radio cegeste performance for 'Songs about Structure,' Gertrude Contemporary, 4 October 2025
radio cegeste performed on Saturday 4 October 2025, in 'Songs About Structure,' an afternoon of performances exploring the circulation of sound in bureaucratic environments.
This was the final public programme for Bureaucracy of Feelings, curated by Diego RamÃrez for Gertrude Contemporary's 40 year anniversary celebrations.In experimental transmission art vein the set was a relational, flawed and fluid exploration of various recent and ongoing preoccupations: legacies of lost artist run spaces from other times and places presented as a sound library of 'silent' ambient atmospheres, anti- stereophonic reception of transmissions through room-sized small scale micro radio to scattered mobile receivers distributed around the gallery/audience to encourage small pockets of intimate listening, shortwave ham-radio amateur distance coding (origin: an op-shop found notebook from the 1940s) reimagined through vocalisation as notation and sound poetry, and clockwork music failing to translate the missing songs of data deficient birds through use of programmable punchcards (this time a theme filtered through live 1870s Autophone, as well as recorded mechanical music box). This gig was also the first public outing of an original stroh violin, a rare and beautiful creature and new comrade recently integrated into the radio cegeste media archaeological menagerie, which I am slowly getting to know and integrating into my repertoire.
I was on the bill with the incredible work of Ari Angkasa, harnessing a striking conceptual-material set of reference points including an extended critical interrogation of the Karaoke mic as intimate expressive reverberant space, and Jon Campbell's songs drifting by like ghosts caught on the wind, as though overheard on an AM radio out a car window on a warm day in early summer in 1987, occasionally soundtracking catalogue essays reimagined as sound poetry. A fittingly eclectic, if perhaps surprisingly coherent mix.
