Commissioned Radio Productions

In addition to our Live-to-Air performances we have also commissioned 14 new studio works. We have selected a range of artists and producers from Scotland and further afield, both established practitioners and those new to working with radio. We discovered many of these artists through their submissions to our open call last year. We intend that these productions will become a showcase for the diverse and inventive approach to the medium that Radiophrenia represents. After receiving their premiere on Radiophrenia the works will be syndicated to our partner stations around the world.

 


How To Pack A Whale

anna

Anna Friz
Transmission : 30th August, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

The diurnal anxiety of constant travel transforms dream logic into dream logistics. Vast apartments filled with mutated memories require urgent night-time packing and transport via all means of motor, machine, or mammal. Absurd dimensional incompatibilities produce carry-on bags which contain whole items of furniture. A radiophonic meditation on the containment and escape of material stuff, moved by land sea and night air, embedded in complex, half-imagined wireless communication channels and signal relays.


Anna Friz began broadcasting on campus/community radio CiTR Vancouver in 1993. Since then she has created audio art and radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance in more than 25 countries, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Anna is Assistant Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of University of California, Santa Cruz, a steering member of the artist collective Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music based in East Iceland, and a long time affiliate artist of Wave Farm (formerly free103point9) in Acra, New York.

nicelittlestatic.com


Humble Music (Los Angeles)

graham

Graham Lambkin
Transmission : 5th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00


Humble Music (Los Angeles) is a tape work focused on a performance given in the basement gallery of the 356 Mission space, Los Angeles.
The genesis of this piece comes from a 90 minute tape made with James Rushford, Judith Hamann and Manuel Lima, in preparation for a concert the following night (of which James and Judith both had parts) to announce the opening of my ‘Marble on the Rot’ exhibition. We took in the acoustic potential of the building, and chose the basement gallery to make some test recordings using a walkman with external mic. There was no audience present.

The piece collages the most interesting passages from that session, and adds overdubs taken from alternately placed –and oft cleaner– recording sources also in use at that time, piercing the gauze of tape hiss and adding a greater dynamic sense to the composition. The domestic disruption that starts the piece was present on the cassette prior to recording, and felt aesthetically in step enough to warrant inclusion.

Graham Lambkin: voice, tapes, cello, objects. James Rushford: voice, objects. Judith Hamann: voice, cello. Manuel Lima: voice, flutes plus the pre-recorded sounds of (friend and neighbor) José Pérez.


Graham Lambkin is a multidisciplinary artist based in Upstate New York, who first came to prominence in the early 90′s through the formation of his music group The Shadow Ring. Combining a D.I.Y. post-punk ethic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, The Shadow Ring created a unique hybrid sound that set them apart from their peers and continues to show as an influence today.
Following the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including Salmon Run (2007) and Amateur Doubles (2012), a critically acclaimed trilogy with experimental tape musician Jason Lescalleet: The Breadwinner (2007), Air Supply (2010) and Photographs (2013), and Making A (2013) a collaboration with renowned table-top guitarist and founding member of the AMM group, Keith Rowe. His latest release, Schwarze Riesenfalter sees Lambkin paired with Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro in a musical reimagining for the texts of Georg Trakl. Lambkin is currently due to release his fifth solo LP Community (Kye) this October, and is working on a collaborative project with Tokyo-based conceptual artist Taku Unami for 2017.


Aerial Holding Hands

catriona

Catriona Shaw
Transmission : 11th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Prior to the Internet, I grew up on a Scottish island, feeling deprived of many a thing. Popular radio was broadcast on both AM and FM, but due to harsh weather conditions, inconvenient landscapes and general far-awayness, signals often experienced interference or were limited. At midnight, the music I listened to on the crackly but more reliable AM would be interrupted half-way through by a jolly male voice, repeating a warning that broadcasting on this frequency would, due to a government decision, be phased out altogether to be replaced by better, more modern FM. Night after night, I lay in contorted positions in my bed, holding onto a wire aerial so I could receive and cling onto a mangled FM signal, all in a desperate battle to preserve my grasp on the here and now of mainstream pop and contemporary late night chatter.

This is an experimental narrative that attempts to re-enact my experience as a radio listener, and consolidate two opposing characters: the slick hiss of FM and the dull thud of AM. Aerial Holding Hands will be aired as a split broadcast with a different channel on the FM broadcast and the Internet webstream. Two separate pieces, each 27 minutes long, one no better than the other. They can be played simultaneously, or individually, depending on your listening circumstances at the time.

Written and produced by Catriona Shaw except ‘Transmission’, written by Joy Division (Curtis; Morris; Hook; Sumner)
Co-production by Fred Bigo Shaw.
Recorded in The Padded Cell, Berlin, Germany and Le Chantier, Louverné, France in 2016.


