The 26th of June was a rainy Friday in New Zealand's capital city, and the aether was filled with reports of Michael Jackson's death (at 11am that day, NZ time), as I prepared a 2pm radio cegeste transmission to the other side of the globe from a lecture theatre at Victoria University of Wellington's school of architecture and design.My half hour set opened the second night of New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9's Noise! 2009 festival, held at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in Manhattan. This festival had a local/global distributed element, as each of its four nights began with an artist casting in their performance from another location somewhere around the globe.
The dislocated present-ness of being live at such a distance, when combined with the bounded locality of Mini FM, fragmented the live immediacy of the radio cegeste project in fascinating ways, and the two sided anonymity of the performance, in so many ways like a traditional radio broadcast, framed the sonic content.
This was a palimpsest of noise and archival material, including laptop-mixed location recordings of New Zealand natural and cultural spaces, theremin, music box, the activation of aleatory airwaves, and live and recorded/transmitted violin, as well as some guest appearances by some of my favourite etheric ghosts: '80s one hit wonder The Buggles ("in my mind and in my car / we can't rewind we've gone too far" as Cocteau might have been thinking when writing code-transmission for Death's black Rolls Royce) and fleeting Cegestions of the electromagnetic poetry channel of Jack Spicer
the first half of this performance can be heard here
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