bending the waves #1: a series about radio as instrument, ausland, berlin.

after travelling to Germany to be part of the Radio Revolten festival in Halle, I was invited to play the first of a two-part series of concerts called Bending the Waves: Radio as Instrument.

I invited Berlin resident composer and viola player Johnny Chang to collaborate. Johnny is from New Zealand, and we'd been friends for quite a number of years after I'd met him via my role as one link in the New Zealand experimental music touring chain through event-organisation in Christchurch in the early 2000s, and hosted a couple of ensembles he was involved with. Since then, Johnny has become an integral part of the Wandelweiser collective of composers, with compositions incorporating an attention to the listening spaces of field recordings and a sense of space bordering on silence. I last saw him play at the Now Now Festival in Sydney in 2014, and his performance utilised radio and viola in sparse and conceptual, yet entirely material ways. 

The opportunity to play in the same room, timezone, and gestural space with Johnny is a very welcome one, because we have collaborated on two prior distance projects, each of which figured the structural element of the distance between us as an essential part of the gestural interchange and sonic dialogue. This foray into proximal liveness potentially extends and deepens our collaboration in some exciting ways.

image by Jean-Phillippe Renoult