Catriona Shaw grew up on the Orkney Islands and studied art in Edinburgh, Munich and Berlin. Her multidisciplinary practice combines drawing, performance, music and participation, as well as a number of collaborations including the band Queen of Japan, and art collectives Club le Bomb and gooeyTEAM. She has performed and exhibited in diverse international venues and festivals.

www.misslebomb.net
www.gooey.de


Signalman

photo: Pietromassi Pasqui
Sarah Angliss
Transmission : 4th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Embracing and updating the Radiophonic tradition, Sarah Angliss presents a spatialised sound poem inspired by The Signalman, Charles Dickens’ ghost tale for the industrial age. In this fractured retelling, Angliss plays with psychoacoustics and liminal sounds to conjure spectral resonances, ghostly cries and the gloom and dampness of a deep railway cutting. As sounds and music unfold, an isolated signalman becomes all too aware of a future horror he can do nothing to undo. This piece is created in collaboration with vocal artist Colin Uttley. For maximum spatial effect, please listen with headphones.

Voiceover artists: Colin Uttley (adult) and Nicholas Gowing (child).


Sarah Angliss is a composer, musical automatist and sound historian. Her work combines acoustic and robotic instruments with Max, electronics, found sounds and field recordings. Sarah’s work explores the uncanny properties of technology, revealing resonances between European folklore and early notions of electricity and sound. A prolific live performer, Sarah also works in theatre, creating distinctive sounds which blur the boundaries between sound design and musical composition. Her theatre sounds have most recently been heard in The Old Vic, London, where she evoked the overwhelming clamour of modernity in O’Neill’s Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape (directed by Richard Jones).

www.sarahangliss.com


The Emptiness of Sound

daniel

Diacoustics
Transmission : 10th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

The experience of sound can at times be a form silence, not so much for the ears, but for the mind. If we close our eyes to focus purely on listening, the outside world as we are used to knowing it gradually fades from consciousness and ultimately disappears. We forget ourselves: the room is no longer there; we are no longer there – even the sound is no longer there. For a moment the mind is still, all that remains is an experiencing of sound.

All that remains is a “listening” suspended in nothing.

The piece features excerpts from archive interviews and recordings of Alan Watts, Delia Derbyshire, Antony Gormley, Denis Smalley, AL Kennedy, Francis Dhomont, Eliane Radigue, John N. Gray, and Daniel Cioccoloni. It references the forms, ideas, and sounds of some of the seminal works in the radiophonic/acousmatic tradition (Inventions for radio – Delia Derbyshire, Sous le regard d’un soleil noir – Francis Dhomont, Névé – Denis Smalley), as well as Francis Poulenc’s chorale O Magnum Mysterium.

Composed, recorded, and engineered by: Daniel Cioccoloni
Additional sounds: Giovani Tancredi, E-Cor Ensemble
Additional field recordings: Felix Blume


Diacoustics was conceived as a project to explore the possibilities offered by sound as a raw material, and our experiences of it as listeners. Over time it has become the main focus of my production in sound, bringing together my research in music, field recording, spoken word, and those abstract, hard-to-define sonic experiences that lie somewhere in between.

Work from the project has been featured in a number of exhibitions (Manifestations, 2nd Recursion), radio programs (Sound Introversion Radio, Radiophrenia), and was awarded 3rd place at the Oxford/Sennheiser Electronic Music Prize (OSEMP) 2014.


lone crow make some hullaballoo

sean

sean burn
Transmission : 9th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

lone-crow make some hullabaloo blends and processes poetry with soundscape, all loosely round recurring dream of an intense relationship with my survivor crow. in his dark materials trilogy philip pullman talks of daemons where each human across the multiverse has such a familiar which lives, fights and ultimately dies alongside them. here is dreamland dialogue with my trickster crow while also weaving in a little of childhood before care and adolescent psych-units


my last major soundwork was švejk’s anabase – a response to the obscenity of world war one as seen thru eyes of ‘the good soldier švejk’ – presented at the international artists anti-war exhibition b-side, casarsa della delizia, italy, spring 2016. i’ve also completed residencies and commissions creating electroacoustic, soundmapping and other sound art for carlisle arts festival; carriageworks leeds; celf mid-wales; cesta czech republic; dash shrewsbury; didsbury arts festival; dragonfly multi-arts festival sweden; hipersonica brazil; humber mouth festival hull; lancaster university / litfest; loudspkr (online); odins glow north york moors; the new gallery walsall; ultrared online

www.gobscure.info


Early Carbophonics

PHOTO : Max Erbacher

Andreas Oskar Hirsch
Transmission : 8th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

In summer 2015 Hirsch finished constructing the Carbophon, an electro-acoustic invention pushing the concept of the African Kalimba or Mbira. Early Carbophonics is the first series of pieces that Hirsch will release with the Carbophon as the main instrument. Drafts from the rehearsal room come together with more refined bits and pieces, editing processes, sampling and effects. Further on, occasionally a morse key, a Moroccan flute, an old Yamaha keyboard, the Electric Palm Leaf as well as the Singing Cane make their appearance.


