. Welles’s version is notable for its form - the interrupting, then rolling news bulletin – as well as for its effect on many listeners, who, in a tense pre-war atmosphere, took reports of “alien” invasion as genuine. Since the original airing on October 30th, 1938, the re-broadcast of The War of the Worlds  has become something of a Hallowe'en tradition. This includes a live re-enactment of the play in 2002 starring, appropriately enough, conservative radio host and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, whose involvement marks the text as what it always was: an essay on the cultivation and modulation of fear. Questions relating to such ‘affective modulation’ can then be heard at around 7.50, in the soundtrack to Bridget Crone‘s Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time (2011). Based in part on Welles’ infamous broadcast, the monologue is “a conversation between analogue and digital broadcast transmissions about time and affect”; the Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time video will be shown in its entirety at Cast and Figment‘s closing event, at SoundFjord, on the 5th of November.

Schedule - Week 2

Cast and Figment continues into its second week with performances and readings from David Berridge, Claire Chard, Sidsel Christensen and Matthew MacKisack. 

Wednesday 26th October

First on this evening, a short work for radio by Andy Weir, The direct result of considered planning churning new courses creating new concepts (2011): ‘Nothing more, we are nothing more of the today of which we are a part. No, we need something more. A call from the future hurtling towards the past and back, picked up on antennae and shot through the city. The air gets thick, so I can feel it, then it gets thicker, so I can’t breathe it. Oohs and Aahs.’ This is followed at about 7.32 by Jonathan Trayner‘s Tales of the Woodland Folk(2011), re-broadcast after technical problems last week. ‘A children’s story, this radio play is the tale of an encounter between Mr Rabbit and Ms Squirrel discussing the best way of governing the Woodland-folk. As the play unfolds the characters argue whether it is better to rule the forest using ignorance; which is Mr Rabbit’s argument, provided by ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tze or terror; which is Ms Squirrel’s preferred option, echoing the words of French revolutionary Robespierre.’ Ms Squirrel: Stephanie Dickinson, Mr Rabbit: Vince Stephen, Narrator: Jonathan Trayner, Music: Vince Stephen, Production: Bill Kenny and Michael Page, Assistant: Jennifer Pengilly, Script: Jonathan Trayner. A pre-recorded discussion between Jonathan Trayner and Matthew MacKisack followsTales of the Woodland Folk. Lastly tonight, at around 7.45, a live reading from the writer David Berridge. With A Hedgerow Doesn’t Have to Leave the House, Berridge intends to: ‘… explore the contradictions of radio as a mainstream source of news, weather, DJ and shipping forecast, alongside its role as a model of experimental poetic communication for Marinetti, Khlebnikov and Cocteau. [1] I propose to explore this through an act of storytelling in which a story of the countryside extends its porousness to a Hackney landscape in which it is told again and again. I would like to explore how experimental  ideas of radio can be absorbed into the texture of a written narrative that is then read aloud… I would like to test how much a story of one place can be filled by the details of many others, in a manner akin to moving quickly between radio stations… I would like to explore how much and in what manner this storytelling can open up to reflections upon the role of radio and sound within histories of experimental poetry/ prose. I have been making a study of “silent sound” in Claude Cahun’s Disavowels and am interested how this could be entwined within the narrative I am telling so that each becomes a way of elucidating the other…’

[1] Rubén Gallo, “Jean Cocteau’s Radio Poetry” in Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin eds. The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound (The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 205-218.

