Contact-mic building workshop, co-taught with Michael Prior, at Testing Grounds

the poetics of connection, immediacy + restraint: ground to ground, crystal to signal.

Between 13-14 August 2018, myself and the Naarm Melbourne based sound artist Michael Prior took a 2 day workshop with students enrolled in the course Sound, Screen and Materiality at RMIT University, on building and using a contact mic for recording, at Testing Grounds. 

We emphasised collaboration, skill-sharing and DIY, technological simplicity and access, and the ownership and transparency of artistic tools. There was a lot of great experimentation.

Here is some (anonymised) photo-documentation of the students' efforts. 

'a private swamp / was where this tree grew feathers once' : a radio memorial in four movements.

"It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”

- W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

"In my beginning is my end. In succession / Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, / Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place / Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. [...] Houses live and die: there is a time for building / And a time for living and generation / And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane / And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots / And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto."

- T. S. Eliot, East Coker (from 'Four Quartets')

radio cegeste at records records, dunedin

The bugler sent a call of high romance— “Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square. On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer

- Robert Graves, 'The Last Post'

Records Records is an iconic second hand record store in Dunedin, New Zealand. An institution in the city, it was started in the 1970s by Roi Colbert, in a little space located in Stuart St, just off the central Octagon, where in the crucial decades of the 80s and 90s it filtered the ebbs and flows of the financial realities vs. the listening and collecting habits of various illustrious locals, while acting as an information and networking hub for Dunedin's sound culture. Recently, Roi sold up and the shop shifted to new premises over on Princes Street. Current owner Pat Faigan has continued the legacy and hosted many live gigs in the store, but, in an era when running independent record stores is a difficult proposition at best, Pat will be retiring from the record selling business at the end of October.

apart from a long history buying records from the shop, I spent a lot of time in the neighbourhood last summer, working right next to the current RR store at second hand bookstore Raven Books.

so, on Friday 22nd October, radio cegeste opportunistically crashed the end of someone else's gig upon finding out it was the 2nd to last one the store would host, and with half a day's notice, transmitted a site-specific soundscape at 8:30pm as a performative radio programme for RR, using the things I had at hand - namely, mini FM transmitter, 13 small radios, some of my 'bowed airwaves' violin tracks and field recordings transmitted via the above, alongside manipulation of room-sensitive radiophonic noise interference.

I also used a portable battery powered record player with material sourced from the shop that very afternoon (incl. an incredible spoken word 1-off private pressing of a british family recording an audio christmas greeting 'letter' to Grandma - the latter presumably located in NZ, which Pat sold me for a dollar), and some 78s found by a friend at the Dunedin dump (incl. a broken, skipping, cracked HMV 78rpm recording of the band of H.M. Coldstream Guards' rendition of ceremonial military standards Evening Hymn and The Last Post).

There were also some musical birdsong cards from the Otago Museum i'd bought that day, coupled with Radio NZ birdsong recordings on 45rpm which i'd picked up from the Blue Oyster Gallery after their inclusion in the Media Povera show. The lack of working overhead lights in the shop added to the huddled and intimate nature of the resulting peripheral, floor-based, no-mains-power performance for receivers and transmitter alike.

my post-Melbourne nomadisms have included, as is usual at some point in such Dunedin interludes, a temporary docking-point at None studios, and renewed engagement with the deep-listening silences and ghost-terrain of Dunedin has been balanced with a grateful nod toward the ongoing industrious activities and artistic vitality of the city's ever-shifting living communities.

Tonight's gig saw long term None residents Motoko (violin, voice) and Justin (percussion, voice) playing together as a duo they call The Surgical Department for this Records Records (second to) last post, as well. Also on the bill were local groups Communist Rainbow Relationship and QTPI.

as if this wasn't enough I cancelled my plan to see Robert Scott play at Chicks Hotel in favour of continuing the evening's energetic bust of engagement in event-based audio exploration by going back to None immediately after the gig to record a duo set with percussionist Lee Noyes.

This was more minimal, based on radiophonic feedback, and involved manipulating 'radios talking to each other' in theremin-like accompaniment to Lee's spacious and subtle acoustic manipulations of a drum, a wire, and various strings. Lee has since tidied this up and is treating it as a potential release, pending acceptance.