Andreas Oskar Hirsch (DE) works as a musician and visual artist. He has been inventing various musical instruments that he performs with, among others, the Electric Palm Leaf that produces sounds through its spikes. Moreover, by connecting melodicas to the air chambers of a rubber boat or decoding bird calls via Morse code, he investigates sound, setups, narratives and performative processes and pushes them to a point where frenzy, humor, sense, and nonsense meet. In 2014, together with Patricia Koellges, he started makiphon, a record label for experimental music.

www.hirschonhirsch.com


What You See

dinahbird

DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult
Transmission : 3rd September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

What You See is the third sound work Dinah & Jean-Philippe have made inspired by aerial disappearances and crashes. In June 2016 during a residency in Kilpisjarvi, Northern Finland, they came across the crash site of a WWII German Junker bomber plane, brought down in the midst of the bleak Arctic landscape in 1942. Over seventy years later remnants of the aircraft are cleary visible, possible wing parts, piping and rusty metal are fused and fossiled into the stony lunar landscape, like a decaying dinosaur carcus, or perhaps a forgotten memorial to those who perished. The recordings in this piece were made almost entirely on site.


DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult are sound and radio artists based in Paris. They often work together making radio works, installations and soundtracks.
Recent works include Take Flight, a composed soundscape starring planes, drones and frequencies, made for ABC’s Creative Audio Unit and A.V.I.O.N, a sister installation inspired by the parallel world of aircraft navigation systems. DinahBird’s radio relay record A Box of 78s is having a rest after it’s 18 month trip around the world. Jean-Philippe’s audio graffitti project, TagAudioLoops was last seen and heard at Waverly train station…

bird-renoult.net


Balancing Act

A. Skuse

Amble Skuse
Transmission : 6th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Noise, our voices become noise, our names become noise, inaudible, unheard, filtered out.
In response to deep pedagogical mysogyny, the piece serves as a ritual, a mantra, a magical spell, presenting 1464 names, female names, invisible names, to the concert hall. Composers who are “simply not there” are here, we “cannot rewrite history”, we are not the ones rewriting herstory.

To listen to these many many women, please go to manymanywomen.com


Amble Skuse writes interactive live technology pieces. After studying at Dartington College of Arts (now University College Falmouth) and Bath Spa University she began writing for performers, finding ways of incorporating live electronics into the performance. She is interested in ways in which the past and the future come together and merge to create the now. Amble works with spoken word, languages, poetry and sound to relate a sense of location, time and identity through her pieces.

Amble is a International Creative Entrepreneurs Fellow, a BBC Performing Arts Fund Music Fellow and runs her own producing house Remembered / Imagined with Judith Walsh.

www.ambleskuse.net


Change Ringing Change

Lin Li
Transmission : 29th August, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Change ringing (or method ringing) is the art of bell ringing established in England in the 17th century and is still practised in many churches in Britain. This sound piece examines the essence and some of the rules of change ringing, and considers the question of whether this form of bell ringing is music and what its musical qualities are. Interviews with experienced bell ringers and musical experts are interwoven with news reports, field recordings, and sound clips created in accordance with the main principles of change ringing whilst extending the boundary of this art.

With thanks to the Guild of Bellringers of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow; Angela Deakin; Jonathan Frye; Eva Moreda; Steven Worbey; and Shantiketu.

Extracts from: Great Peter Ringing, York Minster by Thierry Pauwels (CC BY license); Liam Craddock - 'Bellringing' by Ignite Liverpool (CC BY); Howard Skempton and Central Council of Church Bell Ringers by PRS for Music Foundation (CC BY); 24 bell change ringing at Ringing World 100th Anniversary Reception by Philip Earis (attribution and non-commercial use only)


Lin Li lives in Scotland and has been using sound and moving image in her artistic practice since 2011. Being an experienced choral singer, she is particularly interested in the human voice and the diverse sonic and affective experiences and ideas generated or communicated through speech, singing and other creative use of the voice.

www.linli-art.com


Storage Wars

chris

Chris Dooks
Transmission : 2nd September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Storage Wars investigates a dilemma that many digital artists face; that is, the need to archive vast amounts of audio and visual material in the digital domain and whether to preserve material or not – a problem particularly pertinent to radio broadcasts and my relationship with the radio and arts festival The Dark Outside. This project was designed to bring to fruition the material from my archives that was spewing out of at least six hard drives begging to be shaped. I decided to make new works from this huge resource and delete every unused file that didn’t make the hour-long broadcast, for ever.