Tuesday 25th October

Tonight’s broadcast begins with a live lecture from David Howells,  A Voice in the Dark: Rhetoric for Radio. Howells introduces the lecture with the following: “For all our belief in rational discourse, we know that words – the very stuff of thought – are dangerous. They are not only a reflection on the world, they also have the power to change it, to call things into being, for good or ill. And our only defence against words is to use more words in turn. Rhetoric was – is - the political art of persuasion, born out of the need to make laws and customs, culture out of nature, to civilise men, and to civilise the power of the voice, to make it public. But we have come to distrust rhetoric as misleading and destructive, and it is now difficult to use the word in any positive sense. ‘Rhetoric’, if it does not mean an empty display of language, suggests the use of it to some ulterior purpose. Nevertheless, my purpose in this lecture is to consider whether artists may not, after all, make something useful out of rhetoric or if – as Aristotle maintained – rhetoric is any case a universal human trait, whether they may at least come to recognise themselves as speaking and working rhetorically. And there are particular reasons for them to do so now: given the ‘performative’ turn of contemporary practice, and a political and economic context which will not leave any public act untouched.” Howells’ lecture is followed at around 8pm by Claire Chard reading extracts from T W Adorno‘s 1936 analysis of Martin Luther Thomas’ radio addresses. A product of Adorno’s research into the social reception and significance of radio in the 1930s, The Psychological Technique… analyses the rhetorical devices of right-wing Christian broadcasting: a rhetoric, Adorno makes clear, intended to produce a submissive, psychologically regressed audience. Extracts here are from the book’s fourth section, ‘Ideological Bait’, in which Adorno examines the form and content of Thomas’ claims regarding the contemporaneous economic recession. Cast and Figment then presents a clip from a more recent broadcast by another right-wing demagogue, Rush Limbaugh, in which he declares that Democrat interest in Darfur is due to the desire to secure the “black voting bloc”. The clip, from 2007, includes a variety of rhetorical devices clearly recognisable from Adorno’s analysis of Thomas. “You’ve got it”, Limbaugh tells the caller, “Now you just have to believe your own instincts”.

Monday 24th October: 

At 7.30, hear Study for Composition I (audio) (2009), by Sidsel Christensen, with Rohid Juneja. In an extract from Christensen’s ongoing experiments in hypnotic regression, the hypnotised artist narrates the rise and fall of a secret cult in ancient Greece. Separated from the video to which it has previously been the soundtrack, the monologue encourages the listener to imaginatively align themselves with the narrator’s psychical explorations. In turn, radio’s atavistic promise, what Gaston Bachelard saw as its ability to evoke collective archetypes in the creation of domestic reveries – effectively relocating the psychoanalytical session to the airwaves* – is made powerfully manifest. Study for Composition I is followed at 7.50pm by Matthew MacKisack‘s Hörspiel (The Tribulations of Usefulness) (2010): “Looking from one window, you see the Statue of Liberty; from a window in another wall, you see a daffodil. A daffodil is sitting on top of the torch held up by the Statue of Liberty. A daffodil is hidden inside the torch held up by the Statue of Liberty.”**

Hörspiel is a narrative radio play in which ‘remote viewing’ – a form of codified extra-sensory perception –  is presented as a metaphor for radiophonic experience. Based on documentation of British military research into remote viewing***, the play also draws on the histories of radio drama and technology’s interface with the supernatural. The resulting scenario describes – potentially, enacts, for the auditor – the attempt to instrumentalise reverie. The cast of Hörspiel are: Olivia Armstrong as the Supervisor, Simon King as the Monitor and Adam Loxley as the Subject. It was written by Matthew MacKisack with Adam Loxley.

*In his 1951 essay ‘Reverie and Radio’, collected in The Right to Dream, 1971, trans. J A Underwood

** From U Neisser and N Kerr, ‘Spatial and Mnemonic Properties of Visual Images’, in Cognitive Psychology, 5, 1973

*** See http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FreedomOfInformation/DisclosureLog/SearchDisclosureLog/RemoteViewing.htm

Schedule - Week 1

Saturday 15th

6pm: Richard Hughes / Matthew MacKisack, (A Comedy of) Danger, 1924/2011, performed by Carla Espinoza, Lauren McCullum and Leo Ashizawa.

Monday 17th

7.30pm: David Howells, A Voice in the Dark, 2011. (to be rescheduled)

8pm: Leon Trotsky, Inaugural Address at the First All-Union Congress of the Society of Friends of Radio (abridged), 1926, read by Claire Chard. (NOW BROADCASTING at 7:30pm)

Tuesday 18th

7.30pm: Tamarin Norwood, Musica Practica, 2010-11; contextual discussion.

