16 Oct 2010

'shouting over the music' icecast to radio futura 2010


two days after arriving back in New Zealand, a live re-mix of the site-specific transmission work shouting over the music : a dawn chorus for walter and olivier, recently staged as part of visible city within Melbourne's Cathedral Arcade, was netcast over the airwaves of radio zero, as part of the Radio Futura programme (12 - 16 October), official radio station for the FuturePlaces media art festival, Porto, Portugal. The festival's byline was "five days of exhibitions and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures" and its radio station utilised the potential of radio to link particular and distinct localities via global networks, with a programme of various artist projects and live streams converging in radio space. My slot was from 2-3am (2-3pm NZ time), Saturday 16th October, 2010. This performance without an immediate audience took place in the distinctly localised, deco-era domestic, quietly end-of-the-world setting of Kerry Ann Lee's living room, in Mornington, Dunedin, New Zealand

a regular listener from another NZ city emailed me with the following feedback after the show (thanks CW) :

"Among the buried beauty through so much of the piece, there seems a strong theme of an almost science fiction (in a dystopian modernist vein) element around the relationship of changing birdsong... the way the manipulated ontological qualities of radio itself are bending the very birdsongs into the warped, corrupted forms they will need to find to go beyond the beautifully preserved sanctuaries of 1920s arcades and all they stand for - Also represented by the comparatively elegant weave of Messiaen, against the sounds of the birdsong melting into violin into wheel squeak into a shortwave solo(!) and back and around... with the burned twitch of the characteristic R/C mini fm collapse to hiss as a regular reminder of some kind of perverse and anxious and impatient logic or intelligence surrounding it all, again corrupted... A piece veering from a rather bewitching miasma into the terrifying at surprising intervals."

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