Dr Chris Dooks (b.1971) is an Edinburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and academic researcher. In 1998 Dooks began to pursue his own works full time as a professional multimedia artist after directing arts programmes in his early career.

His 2014 PhD is titled “The Fragmented Filmmaker – Emancipating The Exhausted Artist” and is both a text and a conceptual vinyl trilogy. The expansive project aimed to provide Dooks with a ‘container’ to house many sonic experiments in overcoming chronic health problems. On a more ‘Radiophonic’ level, in 2015 Eilean Records released Dooks’ first post-doctoral album ‘Accretion Disc’ which contains many shortwave radio works.

idioholism.com


Arena On Energy On Tape

stuart

Stuart Gurden
Transmission : 31st August, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Part of my continuing exploration of a ‘distended’ abstraction rooted in everyday activities, Arena On Energy On Tape is a drifting, layered composition woven from field recordings, appropriated and altered sounds, discrete performance, and time stolen back from work.

Referencing a found motivational tape, and the BBC2 arts strand (and it’s Eno title music, appropriated previously in my 2003 video Arena) the piece is a soup of binaural immediacy, approximate noise, elusive periodicy, and mangled guitar and natural forces, all filtered through saturated tape loops, and a cannibalised Leslie cabinet.


Stuart Gurden is an artist working primarily with sound and video, he is drawn to the tensions between creativity, technological evolution, and the processes of cultural recuperation. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA in 2000, and has exhibited across the UK and abroad, receiving various awards including the Scottish Arts Council Film & Video Award. He was short-listed for the 2012 Margaret Tait Artist’s Film Award.

MAP Magazine article

soundcloud.com/stuartgurden


The Edible Pet

zoe

Zoe Irvine
Transmission : 7th September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

The Edible Pet by Zoë Irvine and her son Logan, with contributions from family and friends in Edinburgh, Cornwall and SW. France. A story that crosses continents, travels from pet keeping to dining table, taking in some back garden ethics, pet psychology, trans-species music making, dramatic mishaps, life, death and recipes.

There are some scenes of a graphic nature, this programme contains meat and may not be suitable for vegans or vegetarians.

Featuring in order of appearance: Daniel Manson, Rab Lendrum, Chloë Manson, Gilberte Manson, Juno Neil, Rebecca Palmer, Eva & Nicole, Logan Young, Alexia Allen, Doreen Young, Jill Lendrum, Michelle Davitt, Pauline Wilson, Morris Young, Robert Young, Geraldine Brenner, Osvanira Alves & Jane Hunter.

Extracts from A Household Book for Africa by E.G. Bradley read by Michelle Davitt.
Extracts from humane animal harvest video with Alexia Allen by Paul Wheaton. https://richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp
Bird calls by Elise Rouanet & Aimé Souyri from ‘Charmeurs d’Oiseaux’

Original music by Zoë Irvine & The Galloanserae Experimental Ensemble.
Additional songs Le Poulette Grise – Alan Mills ; Poullette – Béatrice Maillet; Ain’t Nobody Here but us Chickens – Louis Jordan.

With love to Grandma and in memory of Jackie.


Zoë Irvine is an artist primarily working with sound. Her involvement with Bill Furlong’s Audio Arts Magazine from 1994 – 2007 as a sound editor sparked a lifelong interest in the idea conversation and voice as potential artefacts in themselves. As a field recordist, Irvine has a particular love of soundscapes in which distance and space become perceptible.

zoeirvine.net
soundcloud.com/zebraphone
listenrecordcreate.blogspot.co.uk


The Sand Hills

joe

Joe Howe
Transmission : 1st September, 12:00 and repeated at 18:00

Inspired both by the short-lived ‘Funkoper’ (or Radio Opera) movement of the 1920’s in Germany and British storytelling from the same period, ‘The Sand Hills’ is a Quasi-Operatic Radiophonic work exploring ideas of magic, control and influence through the power of the recorded (and broadcasted) voice.

Libretto & Original Music by Joe Howe, with help from Anneke Kampmann, Rebecca Wilcox, Darren Rhymes, Aideen Doran, Ray McGahan, Jessica Higgins, Matthew Walkerdine, Louise Wilson, Rob Churm & Joshua Hill.


Joe Howe is a composer & sound artist, based in Glasgow. He splits his time between producing awkward / complicated synthesizer funk and assured / complicated sound works for artists & theatre. Full awkward / assured / complicated venn-diagram at:

joe-howe.com

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