Wednesday 19th

7:30pm: Walter Benjamin, The Lisbon Earthquake, 1931, read by Katherine Lunney                       

8pm: Jonathan Trayner, Tales of the Woodland Folk (Ignorance or Terror), 2011; contextual discussion.

Opening Celebrations | 15 October 2011 | 5-7pm | SoundFjord | RSVP

Inaugural performance of the Cast and Figment programme, performed live at SoundFjord and simultaneously broadcast here and at castandfigment.org:

The Radio of the Future – the central tree of our consciousness – will inaugurate new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind. … The main Radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word “Danger”, since the least disruption of Radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, and temporary loss of consciousness.*

The first radio play written for French radio was Maremonto, by Maurice Vinot and Pierre Cusy. Its planned broadcast in 1922 was prevented by the Sea Ministry: the realistic dramatization of the sinking of an ocean-going liner was deemed liable to panic the audience.** A similarly naturalistic disaster narrative, the first play written for British radio was Richard Hughes’ Danger, a one-act melodrama set in an unlit and flooding coal mine. As the author later remarked.

Our audience were used to using their eyes; this was a blind man’s world we were introducing them to. In time they would accept its conventions but how would they react on this first occasion? Better make it easy for them, just this once. Something which happens in the dark, for instance, so the characters themselves keep complaining they can’t see. Perhaps we could get the listener to turn out his lights and listen in the dark.***

‘Listen in the dark’ is exactly what the Radio Times advised its readers to do. In an attempt to foreground the ethics of making it ‘easy for them’, of the naturalistic illusion, and in the spirit of a Khlebnikovian ‘flight from the I’, Richard Hughes’ original script has been re-imagined and edited according to contemporaneous Russian formalist theories – themselves a response to Futurist aesthetics – ofostranenie, or defamiliarisation.

* Velimir Khlebnikov, The Radio of the Future, 1921

** see Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory and Practice, 1999

*** Richard Hughes, The Birth of Radio Drama, B.B.C. Home Service, 1956

Written by Richard Hughes. Revised by Matthew MacKisack. Performed by Carla Espinoza,  

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Re:Sound – Research Projects and Exhibitions

Shirley Pegna & Wajid Yaseen 

Singing Windows | Ghost Quartet 

02-04 December 2011 

SoundFjord is pleased to host sound-artists Shirley Pegna and Wajid Yaseen for a two-day work-in-progress session exploring the resonant frequencies of objects in space, from Friday 02 – Sunday 04 December 2011, noon-6pm. Audiences are openly invited to interact and critique the work. The artists will be present to answer questions and to talk about the work and the ideas surrounding it throughout the research project.

Two separate installations, provisionally entitled Singing Windows and Ghost Quartet will explore sound in relation to objects, the gallery space, and indeed people themselves. Portable transducers will act as amplifiers thereby allowing observers and participants to expand their understanding of the properties of sound through a given object, and to explore their own association of place and sound.

During the research project, the artists will be collaborating and pooling their experience of working in diverse places and settings to investigate how sound travels through different materials, and to explore the compositional choices that can be draw from sonified objects. The facilities and space at SoundFjord will allow initial explorations within an interior gallery setting, with the long-term goal of developing work that can be presented inside and outside of a gallery. 

Shirley Pegna is a research student from Oxford Brookes University, has been looking at sound waves travelling through different materials ranging from very long distance travelling sound waves and signals local and domestic sites. 

Wajid Yaseen's work focuses on relationships between the body and sound, and manifests in a diverse range of practices from sound sculptures, installations, electroacoustic composition, tangible interfacing, and live performance. He is the co-founder of the destructivist event Scrapclub (scrapclub.co.uk) and co-director of the sound art collective, Modus Arts (modusarts.org).

www.shirleypegna.com | www.wajidyaseen.com