RIP, Records Records. thanks to Arron Clark who shot and edited the following video montage of the RR in-store proceedings...

wunderkammeren, strings and static...

the evening of the 3rd of July saw me embarking on further collaborative sonic explorations with Black Boned Angel guitarist, Stumps drummer, Sandoz Lab Technicians multi-instrumentalist and general improv polymath James Kirk.

taking the opportunity, while i was in Wellington, to build on some investigations begun in Dunedin at Lines of Flight last May, we began to clarify a method around the minimalist use of strings and static, finding an instrumental base in radios, erhu, violin, and melodica, and a manifest expression in small summations of broken melodies, careful fragments and drift, with a vaguely Sandozian-eastern feel.

Harnessing the effects pedal James uses with Black Boned Angel added a whole new sonic palette to my violin, with drones like arctic ice and deep space becoming the backing to a delicate foreground of whispering acoustics and feathery aetheric scratchiness...

I recorded about half an hour of audio. a fairly sketchy edit snipped off this, called 'from the pencil area' is listenable here

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"... we each discover our own silence, we each recreate silence as a metaphor. From noise to silence, from panic to quiescence, from catastrophe to calm: the very existence of silence both depends on noise, and permits noise to exist"

- Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio

"I have become increasingly preoccupied with atmosphere. Somehow I wanted to move what I'm doing (intention) towards this notion of atmosphere, an activity where we're not aware of technique, of instrument, of playing, of music even, but instead as feeling/sensation suspended in space, perhaps what Feldman meant by music as time, energising to the air, making the silence (unintention) audible."

- Keith Rowe, liner notes for Duos for Doris

"white and aimless signals" : icecast to free103point9's Noise! festival at the Ontological Hysteric Theater, Manhattan

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

last gasp of the DJ, Lines of Flight 2009

I was offered an impromptu DJ slot at the legendary Dunedin experimental music festival Lines of Flight on Friday, filling in for Peter Kirk, who hosts the experimental radio show A'sides for Betaville, which I have been sporadically involved with since its beginnings in late 2007 on Lyttelton's independent broadcast station Volcano 88:5FM.

Despite being currently fairly uninterested in live DJing (apart from the prospect of developing a no-electricity set with wind up gramophones), the challenge of providing a segue from artist to artist, something i'd become used to thinking-through on a regular basis during my organisational involvement hosting monthly events with the Borderline Ballroom experimental music group in Christchurch from 2007-8, led to something pleasingly minimal, near-inaudible, and raw, heavy on field recordings and live outtakes.

While I didn't go in the A'sides direction of maximalism and kept everything gesturally restrained to the laptop and a single CDJ, a lot of the audio was sourced from my archive of bootleg recordings, many featuring people present in the room, with the general idea of not competing with the music, but providing a convivial, yet stimulating ambiance. Less cegeste than 'suggest' for a night, I felt rather privileged to be able to provide such transitions for the sounds of Peter Wright (Christchurch), Crude (Dunedin), EYE (Dunedin), and the wonderful Xe (Auckland - (Rachel Shearer, Guy Treadgold, Sean O'Reilly, and Dean Roberts)).

Tao Wells' THE SILENCE of NOT BEING FAMOUS, LISTEN

as part of Tao Wells' exhibition Art Aristocracy at Christchurch artist-run space the High Street Project (renamed 'The National Gallery' for the show's duration), the artist staged a one night performance with the above title, what he called "the debut of a new visual score for the playing of volume", in which radio cegeste was one of two artists invited to contribute a sound piece.

I put together a DJ set with a distinctly "90s ambient" flavour, due to the 1990s being a theme of Tao's exhibition overall, as well as preliminary discussions around his memories of listening to my show Rotate your State while a student at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury.

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"A performance about volume and listening accompanying a visual score created for the event. The wonderful sounds and skills of Radio Cègeste and Ability Trauma feature. "

thanks to Tao for the photographs. basic information about the event can be found here

Otomo Yoshihide in Christchurch

i interviewed Japanese experimental musician Otomo Yoshihide for radio station RDU98:3FM, during the Christchurch leg of his tour of New Zealand, just before the performance he gave in the foyer space of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

the interview, eventually transcribed for the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space's journal, Log Illustrated, is archived here, and also made its way here.